Feminist Fred

Twisty Faster nails some hard truths about Sex-Positive Feminism. She also linked to a blog called Pervocracy where the young woman writes posts detailing her sexual pleasures, which don’t sound too pleasurable to me.

Between the two of them you should get a good idea about what the rift might be between two women who both are basically feminists with different ways of dealing with our hypersexualized world.

Age makes a huge and terrible difference in how you see oppression.

Comments about prostitution take place in a sphere of human thought that assumes that sex is without any kind of importance, like any other kind of work. When the radical feminist attempts to ascribe a definite weight to the act, by establishing the political atmosphere it takes place within (patriarchy, oppression), there is considerable resistance to this contextualization.

I hear nothing but confusion whenever I read comments defending prostitution. The basis of the confusion comes from the insistence that women are not prostituted, that they are simply selling a service like any other, and that denying them this ‘freedom’ is unjust.

It’s not about degrading the act of sex to the point where it nothing more than a service for men. It’s about freedom!

Nobody wants to look at intercourse as a huge battlefield. Oppression and cultural bias are so firmly ingrained that it renders us incapable of treating the act of sex as a simple service. Many women would love to believe that intercourse is implicitly disconnected with issues of male privilege, the beauty myths, and oppression. Then they can claim it truly is a service conducted in some fantasy land where oppression doesn’t exist, and therefore, can’t be considered rape.

If you try to point out that no woman has the ability to have sex without the healthy crutch of denial, a denial that assures us that sex is completely devoid of politics, some would claim that this is to infantilize the woman. But it is the male culture that infantilizes the woman, not the act of pointing it out.

Feminism is a way of looking at sex that, unlike any other philosophy, assumes that there is much importance to be found in the sex act, and the sexual separation of human beings. To defend the idea of prostitution by lowering our views of intercourse to the point where it can be happily bought and sold is to also accept just as happily the idea that a woman is an object.

I don’t understand why it’s OK for men to objectify and use a woman as long as he pays for it. It should never be OK.

Where feminism fears to tread is idea that intercourse is something far more important than a mere service to be bought and sold freely. You can argue it back and forth forever and never get down to the real issue: Do men hate women, or do they love them? And what do we mean by hate and love?

If love is possession and control, then men do love women. If love is to wish to nurture and cherish, maybe they don’t. A man who truly loves women would never pay to have sex with them, because the idea would mean that he nurtures them in exchange for sex. No matter which way I look at prostitution, it’s nothing but men oppressing women, and I’m astonished so many feminists see it any other way.

I’m beginning to sense a drift in the Patriarchal Borg mind. It’s one with the swift drift toward ever more violent and degrading pornography. It mirrors the now solid acceptance of the once-deplored vice of casino gambling. One glances toward Nevada, and one sees a horrific door opening up to a dystopian future I think of as Porn World.

The drift has become slightly easier to see because of the late scandal of Governor Spitzer, who was caught using prostitutes for evacuating his foul seed into. Such a scandal causes all the manly men, like my friends Misogynist Mike and Pornsick Pat, to instantly wallow in the freedom of constant fantasies of endless supplies of porn star looking prostituted women everywhere. And cheap enough for them, too.

Mike says to Pat, “What’s the big deal? A guy’s got to have some warm place to blow his wad into, doesn’t he? The problem is that it isn’t cheap enough, if you ask me.”

“If I was a girl, hell, I’d do it in a minute!” Pat replies, nodding sagely in his infinite understanding of how women would really think if they just had as much sense as men, “It’s just hypocritical bullshit, women not charging for sex. Hell, they make you pay out the ass for dinner and a show and then make you feel like a jerk just because you try to get them to reciprocate with a little blow job or something. It’s nothing but a fuckin’ racket!”

Mike nods in total agreement, even though neither one of them can even remember the last time they actually went out on a date matching that description. Pat usually confines his dates to the stacks of porn DVDs or a lengthy cruise through increasingly vile internet sites, while Mike prefers to date rape girls he bullies away from their girlfriends at singles bars.

“They’ll never get rid of it!” Mike says, “It’s the world’s oldest profession! It’s just bullshit prohibition, and you know that never works. They oughta just legalize it and get it over with.”

They look at each other in apelike delight. Why, it makes perfect sense! It’s not like you can try to stop manly men from trying every kind of coercion imaginable to use women sexually anyway. A man’s freedom to make women obedient to his sexual whims is the most important freedom of all, when you think about it.

“If it was legal, just think how cheap it would get.” Pat noted.

“Every whore out there would immediately start charging for it outright, instead of just insisting you buy them drinks and dinner. It would be a buyer’s market.” Mike added eagerly.

“They legalized gambling, didn’t they? And it’s already legal in Nevada. Hell, it’s just around the corner.” Pat rhapsodized. Let’s leave our two anti-heroes to their dick-swelling bliss and return to the world of real women.

