Women for or against women?

Personal reflections on the theme of women’s internalised oppression in response to Sonia Johnson’s brilliant and important book, “Going Out of Our Minds: The Metaphysics of Liberation.”

Traduction Française

“I heard you’re running a sleep deprivation cult,” a leader of the US National Organisation of Women (NOW) said to Sonia Johnson when she visited their offices shortly after helping to organise a feminist retreat, where women – of their own volition – had stayed up late talking and singing.

I laughed when I read that. It reminded me of the many things that have been claimed about me – for example, being compared to Donald Trump, accused of bullying, of concealing important information that I had in fact shared appropriately, of being on an ego trip, of not speaking to survivors, of being “difficult” and “as mad as a box of frogs,” of having a personality disorder, and of using my own history of surviving incest and CSE, and my hearing disability, to “get my own way” in some unspecified way. Rumours have been spread that I did something (exactly what is never specified) that was so terrible in the past that several high-profile women (who barely know me) refused to sit in a room with me. And thus my years of quiet (unpaid) contribution to the feminist and abolitionist movement is disappeared.

Neoliberalism, Queer Theory and Prostitution

Traducción al español | Traduction Française

Over the past 40 years or so pornography and prostitution have been mainstreamed and pornography has become more misogynistic, sadistic and paedophilic. In many countries prostitution has come to be considered a regular industry that now counts towards the GDP. Pornography has moved further and further into the open, and prostitution has burgeoned and is more acceptable than ever – while the conditions for the women and girls involved remain appalling.

In spite of the advances made by the women’s movement since the 1960s, men still control the big power blocks – the government, the armed forces and police, finance and banking, big business and the media. The ‘sex industry’ is overwhelmingly for men, and feminists have found enduring resistance to its critique. In this article I attempt to draw together some explanation for this resistance and argue for a different approach.

“Perhaps more surprising is the difficulty we have had finding allies in this effort. Even though there is a fairly strong consensus among progressive or liberal people about the value of peace, economic justice, and human rights – and about the negative values of corruption and secrecy in government, excessive concentration of wealth in the hands of small elites, and so forth – there is a remarkable non-consensus about issues of gender power and sexual exploitation. The sexual privileges claimed by men under the rules of patriarchy are often still claimed by ‘progressive’ men marching under the banners of peace and justice.” (D.A Clarke, 2004.)