“Whorephobia”- the United States customs has it

Normally when I see the word “whorephobia” it’s used in a completely nonsensical way- to imply that radical feminists are somehow hating women who are prostituted. This article in Metro News highlights just one area where you will find actual hatred of women in the sex trade.  Hint: It’s not feminists doing the hating.

University student Clay Nikiforuk (not her real name) happened to be crossing the U.S. border on her way to Boston, when customs officers harassed her about having condoms and sexy underwear in her baggage.  Apparently, having condoms and sexy underwear in your suitcase automatically makes you a prostitute.  I would have just assumed she was a person going on a trip to Boston, silly me!  Later, on a flight to Aruba, U.S. customs officers asked her how much she was being paid to go on this trip, because she was accompanied by a man.

Although the story gets worse from here, even this much information is enough to fill me with rage.  There are several underlying assumptions going on here.  One is that there’s something wrong with a woman being in public with condoms.  How many articles have we read already about women being arrested or interrogated for walking in public with condoms in their purses?  Here’s a news flash for the morons who harass women carrying condoms:  condoms are a health product.  They are for protecting body tissues from contracting diseases.  Kinda like hand sanitizer, bandages, soap, rubber gloves, face masks, and sunscreen.  The woman with condoms in her purse is not carrying them with the intention of committing a crime, she is carrying them with the intention of protecting her health, and the health of her sex partners. Protecting one’s health, it turns out, is a good thing.

Another part of the assumption going on here is that a young, attractive woman with condoms is necessarily a prostitute.  This is the virgin/whore dichotomy for the bazillionth time.  If a woman is not in the kitchen wearing a housedress and cooking for her husband, or sitting quietly in her room doing her homework, obviously she’s a whore.  She’s public goods for anyone to take.  This assumption fails to consider that a young, attractive woman in public with condoms in her purse might simply be a person who’s going on a trip.

Also part of the assumption is the idea that women who are sex trade workers are criminals or suspicious people.  Wrong again.  Women in the sex trade are people just trying to live their lives.  No need for interrogation or incarceration here.  (Some affordable housing and decent jobs would be nice though.)

This young woman was flagged as a suspected prostitute, interrogated for eight hours, and denied entry into the United States.  For what reason?  Even if she was a prostitute, what’s the big fucking deal? She enters the United States briefly on her way back home, and what?  What’s the problem?

I hate the word “whorephobia” because I don’t know why the fuck we’re calling women “whores” when we should just be calling them women, but the U.S. immigration law is fucking whorephobic.  They forced this young woman and her friend to purchase plane tickets to Panama and then to Canada just so they could get home.  For no fucking reason.

And get this: the married man she was with was not questioned.  SHE was interrogated for eight hours and denied entry into the U.S. for being a “prostitute” but the man she was with, who, by association with a supposed prostitute, was a supposed john, was not questioned.  If the U.S. border thinks prostitution is wrong, here’s a piece of advice:  INTERROGATE THE JOHN. Deny THAT fucker entry into the country.

The bottom line is this:

1. Women cannot be in public with condoms, or they’re public goods.

2. Women who go on trips with male friends who are married are so evil they should not be allowed to go home after their vacation.

3.  In the case of adultery, the other woman is entirely at fault and the cheating husband is an innocent bystander.

3.  It’s morally wrong to be a rape victim, but A-OK to be a rapist.

 

As Twisty would say, you’re a member of the sex class, and don’t you forget it. (For a citation of this quote see her every single blog post.)

I have a much better word for whorephobia.  The hatred of whores is the hatred of women.  The hatred of women is misogyny.

U.S. customs and immigration, you are a stinking pile of misogynist shitstains.  Go fuck yourselves.

Bushfire disappointed by 30 Rock

I have been catching up on 30 Rock lately and just reached season five.  I have always loved the show, but I was shocked to discover a rape scene portrayed as sex in the first episode of season five.  The context of the joke is that Pete has a lot of free time now that Jenna is doing some of his work.  While expressing to Liz how much free time he has now, he says, “Yesterday, I went to the gym!  And this morning, I made love to my wife!  And she was still asleep, so I didn’t have to be gentle!” Then we see a shot of Pete’s wife, Paula, who is both sleeping and rocking up and down as if having sex.  It’s a shot of her from Pete’s perspective.  Liz’s answer to this is “That’s one of the most upsetting things I have ever imagined.”  That would be my response too, because rape is certainly very upsetting, but Liz’s response is not the same as mine.  She is responding to Pete’s perspective, not Paula’s.  She is expressing that it’s upsetting to think of Pete “making love” to someone who is sleeping as if this is a bad experience for him.  The fact that penetrating a sleeping person is rape is completely non-existent.  Also non-existent is the realization that if Pete has to be “gentle” when Paula is awake, then presumably that’s because she wishes for him to be gentle, and in this case he is not. So not only is he “having sex” with a sleeping person, but he is directly going against what he knows she wants.  It is so obvious that this is rape that I cannot believe no one on the show wanted to edit this.  It means either no one knows that this is rape, or that they don’t care.  Either of these possibilities is terrible.