Does anyone out there have any doubt that this coming? The next step towards fulfilling male privilege must be legalizing prostitution. Reducing women to objects has already been advancing quite nicely, with women scared into conforming to alien beauty norms, modeling themselves after porn stars and Bratz Dolls, exercising on stripper poles, and in millions of other examples. The next step in expanding male privilege is legalizing prostitution, so that men can enjoy even more unfettered access to using women, with even less choice in the matter for the women involved.

Feminism is the only branch of philosophy to actually criticize what we think of sex, and because of it, it tends to repel and offend anyone in a position of privilege or anyone who bases their worth on defending the privileges of those who oppress them.

Go up to any dude in our dude-centric world today and tell him that his entire conception of sex is based on dominance and submission, rape and coercion, and you’ll get a strangely defensive response of some kind instantly.

This, to the standard feminist, is nothing more complicated than male privilege defending its own; but as a man living in a misogynist world, I have to point out some of the complications that arise from the mixed bag of emotions aroused by contemplating your own misogyny. They may be undercurrents compared to the limitless oceans of selfishness that make up the bulk of a male viewpoint, but underneath every male, no matter how well-trained he might be by our patriarchal culture, there is a human being.

I submit that it is the cultural perversion of sex that corrupts us completely. In our culture, there is no real application of the idea that sex is something rare and magical, sacred and untouchable. We all have a sense of this in our hearts, but how many of us have it destroyed by all the evils of the world before we even get to try it for ourselves?

The sex-positive feminists and their dudely acolytes, who swarm the internet loudly proclaiming their feminism, yelling for the rights of a woman to prostitute herself, are so far from understanding sex as something positive that they have no idea what I’m even talking about when I proclaim sex is something rare and sacred. To them sex is something as common as dirt, as unimportant as any other bodily evacuation, and has no higher meaning than a squirt of spunk over the face of an empowered woman on her knees before them. Sacred! They say. What a laugh.

To the sex-positive feminists, all sex is just masturbation with partners, two people - or more - doing nothing any more special than jerking themselves off with company. It’s a circle-jerk world, boys and girls, together or apart. The mere idea that sex could be anything higher than this simple animal act can only enrage them.

But I say it can be; and it is. It’s a much higher form of communication between a man and a woman than I could ever explain. It’s a mutual exchange that can lead to something nobody can ever fully comprehend or duplicate: the creation of a human life. To reduce this to nothing more than orgasmic degradation is lunacy and madness, and it’s easily shown to be so by looking at how quickly mere animal sex degenerates into dominance and submission, lust and control.

If someone tells you they are sex-positive from behind a stripper pole, or while hooking their way through grad school, you should tell them “You know nothing about sex!”

So many people these days have only enacted pornographic fantasies in the company of another person enacting a fantasy. How many have ever really known sex?

Is sex something sacred or profane? Deep down inside, even the most worthless dude knows that it must be something more than spewing his filthy spunk without reason or emotion.

I’ve only read a few chapters of Intercourse, only the second feminist book I’ve ever read. It’s amazing how different it is to read a book by Dworkin than it is to read about Dworkin. The shocking slogans and out-of-context quotes are all I’ve ever heard, and they’re so unfair. You simply have to read the entire book to get a real idea of the enormous complexity of her thoughts on sex in our culture. Most of it is simply pointing out things famous writers have actually written about sex, love and reducing women to lovely things to be fucked.

She was a hero to me from the time I first heard that she had joined forces with the right wing to try to limit the spread of pornography. To be blunt, I don’t care who helps me to get this stuff back under the bed, under the counter, and in the closet once again; it just has to be done. To live in a world that openly condones the increasingly violent excesses of porn just to try to prove itself sex-positive is intolerable to anyone who has a distaste to being degraded and degrading others.

It’s not that I’m anti-sex. I love sex, but more than sex, I love to love, and that’s something that encompasses and surpasses sex; sex being merely a subset of love. To love, in my mind, is like the Italians put it - volere bene - to wish someone wellness. To wish all good for someone, to want to give without getting back. Unconditionally, regardless of sex.

To say that you are sex-positive and support the rapelike porn sex of our modern world - whether you are a woman or a man - is willful ignorance. Dragging sex down into an insensitive animal level in order to continue to deliver ever-increasing shocks to your jaded sex-sickened body and mind isn’t positive.

I’ve read a lot of negative crap about Dworkin and I can see that it’s all hooey. She’s an easy target, telling the truth we don’t want to hear, and the criticism that she doesn’t offer us a solution to the problem of sexual imbalance is just whining. She seems to expect us to feel free to imagine a solution for ourselves. If she were truly angry, she would have given us all up without ever writing a word.