There is a special place in hell for women who do not help other women. – Madeleine K. Albright
From the very beginning, feminism has been a movement as divided in its sensibilities as women are divided in ours. While many early feminist leaders were concerned with issues which affected all women of every class and situation (such as reproductive freedom and social, legal, economic and educational equality) and by their efforts reshaped Western society for the better, the majority of rank-and-file feminists (especially in the US and UK) were unimaginative middle-class white women who were primarily concerned with their own peeves rather than the very real needs of women who were lower-class, nonwhite or unconventional. But whenever I dare to make statements like this, I am often countered with a disingenuous “Feminists are just people who want women to have equal rights with men.” If only that were true! Certainly some feminists were and are like that, and Goddess bless them for it, but then as now most simply used the movement as most people use any political or social movement, namely as an excuse to control others. While the best and brightest early feminists were working to win rights for individual women and thereby strengthen liberty for all people, the majority were working to do the exact opposite by imposing their own prudish, repressed, Christian, Victorian and feminine sexual morality on the 85% or more of society who were none of those things.
These conflicting attitudes about freedom of choice vs. conventional Victorian sexual morality can be seen in the person of Josephine Butler (1828-1906), who recognized that English law of the time (especially the Draconian “Contagious Disease Acts”) stripped prostitutes of their rights as Englishwomen and so campaigned tirelessly for the repeal of those laws for 16 years. At the same time, Butler (like most Victorians) believed that women were essentially asexual, and so could not accept that any woman might freely choose to exploit the male sexual appetite in order to earn a living; the very idea was anathema to her rigid Christian thinking. She therefore concluded that it was actually whores who were the exploited ones, childlike victims of male lust who had been forced into lives of “degradation” by male oppression. Like so many people both then and now, Butler was so convinced that her opinions were “right” that she imagined anyone who believed differently must be suffering from some form of impaired judgment.
Butler was very charismatic and attracted many middle-class feminists to her cause, but after the repeal of the Contagious Disease Acts in 1886 prostitutes were no longer the cause célèbre; when they refused to repent their whoredom and embrace “honest work” and conventional morality the feminists abandoned their sympathy like yesterday’s newspaper and declared war on our entire profession, vowing to abolish it entirely. Butler founded the Social Purity Alliance, an organization dedicated to imposing middle-class Victorian standards of chastity (i.e. repugnance for sex) onto men, and it was but the first of a host of similar organizations which sprang up on both sides of the Atlantic throughout the 1880s and ‘90s. Though the movement boasted a number of high profile men (such as William Booth of Salvation Army fame and the American health-farm proprietor John Kellogg, who touted corn flakes as a “cure” for masturbation in adolescent boys), the overwhelming majority of its members were female. And though many of these came from conservative Christian backgrounds, many others were former Butlerites; middle-class “feminists” had shown their true colors and abandoned the drive to win rights for the disenfranchised in favor of one which aimed to restrict the rights of everyone. One goal of the social purity movement was the imposition of universal temperance (eventually resulting in Prohibition in the US), but the more important one for our purposes was the war on whores. While male rulers had always been largely content to “control” or ghettoize prostitutes, the purity crusaders vowed to wipe us from the face of the Earth, and their newfound political clout (which increased dramatically after women were given the vote in almost every Western nation in the first two decades of the 20th century) resulted in an unprecedented wave of harsh, repressive laws directed against the women who so offended the retarded sexual sensibilities of their privileged bourgeois sisters.
The purity crusaders used many propaganda weapons against prostitutes, but chief among these were disease scares and the “white slavery” hysteria. As several times before in history, whores were vilified as dirty plague-carriers, and this campaign of misinformation was so well-organized that the notion is still deeply imbedded in the public consciousness a century later despite ample evidence to the contrary. But the “white slavery” propaganda was even more effective; the unholy alliance of middle-class feminists and puritanical religious zealots managed to convince the public, the media and governments that there was a huge international trade in underage girls, abducted and forced into sexual slavery in foreign countries. The fact that there was absolutely no evidence for such a vast conspiracy made no difference whatsoever; the public devoured lurid stories of child prostitution, and throughout the Western world (especially in English-speaking countries) voluntary adult prostitution was banned or severely restricted under the excuse of combating involuntary prostitution of “children”. The brothels were closed, girls were forced into the streets, and the pimp as we know him today first appeared; in the name of “freeing” women from male “exploitation”, these so-called “feminists” had actually surrendered many women into a new form of male domination.
