The greatest enemy of individual freedom is the individual himself.
– Saul Alinsky
As most of you probably realize, in order to keep this blog going I need to do an awful lot of reading on the internet every day. Readers send me many links, I discover some myself, and I get loads of them from Twitter; for every item which I eventually share as a link, a TW3 item or a full column there’s another I simply “retweet” and still another I pass over completely. Most of this latter category are simply things in which I’m not interested, or things in which I don’t think my readers would be interested, or things I’ve already shared, or new items that nonetheless cover ground I’ve already covered. And sometimes I disagree with the author’s spin, yet don’t find it so wrong that I feel the need to shoot it down. But there are others (and I’m sorry to say far too many others) which I can’t even finish reading because of their declamation of absurdities, their overuse of meaningless shibboleths, or their adherence to wholly obnoxious fads; my eyes glaze over, I close the window by feel (because my eyes are glazed over, of course), and I move on and try not to accidentally open any of the numerous repeats of the link in other tweets declaring it brilliant or profound or whatever.
A large fraction of these oh-so-annoying words, phrases and ideas derive ultimately from Marx, generally (though not always) by way of feminism. Even if I didn’t regard Marxism as an abomination against the individual, and even if it were not a failed social experiment, I would still find it bizarre that so many people who identify primarily as sex worker activists (though not many who identify first as sex workers) espouse it. First of all, despite the modern re-interpretations to which some Neo-Marxists subscribe, it is very clear that Marx considered prostitution to be a “disease” of capitalist society which would no longer be permitted in the communist paradise (presumably because the commune would magically make the sex drives and relative attractiveness of men and women equal). Every communist state has criminalized sex work and punished it harshly, even brutally; under Mao women caught whoring were sent for “re-education”, and though the regime declared in 1958 that prostitution has been “eradicated”, the “re-education centers” remained full and top party officials had access to that which was officially declared not to exist. Furthermore, neofeminism is really nothing but a form of Neo-Marxism with a few parameters redefined, and as we all know the neofeminists are no friends of whores. Yet all too many posts by sex worker activists go on and on about “Patriarchy” (the neofeminist version of “bourgeoisie”) and “capitalism” and blah blah blah blah until whatever they were trying to say is drowned out by nonsense.
Now, it is true that some people use the word “capitalism” to mean plutocracy or fascism (the marriage of government and big business). But that’s not the way those about whom I’m complaining use it; it’s clear from context they resent having to work for a living, and imagine some pie-in-the-sky Utopia in which people only work as much as they want to at whatever job they like, and yet somehow things still get made and the toilets still get cleaned. This is a fantasy for children, not a serious topic of discussion for sane adults; yet there they are bleating away with rubbish like “surviving under capitalism”, as though they imagine it was any easier under feudalism, barter systems, tribal communism or other economic systems. The very concept of a Utopia is impossible; it’s certainly not a topic on which an activist for the most pragmatic of trades should be wasting her time. And to do so with paradigms borrowed from people who would like nothing more than to see that trade abolished is as counterproductive as anything I can think of.
But the most appalling of these sins of content is one which seems to have become a new fad in the past few months; some sex worker activists now also declare themselves misandrists. To them I say, “please go home and find something else to do.” The campaign for sex worker rights must be grounded in the right of all people to be free to do as they like with their own bodies; it is incompatible with centrally-planned economies, incompatible with dogmatic systems of thought which demand orthodoxy, and certainly incompatible with the idea that it’s laudable to hate some people for an accident of biology. And how in Aphrodite’s name is someone supposed to provide a proper sexual service to a person she professes to hate? The very idea is asinine. I can understand burnout; I can accept that a hooker might so tire of sex with men, and with the offensive behavior of bad clients, that she decides to swear off of socializing with them after retirement. But that’s not the same thing as hating men, and the latter has no place in a movement which will absolutely never in a million years succeed without the cooperation of the men these ridiculous women profess to “hate”; that sort of attitude belongs in the prohibitionist movement, not ours. I’m not sure why the people I speak of can’t see the self-defeating nature of these negative beliefs and dogmas; those who embrace them are, figuratively or literally, sleeping with the enemy.
You were exposed to this via the “Twitterverse”?
I’ve never heard of this and it sounds just as retarded as hell. Do you have a link to an example?
“I’m a bouncer and I hate drunk people” … Yeah I try to put that on and it just doesn’t fit.
“I’m a doughnut baker and I hate cops” … WTF??!!
I don’t doubt you on this … we certainly are living in the “Age of Anti-Reason” where any cockamamie idea is considered “legitimate” no matter how illogical it is.
The State of California is “eat-up” with that kind of nonsense.
I suppose one way to garner the favoritism of neo-feminists who normally shun hookers is for a hooker to say …
“Hey, sistas … I’m only doing this because I hate men and want to cause harm to them! I’m in the one in the power seat and I take full advantage of their inability to think without getting the little head involved.”
So maybe that’s it? Women don’t like the scorn of other women so they try to turn that around?
It’s still stupid though.
Re: Chinese prostitution. The effect of that Mao policy still lingers and is tied to race consciousness. Friends of mine who worked in China would frequently be told that any whores they saw where obviously Mongolian because no Chinese girl would ever do sex work.
I think dreaming about Utopia is not bad, although any sane person knows it will not completely be reached. Everybody knows there will always be violence, and one can still strife for a society where violence doesn’t exist at all, although you know it will never be fully reached.
