two feminist links
My response to Woman's Question Time last week has been quoted in Penny Red's latest article for The Samosoa, The sex work shibboleth:
Furious debate about sex work and pornography dominated the discussion at the recent Women’s Question Time event in London, organised by the charity Eaves, where feminists were invited to put questions to prospective Women's ministers in the run-up to the General Election.
Pandora Blake, a feminist sex worker, attended the event. “I hadn't realised quite how aggressively hostile most of my sisters are to my ideals,” she said. “It’s worrying that so many of the best female politicians seem unable to see nuance when it comes to the sex industry".
At this event, like so many others, issues such as abortion rights and the pay gap were elbowed out in favour of monolithic tub-thumping about sex work that played out a worrying tendency on the part of contemporary feminists to moralise rather than strategise.
I think it's an excellent analysis, although I admit I'm stumped on how to open a dialogue with abolitionists that has a chance of resulting in reconciliation.
I also enjoyed this interview on The Sexist with Jaclyn Friedman on fucking while feminist:
I have been with some men who are surprised that I am, shall we say, less than vanilla in bed . . . A couple of guys were shocked that I like to play various games in bed, because I’m a feminist. That’s always really interesting to me. I’m always like, ‘Are you kidding me? The feminists I know are the craziest women in bed you can find!" Those are the moments where I feel like a one-woman feminist PR machine. I’m instructing the world one man at a time that feminists are really fun to sleep with.
"less than vanilla in bed"
ReplyDeleteWhat do you think that's supposed to mean?
Kinky, I assume!
ReplyDeleteYou're probably right, Pandora. But I'd always thought kinky was "more than vanilla"!
ReplyDeleteas in ... vanilla with crunched nuts, bitter dark minty chocolate, ginger, lemon juice and chilli sprinkles on top.
ReplyDeleteI appreciated your quote/commentary. My wife and I both consider ourselves to be feminist. There is an unfortunate tendency in our society (speaking of the U.S. but I suppose it may be true in the U.K.) to "flatten out the curves", to make things black/white and ignore nuance and subtlety.
ReplyDeleteSome even consider it a weakness to offer complexity or nuance to the understanding of an issue or situation. I believe that the opposite is true, that it takes strength to question oneself and to question authority and to look deeply within.
I think feminism is about equality and a woman's right to choose her own way in life. If one of those choices is to be a sex worker or to be submissive, why not? Otherwise, you're exchanging patriarchal conformity for conformity to vanilla feminism. It should be about freedom.