The war on whores reached its peak in the 1920s, but ran out of steam when the Great Depression gave middle-class feminists something more important to worry about; that was followed closely by the Second World War. But once Hitler was safely buried and the dust began to settle, the stifling conformity of the 1950s inspired a new generation of feminists. As in the first wave of feminism a hundred years before, the best and brightest feminists concerned themselves with the big issues and the rights of individual women, while the majority of rank-and-file feminists were once again unimaginative middle-class white women who were primarily concerned with their own peeves rather than the very real needs of women who were lower-class, nonwhite or unconventional. One of the big issues this time around was sex; as I discussed in my column of July 20th scientific inquiry had at last exploded the myths about female sexuality which drove so much of the first feminists’ agenda, and for the first time in modern history “respectable” women were free to think and talk about a subject previously restricted to their whore sisters; the so-called “sexual revolution” had arrived.
Unfortunately, the evaporation of the social purity movement had not resulted in an equivalent evaporation of the morality laws it had foisted on the populace, especially in the United States; far too many Americans are subject to a peculiar delusion I call “lawheadedness”. A “lawhead” is one who believes that man-made laws are actually based in objective reality like physical laws; he is unable to comprehend that the majority of laws are completely arbitrary, and therefore views a violation of a “vice law” with the same horror that normal people reserve for rains of toads or spontaneous human combustion. Though lawheads are a minority of the population they are disproportionately represented in positions of power, with the result that once a law is on the books it cannot usually be removed by any means short of armed insurrection. Despite the fact that in the 1960s many Americans became far more accepting of prostitution and other sex businesses, this was insufficient to cause prostitution law to even be questioned, much less repealed.
In the sexually “liberated” climate of the 1960s, many true feminists found this situation abhorrent. They rightfully recognized that laws against prostitution are discriminatory in the extreme because they criminalize the only profession which is overwhelmingly practiced by and controlled by women; these early second-wave feminists understood that repression of prostitution is the repression of a woman’s right to decide what to do with her own body, just as surely as banning abortion or birth control was. And since feminists were working to abolish the latter laws, it only made sense that they should work to abolish anti-prostitution laws as well. But by the early ‘70s the first-wave pattern was starting to repeat itself; the white, middle-class feminists who made up the majority of the movement monopolized debate and elbowed the hookers out, forcing us to start our own separate rights organizations such as COYOTE and the English Collective of Prostitutes. As yet there was no open hostility between whores and mainstream feminists, but sexually-repressed caricatures like Kate Millet were working to change that; here’s a quote from Millett which defines her view:
Prostitution, when unmotivated by economic need, might well be defined as a species of psychological addiction, built on self-hatred through repetitions of the act of sale by which a whore is defined.
Recognize the Victorian rhetoric? It’s the old “whores are subhuman” dressed up in modern pop-psychology drag. Millett and others like her started to pull feminism in a Neomarxist direction, transforming what had been a positive movement about making women equal partners with men into a vicious political organization whose catechism was the old Marxist poison of class warfare, except with “patriarchy” substituted for “bourgeoisie” and “women” substituted for “proletariat”.
By the end of the ‘70s feminism was in turmoil, torn between the true feminists and the sick, bitter Neomarxists and their “gender war” rhetoric. But once AIDS appeared on the scene the war was over, and the misandrists had won; the modern Puritanism engendered by the AIDS scare shifted the balance of power to the anti-sex position, and sex workers of every kind (including everyone from porn stars to lingerie models) were demonized as gender-war “Uncle Toms”, as typified in this quote from anti-whore activist Julie Burchill:
Prostitution is the supreme triumph of capitalism. Worst of all, prostitution reinforces all the old dumb clichés about women’s sexuality; that they are not built to enjoy sex and are little more than walking masturbation aids, things to be DONE TO, things so sensually null and void that they have to be paid to indulge in fornication, that women can be had, bought, as often as not sold from one man to another. When the sex war is won prostitutes should be shot as collaborators for their terrible betrayal of all women, for the moral tarring and feathering they give indigenous women who have had the bad luck to live in what they make their humping ground.
