A liberal feminist encounters reality

[NotTerfNorCis]

www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/oct/17/feminism-working-womens-prison-inmates-sex-work-marriage

I had engaged with ideological debates on the topic of sex work before, of course I had. I knew that to question whether sex work is really like any other work would make you a dreaded “swerf” (sex worker exclusionary radical feminist) and – like the patriarchy – is an attempt to control what women do with their bodies. People don’t need rescuing, the theory goes, they need rights and unions.

The majority of sex workers I met in prison, who arrived with bruises and track-marks, would rather have been doing anything else. They needed their rights protected, sure, but they also wanted a route out. The reality was not simple. It rarely is.

Of course yes.
This author’s revelation is really about the danger of extremes isn’t it? Like you’re either a ‘tef’ or a ‘ta’. No shades of grey allowed.

Ah! Liberal feminism.

Feminism-lite.

The man-pleasing type of feminism.

Shite isn't it?

What the fuck is: I had previously hosted a lecture by a non-binary Mars astronaut?
Since we're at least a decade away from the launch of any manned Mars expedition and NASA isn't anywhere near choosing a crew*, it was probably some wannabe astronaut who applied to one of the several private Mars expeditions. Hardly any of these projects have survived past the "Let's set up a website and get on TV!" stage.

*Interestingly, NASA has been discussing sending an all-female crew to Mars, as being more stable on a long mission than a mixed or all-male crew.

So that would be a non-astronaut identifying as an astronaut.

It doesn't sound like she's learned anything from her experience. She went into a prison, full of incredibly vulnerable and abused women and expected that she could somehow patronise them with her useless libfem empowerment nonsense. Reality bit her a just little, but she's still trying to cling on to her misogynistic ideology, claiming that men prostituting women is somehow complicated rather than the simple fact that men use their physical, economic and social power to overcome and terrorise women into prostitution.

She even describes women being held in sexual slavery by men as being 'paid' by them because their captors put a roof over their heads and feed them drugs. She basically has no clue and doesn't want one either.

Now she's written a book about them called 'Jailbirds'. How completely disrespectful to call vulnerable women a sexist term like that and to capitalise on their suffering in order she can promote herself as a writer. She won't admit that radical feminists have got it right about what men do to women in the sex industry, she's still calling us "swerfs". Women like this sell out the most vulnerable, the most harmed, the most damaged women with their conceited, man-pleasing and as she puts it, self-congratulatory "feminism". It makes you popular though, so I expect she'll carry on.

Basically she can't bringing herself say men are raping these women and calling it "prostitution" or even worse, "sex work", because money is exchanged. That's the bottom line.

What Karabair said.

What this tells us, rather sadly, is that liberal feminism is actually hindering rather than helping young women's attempts to understand the world they face. Ask your average non-woke woman who doesn't call herself a feminist and of course she knows that the sex industry is exploitative and the majority of the women in it want out. My stepmother, nan, aunties etc, none of them feminists, would not have been surprised by what they saw in that prison. But this young woman was, because she's bought into an ideology that actively impedes her ability to recognize misogyny when she encounters it and fight back.

Modern liberal feminism is the backlash, especially the "sex positive" arm.

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You have to be a special kind of stupid these days to embrace libfem sex pozzie feminism. Radical feminism is freely available on the internet, it's clear and it tells the truth about what happens to women. When these sort of people talk about "choice" the main choice they make is to deliberately ignore the harm and destruction men inflict on women, mainly in order to hate on other women - the "swerfs" and the "terfs" she so desperately wants to avoid.

How idiotic do you have to be to believe women in prison who've experienced prostitution would somehow have a pimp who was merely taking 40% of their money and not subjecting them to severe violence, and that a pep talk about "empowerment" and not needing a man would somehow sort them out. I think this woman might be actively harmful in a prison encounting women in these situations. She certainly wouldn't be able to help them in any way.

As a demand-driven business, prostitution requires, as demand increases, the increasing impoverishment of women in order to create supply to meet that demand.

