[LAF] Disgusted by the misogyny on this list

[Joy Wood]

Too right.
 


From: sarah.c.l at hotmail.co.uk
To: laf at lists.aktivix.org
Date: Tue, 14 Jul 2009 06:52:42 +0100
Subject: [LAF] Disgusted by the misogyny on this list



I’ve been on this list for a while, and contributed a couple of times, but I’ve been largely put off in the past by the sexism of some of the posters. Joy, Ed, thank you for your continued efforts to stand up to this barrage of woman-hating.

It’s like I’ve fallen through a time-warp back to the ‘sexual revolution’ of the sixties, when they celebrated rapists and child abusers as ‘sexual outlaws’ and thought prostitution would die out because ‘sexually liberated’ women would do for free what you had to pay prostitutes to do.

So, we have Steve, who thinks that sex is a human right, but freedom from compulsory sexual activity isn’t. Yes, you pay lip-service to ‘sex equality’, by saying that women will have access to this ‘charitable prostitution’, but really this is about shawing up male entitlement and male privilege.

And we have Volodya, who only wants to hang out with ‘empowered sex workers’ (ie already privileged individuals who have embraced ‘sex work’ as part of their ‘transgressive’ lifestyle choice), and would rather hear pimps’ and pornographers’ accounts of the sex industry than hear from those who have been chewed up and spat out of the system. Because victims are boring and whiney and not-sexy, and anyway, victims aren’t people, so it doesn’t matter what happens to them. And if any one disagrees with you, that means they hate sex, so you don’t have to listen to them either!

Do either of you actually realise that women are human in exactly the same way you are? Our bodies feel things in exactly the same way yours does, and what you would experience as abuse and degradation, we would experience in exactly the same way.

You don’t get to pick and choose which hierarchies you oppose and which you want to keep, bell hooks didn’t call it “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” for no good reason; all forms of hierarchy are intertwined. You want a world with out capitalism and the state, but you don’t want to give up sex hierarchy.

Presumably, in your putative anarchist community, men would co-operate horizontally to oppress women and ensure they continued to sexually service men, either through direct violence, or through control of economic recourses (food, shelter). It sounds more like the Swat valley than anything any woman would recognise as utopia.

Sarah




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