There is the Neofeminist position in all its histrionic, collectivistic, misogynistic, anti-sexual, completely-detached-from-reality putrescence; whores are evil, Burchill is saying, because by our comfort with sex we make prudish women like her look bad. Like the “learned” men of the 19th century she portrays us as stunted creatures incapable of free moral choice, “things to be done to” in her words; note, however, that it is Burchill who so characterizes us, not her imaginary “patriarchy”.
So in almost exactly a century, we’ve come full circle. As in 1910, we’re still being blamed for spreading disease despite ample evidence to the contrary. As in 1910, authorities justify laws banning voluntary adult prostitution with the excuse that such bans somehow magically help them combat child prostitution and white slavery (only now they call it “human trafficking”). As in 1910, we are characterized as subhuman monsters somehow different from other women. And as in 1910, our worst enemies are not men, but a certain type of twisted control-freak woman who is perfectly happy to kick her sisters in the teeth in order to advance her own selfish, prudish, repressive agenda.
It does look pretty bad, doesn’t it? But there are a few very important differences between 1910 and 2010.
The first of these is that prostitution is being legalized, to one degree or another, all over the world. So there’s someplace (or many places) to point to and say, “look, that nation hasn’t disappeared in a puff of harlotry.” It isn’t everything, but it’s something, and it’s more than prostitutes had in 1910.
The other thing is the Internet. You and other whores, former whores, and hobbyists can speak out and show us that you aren’t demons or aliens, but human beings like the rest of us. Any of us out here who wonder what the truth is can go online and read the neofeminists, the theocrats, the human trafficking alarmists… and you. And Kama of Kingston, and others.
It will happen. Who would have predicted, fifteen years ago, that California would be *this close* to legalizing marijuana for recreational use? Who twenty years ago would have predicted gay marriage?
The War on Whores will end, and for all that I’ve never hired a call girl, brothel girl, or streetwalker, I say it can’t happen soon enough.
Yes and no. I admire your optimism, dear friend, but you have a tendency to view social progress as analagous to technological progress, which it isn’t; things which are legalized can quickly become illegal again in a few years. Plus, in most countries where prostitution is “legal” whores are still persecuted by inane laws designed to control us in a way no other profession is controlled; there are no laws against carpenters advertising or nurses supporting whoever they like with their income.
I’m also afraid that your analogies are flawed; whores are not a group but a subgroup, and we don’t have the excuse of heredity like blacks or queers. To make your analogies work, imagine that once homosexuals had won civil rights the mainstream gay rights organizations had agreed to disavow drag queens, branding them as “traitors to homosexuality”, creating fallacious “studies” to pretend they are all drug addicts and rape victims, and encouraging governments to make MORE laws against them. Or that it was made totally legal to grow one’s own weed, but buying or selling it was illegal.
Until the feminist movement gets its collective head out of its collective arse and sends the neofeminists packing, we will continue to be maligned and attacked by those who should be our allies; even in countries where prostitution is legal or semi-legal (such as in Nevada, the UK and the eastern states of Australia) these same traitors to sisterhood often make attempts to have it declared illegal again.
Well I feel that social progress does tend to… progress. But it is uneven and all too often, things get worse before they get better. Worse still, sometimes things get better before they get worse!
I suggested two reasons for optimism, and of the two, I have to admit that What’s Done Elsewhere is the weaker. In Europe they have comprehensive sex ed, and here we have abstinence-only sex ed. European teens have less STDs, less pregnancy, etc. than do American teens. Our response? Spend more money on ab-only. So the fact that It Works Over There is no guarantee that it will be tried Over Here.
The other reason I gave was the Internet, and I’ll stand by that. People kind find information that the government, religious groups, or neofeminists don’t want them to find. In fact, teen pregnancy and STDs are going down recently. This isn’t because a hundred million dollars a year spent on ab-only has succeeded where eighty million a year had failed, but because teens are going online and getting comprehensive sex ed whether the government likes it or not.
Well, only time will tell whether or not my optimism is justified. Even if my most cheery notions are exceeded, it’ll be to late to help you, as you’ve retired.