When you present rape as sex, you contribute to rape culture.  You enable men who do this to believe that what they’re doing is normal.  It’s not.  Sex without consent is rape.  Shame on you, 30 Rock.

Ontario Liberal Party elects lesbian leader

I am proud to announce that Ontario now has a lesbian leader.  And the two finalists were both women!

 

 

 

“I am thrilled for us … tonight, we made history … our final ballot had two women.” -Pupatello

A radical change to public education

A place where children are “educated.”

Public education, despite its name, is not about educating the public.  Its purpose is to babysit children during the day while their parents are at work and to create a new generation of workers – people who find it normal to sit at a desk all day doing whatever their boss tells them to do in order to create wealth for someone else, and then never questioning the validity of this system.

“How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?”  -Charles Bukowski

There is not much difference between the classroom and the workplace.  In both places, there is one person in charge and a group of subordinates who have to take orders.  In both cases there is a plan of action for what has to be accomplished which is decided upon by people who may not be present at the school or work site.  The subordinates, as well as the teacher or boss, have to arrive at a specific time each day.  The teacher or boss has to enforce that these tasks are completed as decided upon by the (sometimes unknown) decision maker.  They have specific times scheduled for breaks, and cannot take a break at any other time.  They have a half an hour to eat a bag lunch. Using the washroom when it is not break time is often forbidden.  This is a rigid hierarchical structure where someone is in charge, and this someone is always a privileged person with wealth, and this someone gets to dictate what other people will do during the day based on his own needs.  It’s not about the needs of the people involved.  School is not about the needs of children.  School is about the needs of the dominant culture.  The dominant culture is controlled by the people in charge, who are rich and privileged, and who are very few in controlling a great many.

Children do not need to sit in rows all day taking orders.  They do not need to complete a prescribed set of tasks just because they’re in a period of life labelled as “grade three”.  They do not need to learn how to walk down the hallway in a straight line without talking.  These are things the bosses need. The bosses need a set of compliant workers to do their work for them and thus create wealth for them.  The only way a whole generation of human beings will submit to authority and do work for someone else is if they spend the first 18 years of their lives in captivity learning that they must submit and obey, and that there is nothing else in life besides submitting and obeying.

I was a public school teacher.  I lasted less than two years.  The job broke my heart.  The people who thrive at teaching are usually white and heterosexual and usually women.  I meet two of those criteria, but I have not bought into the dominant culture, nor the dominance and submission paradigm.

I love the idea of public education.  I love the idea of free education for the public.  It’s probably my favourite out of all ideas.  I resigned from a permanent position in the public babysitting and indoctrination system, and went to work in an office instead.  I’m less miserable there.

I like to dream about what “public education” would look like, if we had such a system.  This would be a system that actually educates the public.  We are capable of creating such a system immediately, but we aren’t going to, because it would not serve the ruling class.

Funfeminists are everywhere!

I was overjoyed to join a Facebook group dedicated to radfems who are not transphobic when someone uttered the phrase “consenting sex workers.”  Dear goddess, why?  The funfems are everywhere!

I responded with this:

“The phrase “consenting sex workers” is so fucked up. We live in a world where women are expected to be sexually available to men at all times, and where women are kept in relative poverty to men, and where women are economically and socially coerced into prostitution, and some outright forced. This idea of consenting to sex work is a funfeminist idea. It’s just like “I choose to wear high heels, and if I author this choice, I therefore can’t be a victim of it” as Twisty puts it. You’re not really freely choosing something that the patriarchy makes practically compulsory, and it’s definitely not feminist to advocate that we do exactly what the patriarchy wants and call it “feminism”.”

Well, guess what.  I was called “whorephobic” and “1970s”.   This is absurd.  I was born in the mid-eighties, and therefore have never even set foot in the 1970s.  Even my feminist ideas come from the 1990s and 2000s, as I’ve rarely read anything that was written before then.  Furthermore, I’m not at all scared of prostituted women, nor do I hate them.

