Savaging

When the sex war is won prostitutes should be shot as collaborators for their terrible betrayal of all women. –  Julie Burchill

Domestic sows are often subject to a perverse and horrifying behavioral abnormality called “savaging”, or cannibalistic infanticide; in plainer language, they eat their own young.  The behavior is thought to be caused by fear, stress or unsanitary conditions, but it is also noted that sows which have done it once are prone to do it again.  Though humans are not subject to this behavior in a literal sense, there are a number of women who tend to viciously attack others as part of a broader rejection of their own femininity; I call them neofeminists.  And like disturbed sows, neofeminists reserve their most vicious attacks for those one would least expect them to target, in this case other women.

The reason, I suspect, lies in the differing ways in which men and women view our bodies.  For a man, the body is a vehicle; he gets signals from it such as hunger, pain, sexual desire, etc and though he’s forced to respond to those signals he still views them as something outside his ego.  In the sea of organic life a male is someone on a raft:  He is supported by the sea and can perceive it all around him, and it has powerful and often overwhelming effects on him, but he is ALWAYS outside of it and indeed fears being swallowed up by it.  But for women our psyches are inextricably bound up in the body; we are immersed in that sea, swimming in it, surrounded by it on all sides, and the signals from it are not merely messages from somewhere else but thoughts in our own brains.  No man can understand the way women think of food or sex, and pregnancy might as well be science fiction to them.  Starting in the early teens the female body undergoes catastrophic changes (unlike the comparatively gradual and subtle male ones) and every month we are reminded of the fact that Mother Nature is in control and we have little choice but to obey her demands.  This is not merely a physical thing but a mental one; our feelings, perceptions and thoughts are altered by the internal tides and they’re only a pale reflection of the changes produced by pregnancy.

So it should come as no surprise that some female intellectuals reject their own femininity, in extreme cases violently so by embracing male dress, grooming, mannerisms and lifestyles.  It isn’t about “male power” as they claim publicly; it’s about rejecting female powerlessness over our bodies, a state they wrongfully blame on men because the truth, that it’s the doing of the bitch goddess Nature, is too overwhelming.  Men and political systems can be fought, but Nature cannot be, so neofeminists adhere to the ridiculous “social construction of gender” ideology as a way of whistling past the graveyard.  Because they’re so miserable and maladjusted they resent anyone who isn’t, and from this resentment grows envy of men for being free of the tyranny of a female body, and envy of women who have learned to live comfortably with it.  Envy inevitably decays into hate, and the ultimate targets of that hatred are prostitutes because we not only embrace our bodies and use them to enrich ourselves in a way denied to neofeminists, but also because we enable men to procure sex on their own terms rather than having to dance to every ridiculous demand made by some woman with an exaggerated sense of her own irreplaceability.

The neofeminists are fond of pretending that prostitution is an outgrowth of patriarchy, but this is clearly absurd; the highest status of the prostitute is found in the ancient semi-matriarchal cultures, and the lowest in the most patriarchal ones.  Married women in such cultures often resent the freedom and power of the prostitute, and as in the case of the neofeminists such resentment gives rise to hatred.  But it wasn’t until the decay of first-wave feminism that this hatred actually turned into widespread legislative repression, and even then the persecution was represented as a self-evident moral issue.  A century ago there was no need for moral crusaders to lie about whores; the truth of our lives was enough to justify a war on our profession according to the prevailing Christian morality of the time.  But after the sexual revolution relaxed the sexual mores of amateurs, it became much more difficult for anti-whore crusaders to whip up public feeling against us with the mere truth, so lies became necessary.

First came the traditional police lies about prostitution “attracting crime”, which equated escorts with streetwalkers and ignored the fact that it’s criminalization which creates the “crime” of prostitution in the first place.  But when prostitutes started participating in second-wave feminism and sympathy for us began to grow, early neofeminists found it necessary to construct elaborate lies about our degradation, bad childhoods, drug abuse, etc so as to destroy our credibility without openly attacking us (which at the time would’ve been recognized as the flagrant violation of sisterhood it is).  Whores then became victims who, though blameless, couldn’t be taken seriously because we were so screwed up.

This mythology is still the prevailing one, and gave rise to the Swedish Model and the “sex trafficking” cult, but unfortunately for its adherents there are a certain number of outspoken harlots who dare to challenge that view and prove its fallaciousness by simply showing ourselves to be intelligent, reasonable and well-adjusted women who aren’t “victimized” by anybody.  And because the internet has made us far more visible than we used to be, a new and even more vicious lie became necessary.  Neofeminists now claim that though the vast majority of prostitutes are trafficked, coerced victims, those of us who speak out for sex worker rights are a tiny minority who actually participate in the degradation of other women!  Some neofeminists prefer the subtle approach, claiming that though we may indeed be free and happy our “bad example” helps to make the sexual enslavement of “millions” possible, while others (such as those I discussed Friday) prefer the more overt approach typified by the Julie Burchill epigram to this column.  But a few (such as those who seem to have schooled “Bedelia”) have actually dreamed up a conspiracy theory of “Elders of Zion”-like proportions.  These lunatics imagine a vast, powerful “pimp lobby” funded by pornography which actively promotes sex trafficking and “paid rape” (yet somehow lacks the influence to get prostitution decriminalized even in Nevada), and that sex worker advocates such as the leaders of SWOP, well-known writers such as Tracy Quan and Belle de Jour, and even bloggers like myself and a number of my readers are all in the employ of this “pro-prostitution” cabal.

Nobody who hates femininity as much as the neofeminists do can possibly be accepted by rational people as speaking for all women, but few of their followers are rational and the politicians who embrace their rhetoric do so not out of belief, but expediency (neofeminist dogma gives them an excuse for more repressive legislation).  So I welcome neofeminists’ increasingly overt attacks on sex workers; the more vicious they grow, the less the public will accept that they speak for all women, and the zanier their pronouncements about vast pimp conspiracies become the less their arguments will be taken seriously by normal people.  Sooner or later, the only people listening to their nasty grunting and squealing will be the few benighted souls who choose to inhabit the same philosophical sty.