That, I totally agree with. Control freaks hate the internet (look at the money and resources China wastes on trying to control it) for exactly the reasons you stated, and also because it lets people who live far apart organize themselves in a way that was impossible even 20 years ago.
As I recall, one radical feminist famously said, “All sex is rape.” This twisted logic would seem to include any form of consensual sex. Such is the level of discourse coming out of the more extreme feminists among us.
That was Catherine MacKinnon. Her argument was the old Victorian “subhuman whore” one, except extended to all heterosexual women. In MacKinnon’s perverse view, only lesbian neofeminists are capable of adult judgment; like Butler, she was so convinced of her own rectitude that anyone who disagreed must be insane. And since all heterosexual women are mentally incompetent, they therefore cannot give consent any more than a child can, so all intercourse is rape for the same reason that sex with a child is rape even if she consents. Q.E.D.
Yes, it’s incredibly warped, but it’s completely logical; once one accepts a fallacious premise, all manner of absurdities can be argued from it.
No, Catharine MacKinnon never said that: http://www.snopes.com/quotes/mackinnon.asp
Didn’t bother to look very hard for a correction, did you? But I guess it’s more fun to think you’ve scored points despite the fact that, while not a direct quote, the phrase sums up the content of much of MacKinnon’s oeuvre.
No, you’re absolutely right, I didn’t look for a correction on your blog at all. Sorry about that. And I probably should have made it clear that I wasn’t trying to score points – I have no problems whatsoever with either your characterization or your assessment of her views. I was just trying to set the record straight in a very minor way, and I have more than enough contempt for the views of her (and her ilk) regardless of whether that quote is correct or not. I apologize for my carelessness. Loved the article, BTW!
Apology accepted. 🙂
Without the Internet, it’s unlikely that I’d have have the opportunity to discuss much of anything with a lovely ex-stripper and retired call girl.
To move things to a lighter note: out of the various screen names I’ve use, I picked this one to use here. So when are you going to say, “Hi, Sailor!”
OK, maybe that’s a bit streewalkerish, but hey. ^_~
Hi, Sailor 😉
I totally agree with you here, Maggie. What I find really sad in the Burchill quote you mentioned above — aside from is clear hatred/fear of prostitutes — is the manichaean duality. It’s either women care about themselves and their pleasure or women sell themselves to men as slaves. It’s either I respect myself as a human and sexual being — and then I don’t “sell myself”, or I despise myself utterly, and therefore I sell to men this self that I hate. As if there could be no other possibilities! As if a woman could not respect herself, her sexuality and her sexual pleasure and want to exploit the different intensity in sexual desire between the genders for commercial profit. The fact that this has to be an either-or decision, the non-acceptance of any other possibility or nuance… that really makes me sad about the way people like Burchill view the world.
Even this story about “selling yourself”. The (neo/rad)feminists didn’t invent it, but they certainly don’t shy away from using it. How on earth can you think that a prostitute really “sells herself”, like a slave? She’s selling a service. If a singer who accepts money to sing in a birthday party is not ‘selling him/herself’, then why on earth would a woman who sells sexual services be ‘selling herself’? (I find the concept even quite misogynistic: I link it to the old — patriarchal? — idea that women = sex, that all a woman can possibly be or mean is the sex she can ‘give’, so after she’s sold the sex, what else of any value is left in her? Nothing, right? Can’t you feel the misogyny dripping?)
I will only add that this feature you describe — there being some feminists who did get it and tried to fight actual problems and solve real injustices against women, while most of the rank-and-file feminists were only concerned with their personal pet peeves — is typical of all kinds of social activism. You could see the same pattern in communism, socialism, nationalism, and nowadays also in, oh, vegetarianism/veganism, animal rights activsts, whatever. There are a few serious people who are thinking about real questions and how to solve real problems; and then an overwhelming number of ‘followers’ who repeat soundbites and obsess about nonissues.
Amanda Brooks did an excellent column on that.
Yes, absolutely. 🙂
I even sometimes wonder, Maggie, if there is any sense at all in trying to do something to improve the world. Since any social movement with any chance of affecting any changes needs numbers, and you only get numbers by accepting the rank-and-file soundbite-repeaters… it would seem that any group of individuals fighting for something, no matter how true, would eventually degenerate in ways similar to feminism.