Anyone advocating for anything that increases demand, including “destigmatization” of punters and normalization of prostitution as work like any other, is, by extension, supporting either a) increasing global female poverty or b) increasing trafficking.

Because growing demand MUST be met by growing supply.

Excellent posts @Karabair

@BickerinBrattle

i have my own conspiracy theory...
''sex work is work' and sex positive drive and the progressive sex ed for kids'' are all for supplying future sex workers.

Do careers advisors help young people in schools to get jobs in prostitution these days?

If not, why? It's work like any other after all..

Massive sarcasm smiley.

As a demand-driven business, prostitution requires, as demand increases, the increasing impoverishment of women in order to create supply to meet that demand.

YY and the graduate "happy hooker" who sees "escorting" as a more lucrative alternative to temping (Brooke Magnanti I'm looking at you) has way more agency and available choices than a single mum on UC or a trafficked woman or a women groomed at age 13 and given drugs by her pimp to get her hooked. But also, the "happy hooker" is expensive because otherwise she'd temp instead. What most punters want is cheap prostitutes. Only impoverished or enslaved women will be cheap. So men who want to buy sex pay to rape want more women to be impoverished or enslaved.

The well-heeled man pays top whack for the "happy hooker" because he wants to use a nice hotel room, or he has a specific activity in mind that won't work in the back of a hired van (Magnanti describes one man urinating on her whilst she lay in a bathtub, that's not going to work in a vehicle). The side-effect, that benefits all men who use prostituted women, is the educated "happy hookers" stabbing other women in the back by advocating against Nordic Model and for decriminalisation and blaming the pimped and trafficked women for their own plight, as described in the Graun article.

The man-pleasing type of feminism.

Let's call this what it is, it's patriarchism and its adherents are patriarchists.

As such it is absolutely anti-feminism and anti-feminist.

Do careers advisors help young people in schools to get jobs in prostitution these days?

That was a lib dem suggestion a few years back, along with lowering the age of consent to appear in porn to 16.

www.google.com/amp/s/www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/careers-officers-could-suggest-prostitution-8858826.amp

I hope Mim Skinner googles herself and finds her way here so she can encounter some real feminism.

But what I quickly learned was that my feminist education had a thick wedge of information missing: namely, the part where it connected to actual women being very fundamentally oppressed because of their gender. Confronted by someone whose cervix had been plugged with four egg-sized capsules of crack cocaine on the behest of a controlling boyfriend who would reap the profits, I found it difficult to work out quite how my Frida Kahlo T-shirt and mansplaining radar were going to help things.

Having a cervix is nothing to do with a person's gender. The writer evidently doesn't get it at all. Does no-one actually read these things before they are published? Do words not mean anything any more?

That was a lib dem suggestion a few years back, along with lowering the age of consent to appear in porn to 16.

Lib dems = Men's Privilege Party.

Magnanti describes one man urinating on her whilst she lay in a bathtub, that's not going to work in a vehicle

And this is meant to be the happy, empowering, full of agency version of prostitution? Oh, Brook, you do love lying to yourself.

oppressed because of their gender

Having a cervix is nothing to do with a person's gender.

It's almost like the word she needed was "sex".

someone whose cervix had been plugged with four egg-sized capsules of crack cocaine

My vagina clamped shut on reading that. My cervix and foreign objects are not friends: I screamed the clinic down just having a coil fitted.

this is meant to be the happy, empowering, full of agency version of prostitution?

Ah but she charged extra for that. Because money totally compensates for the indignity...

Re the cervix issue, I've seen blokes writing about sex claiming to think that women like having our cervixes forcefully rammed into. Which kind of tells you all you need to know about whether or not you should take anything men have to say about how women's bodies work seriously.

I had previously hosted a lecture by a non-binary Mars astronaut, run a workshop on gender-neutral pronouns and started a choir that sang protest songs)

Of all the useless bullshit to dump on women who can't get away...