There are plenty of people who hate prostituted women.  The religious right, the police, the johns!  But not feminists.  There are no feminists, liberal or radical, who hate prostituted women.  The phrase “whorephobic,” when slung at a radical feminist, really means this: “How dare you point out that my job is exploitative!”  I’m not even sure why people object to others pointing out that their job is exploitative.  It’s not an insult toward the individual, it’s an observation about the system in which we live.  My own job is exploitative, and if someone pointed this out I wouldn’t call them “office worker phobic”.  Why would I?  Obviously, if it were not for economic necessity, I wouldn’t force myself out of bed before the crack of dawn each day to go sit in a cubicle and listen to customers rant over the phone about how much they hate the company.  Why would I do that if I wasn’t being coerced?

Invariably, when a funfem throws out the word “whorephobic” it’s because there is a dispute over the idea of agency.  Invariably, the funfeminist thinks she has complete agency, and therefore is not being exploited or abused or raped. But no, women do not have complete agency in a patriarchy.  I would go as far as to say that no member of the working class, female or male, has complete agency in our system.  Anyway, here I will have to quote Twisty, and if you haven’t read this post of hers, please do so immediately:

If we don’t think we are victims, we won’t be victims.

You know; only sick people take pills; therefore, if I don’t take pills, I won’t be sick.

What this argument fails to consider, regardless of a few funfeminists’ purported choice to choose choices,  is that, hourly, billions of women worldwide suffer everything from discrimination to murder exclusively because of their sex. Women cannot choose the “I’m-not-a-victim” choice. Not even the funfeminists can choose it, not really, because when stuff like “you cannot rape me” or “my appearance is meaningless” or “the state cannot interfere with the contents of my own personal uterus” is not on the menu of choices, no real agency exists.
“Spinster Aunt Reads Comments on Dawkins Website, Wrinkles Lip”

I did mention this to the funfem in question, and she completely dismissed it.  She said that everybody has agency, and get this, our agency is located in the neocortex.  Awesome!  So gals, next time a dude rapes you or abuses you and gets away with it, just use your neocortex, and voilà!  Problem solved!

There is another line that I hear every time the word “whorephobic” comes out.  It’s the idea that “sex work” is not “exploitative” because that would make every other job exploitative too.  What on Earth makes anyone think that other jobs are not exploitative?  Of course other jobs are exploitative!  One of the successes of the capitalist system is convincing the working class that we are not oppressed.  Everyone who is forced to sell their labour to a company in order to have a place to live and food to eat is being oppressed. You’ve got one rich guy who pays dirt cheap for other people’s labour and gets to keep a whole bunch of profit for himself, and all those other people have no choice but to keep going to work and making money for someone else to keep because if they don’t they’ll have nothing to eat and no place to live.  If that’s not exploitation and abuse, I’ll eat my foot.

Obviously, I deleted myself from this group.  I don’t need antifeminist ideas coming right up in my Facebook news feed. There’s enough of that shit everywhere else.   The only reaction to my leaving was the thought that it’s too bad I “flounced” because I should have stuck around to “learn something”.  No thanks, gals, I don’t want to “learn” anything else from people who think that women have agency in a patriarchy and freely choose prostitution.  I have definitely already “learned” this idea, and all other antifeminist ideas, and thankfully, I have managed to unlearn a lot of them.

In which Slutwalk claims to have made lots of changes, but cannot name anything that has changed

I had an interesting conversation recently with a representative of Slutwalk.  I do know who was posting but I will not use her name because this is not about her personally.   I pointed out that nothing had changed about Slutwalk after the constructive criticisms giving from other groups, and the following took place.

Cisgendered: not an offensive term.

Thanks to blamer Kristal for this wonderful quote on the silliness of being offended by the word cisgender.

 

 ”The word cis is oppressive” shit gets on my last nerve! If they think a word is oppressive they are not oppressed or rather they dont understand wtf oppression is. N*gg** is not an oppressive word because “I didn’t choose it for myself”. I didnt choose my name for myself either. The word is only oppressive because there is a history of dehumanization and violence that comes with that word. The word tr*nny is  a slur because there is a history of the trans* community having their humanity disregarded, them being murdered, and them being denied healthcare among other things. That goes for using trans* for some people and real man/woman for others. There is no oppression that goes along with the word cis. Cis people were not made slaves for being cis, cis people are not killed for being cis, cis people are not beaten for being cis !”

 

I’ve heard several people claim that cis is offensive, but there is no reason why it should be.  Cis just means that society labelled you the correct gender identity.  It’s a morally-neutral observation.  Finding offense at this term comes from not understanding what gender identity is, and a simple google search can solve that.