A friend tells me that the best is simply to raise your kids in such a way that they don’t end up being idiots. That’s the best you can do for the future, he says. I’m not quite at the point of thinking he is right… but I’m moving in this direction. 🙁
Asehpe, has there been any social progress at all, on any front, in the last, say, two hundred years? If the answer is “yes,” they the answer to the question of whether or not it is worth it to try to improve the world is also yes.
Well, ending slavery has happened in the last 200 years, hasn’t it? Women won the vote… Colonial empires fell apart… Working conditions improved remarkably for the proletariat in most civilized countries… Sex has become a possible topic of conversation, albeit still with a number of ‘minor social stigmas’ on it… Education has reached more people in percentual terms than it ever had in the history of the world… Some progress has happened.
What I’m not sure about is if much, or even any, of this progress was obtained because of the work of (most of?) the people who busied themselves with social activism in the period.
One problem with trying to improve the world is that we simply don’t have a good theory of how society and culture really work yet. So there’s a good chance that whatever ideas you want to propagate to improve society may actually harm it — they may have effects you’re not aware of yet. We just can’t really predict it. (An example I saw once but can’t remember the details of was about some reservation in which the first ecologists decided to help the herbivores by killing off all the carnivore predators; predictably the herbivore population increased, but then all available food was eaten and the herbivores they had wanted to help ended up starving. These ‘primitive ecologists’ thought they were doing the herbivores a service by killing their predators, but in fact they weren’t.)
When I think about this, I feel like Daoism may have a point when it recommends the path of non-action…
Now that is an interesting consideration: social activism has happened, and social progress has been made, but did the first really cause the latter? Correlation does not equal causation.
There were those who advocated for the end of slavery, and slavery ended, but did it end because of what the advocates did? There have always been people opposed to slavery, but it didn’t end until the Nineteenth Century (it sort of still exists today, but not like before). So if the abolitionists of the Eighteenth Century couldn’t end it, why think that the abolitionists of the Nineteenth cad anything to do with ending when end it did?
My best guess is that activism does make a difference, a huge difference, but isn’t enough alone. To return to the issue of slavery, it wasn’t until the North was industrialized and mechanized to a large degree that anti-slavery advocacy began to have a strong effect. Previously, the best that could be done was to ban the importation of slaves, and that not until twenty years into the (for them) future. There were people, black, white, and other, who were opposed to the Jim Crow situation from the first, but it wasn’t until television that it was ended.
So I guess my take is this: yes, do keep up the social activism, but understand that you will only have small victories (if even that) until the other things line up. But when those other things line up, the activism needs to be there!
Hey Maggie, I don’t suppose you have a link for that Burchill quote? I can’t find the original anywhere! x
It seems to have appeared in an essay called “Born Again Cows”, if that helps any.
It’s from Burchill’s book of essays, ‘Damaged Goods’ – see here: http://biblio.co.uk/books/44484448.html.
Brilliant article btw Maggie, as ever. I imagine the above question is in response to Burchill once again covering herself in glory in the British press today with yet another vitriolic display of hatred…
Thank you! Yes, I saw that, and I tweeted part of that Burchill quote in commenting on it.
[…] as it had happened in first-wave feminism, a cabal of white, middle-class, sexually-repressed women commandeered the movement for themselves and elbowed sex workers out; once the AIDS scare began in the early 1980s their victory was […]
[…] efforts to suppress our profession entirely became the rule. In other words, during the years when the lot of other women was steadily improving, ours was worsening; and even today, most of the worst enemies of sex workers are other […]
[…] just as the first wavers devolved from successfully crusading against the horrid Contagious Disease Acts to campaigning against things which made middle-class white women uncomfortable (including […]
“Prostitution, when unmotivated by economic need, might well be defined as a species of psychological addiction, built on self-hatred through repetitions of the act of sale by which a whore is defined.”
“Recognize the Victorian rhetoric? It’s the old “whores are subhuman” dressed up in modern pop-psychology drag.”
Not so fast there, Maggie. Interviews with porn directors and producers say they same thing, more or less. That by the time (many of) these women meet them and start doing porn, they are “already broken” and “damaged” with histories of child neglect, abuse, sexual assualt, etc. While the directors and producers make out like they are “creating jobs for America’s rejects” and thus doing something to help them, there is no brushing under the carpet of the fact that the reason why these women are entering into that business is because of some type of human suffering.
We know that abuse victims often experience low self esteem (self hatred) and often follow a trajectory of repeating patterns of domination and submission because that is what they know.
You cannot for a second say that psychology and self image does not at all play a role in the sex industry.
You bet I can, and once you’ve been in the sex industry yourself for a few years I’ll be happy to hear your opinion on it.
While it’s true that some porn performers, and other sex workers, are in the business because they can’t get jobs elsewhere, that’s true of almost any business. I’ve met just as many or more porn performers who weren’t at all like that description. Some are very intelligent, and delightful people. Some have backgrounds of abuse that they have overcome, some don’t.
Let me tell you, getting naked for the public is not the job that someone with low self esteem does.
Remember, porn, and sex work in general, is a performance. One creates a character to work through. In public, you’re not seeing the real person. You’ll hear whatever attitude and story suits the character.
Sadly, too many people come from backgrounds of abuse and neglect. If they all worked in adult entertainment, there’d be too few doing all the other jobs.
It is performance art in its highest form.
Very good article, Maggie. Well said. I couldn’t agree more. While ideally I would be considered a feminist because I think that a general male-female equality is moral and leads to a healthier society, I refuse to carry that label because I’ve been so thoroughly disgusted by the general feminist movement. It’s so bad that their Misandry and “patriarchy” and “rape culture” lies have led them to actively discriminate against transwomen since at least 1973.
I don’t need “feminism”, I have a moral compass instead.
We are so very fortunate to have you writing this blog, Maggie. I don’t usually comment. I just want to say thank you.
You are very welcome. 🙂
Reblogged this on Pycraftsworld’s Weblog.
Brilliant stuff Maggie. There is always a history lesson in your blogposts.
Have you written about WHY certain women have this psychology/morality, where they want to wipe out prostitution?
I can understand why some men do it.. they are White Knights, and evolution has built men to have this protective instinct towards women and children.. and thus they tend to shield women from anything they perceive as a danger.
Why do women do it?
Right Wingers tend to have a better understanding of human nature than the Left (xref: Steven Pinker’s Blank Slate), and therefore I could at least get an honest answer from the rather respectable Barbaba Kay. Her objection is not that women are being exploited, or being forced into it.. but that the profession is inherently dangerous and therefore it should be banned. I responded “If so, shouldnt men be exempted from dangerous jobs as well, such as firefighting, or combat”? No answer, of course.
“There is a special place in hell for women who do not help other women.” – Madeleine K. Albright
No, Madeleine. There is a special place in hell for PEOPLE who do not help other people.
A bit off-topic, but I came here from AVfM. Having poked around a bit on this blog, I am impressed by what I have seen thus far. The perspectives and citations you offer provide much to chew on. There are some aspects of your arguments I am not sure I can agree with (largely due to ignorance), but for complicated issues like prostitution, I feel such perspectives are immensely valuable.
As for myself, I am somewhat ambivalent on prostitution. I feel grown women should have the option if they so choose, but given that a good friend of mine is a former child prostitute (and one of the most psychologically damaged people I’ve ever met), I have personally been soured on ever seeking out said services.
In any case, keep up the good work.
[…] Traitors to Their Sex The purity crusaders used many propaganda weapons against prostitutes, but chief among these were disease scares and the “white slavery” hysteria. As several times before in history, whores were vilified as dirty plague-carriers, and this campaign of misinformation was so well-organized that the notion is still deeply imbedded in the public consciousness a century later despite ample evidence to the contrary. But the “white slavery” propaganda was even more effective; the unholy alliance of middle-class feminists and puritanical religious zealots managed to convince the public, the media and governments that there was a huge international trade in underage girls, abducted and forced into sexual slavery in foreign countries. The fact that there was absolutely no evidence for such a vast conspiracy made no difference whatsoever; the public devoured lurid stories of child prostitution, and throughout the Western world (especially in English-speaking countries) voluntary adult prostitution was banned under the excuse of combating involuntary prostitution of children. […]