I think the same is true for gender equality, income equality, wealth equality, etc…
I think there always will be prostitutes around who hate their work and who hate men, but wouldn’t it be fantastic if only those prostitutes remained who truly liked their work or don’t suffer from it? The same for other work. Wouldn’t it be nice if only the toilet cleaners would be left who have no problem with their work?
I think a complete eradication of labour is laudable. In the future things could be done by robots, think about self-cleaning toilets.
There is a website which defends the idea of a world without labour. It is called whywork.org:
In principle we could live very simple, more in harmony with mother nature. We could minimize our consumption, and this way we can also minimize pollution and the hours people have to work.
We cannot eradicate injustice and harm, but at least we could minimize it.
Maggie, I want to know your opinion about bareback-brothels in Germany.
I think bareback brothels are something which could only safely exist in a disease-free Utopia.
It’s an impossibly unreasonable goal – and it’s dangerous even to attempt. It ignores the fact that, although technology advances – people don’t change.
It also ignores the fact that violence is not a “consensus” activity. I can be the most non-violent person in the world and someone else can come along and force me – either into defending myself … or taking an ass whipping at his hands.
The responsible thing to do is to recognize this fact and be prepared to defend yourself. As someone who’s been in a scuffle or two – let me tell you that it’s much easier to defend yourself when you can summon some of the “darker” side of humanity within you. You won’t have that place within you if you were raised on “Captain Planet” and “Captain Kangaroo” and “Mr. Rogers” alone. Control of the violent side – that should be the goal – not the elimination of the violent side – you, or someone protecting you – will NEED that violent side.
Which brings me to the most god damned hypocritical thing about Western “peace” movements and the “non-violent” people who espouse them …
They are able ONLY to spew their illogical and dangerous nonsense by hiding behind a cadre of “protectors” who defend their right to free speech and lunacy. As feminized as we have become in this society, we still manage to crank out a bare minimum of “defenders” – people who know how to fight, people who aren’t afraid of the activity and recognize that it is important. They are people who have that “dark side” within them, but know when to control it and when to release it with all of hell’s fury.
Yet it’s the peaceniks that consistently deride the very people they depend on for their freedom and safety. Liberal arts whimps with degrees in gender studies consider themselves to be the intellectual and morally “superior” ones … while degrading those that defend them as having to do it because they lack intelligence – or education. These defenders are derided as “robots” … brainwashed in boot camp by an evil government to kill indiscriminately. You want to talk about removing “agency” from sex workers? This is how it’s removed from the defenders.
What a JOKE.
There is a dark side to men and it was put in us through evolution – it will not be erased – you don’t want it erased. The peaceniks are the stupid ones because they don’t comprehend the fact that they’ve OUTSOURCED their defense to the animals they constantly bitch about.
The peaceniks typically object to their nation’s fighting men being sent all around the world to bring war to others. If we would stay home and be prepared to defend THAT, not go out and conquer the world, you wouldn’t have a lot of peaceniks because there would be no need for them.
Great piece, Maggie!
If only from a pragmatic public relations standpoint, self-identifying as hating 50% of the people you need to support the government respecting your rights is massively self defeating. Further, there’s usually a 20% spread between men and women in their support for decriminalization; misandry isn’t simply indiscriminately dumb, it’s actively hostile towards one’s largest supporting demographic.
Following in the footsteps of the great Valerie Solanas. Feminism is a losers’ philosophy, and it’s not surprising to find losers in an underground business.
Marxism is a widespread fantasy because it promises Mastery to petty little intellectuals who lack any obvious merit that might cause them to rise in the world. This is for approximately the same reasons that Theocracy is favored by petty Priests of no particular merit, and the Divine Right of Kings was clung to by Aristocrats with no actual talent for rule.
In “A Time to Betray”, Reza Kahlili describes how, when he was a kid, a muslim cleric rode a donkey up to his family’s house for an Islamic gathering that needed to be “blessed”. He describes how his grandfather looked at the cleric and commented … “Allah help us if those men ever get control of this country.”
Decades later, when Kahlili is a grown man and a member of the Iranian Republican Guards … another Islamic ceremony must be “blessed” and … the same old cleric rides up to his house …
In a Mercedes.
The Marxist Intellectual and the Peasant:
MI: Comrade, I will explain our system to redistribute wealth in terms so simple you can not fail to support it.
P: Thank you, sir. Please explain.
MI: If someone has two farms, we will take one and give it to another who needs a farm. Can you support that?
P: Why, yes, I can.
MI: If someone has two houses, we will take one and give it to another who needs a house. Can you support that?
P: Why, yes, I can.
MI: If someone has two cows, we will take one and give it to another who needs a cow. Can you support that?
P: Why, yes, I can.
MI: If someone has two chickens, we will take one and …
P: No!
MI: But, Comrade, why do you not support our system to make everyone equally wealthy?
P: I have two chickens!
This article is dense with material, and there’s a lot to unpack in order to talk about it. I think we can seperate out two groups here. Group One would be people who use academic feminist buzzwords in order to sound intelligent, because they misunderstand them, or because the simply can’t think of an alternative term. For example, in twitter discussions I end up using the “politically correct” term sex worker. Why? Because everything else seems to either be a pejorative or a euphemism. So, in order to have linguistic precision, I don’t want people to think I’m insulting them (“whore”) or misunderstanding what they actually do (“escort”). Patriachy or rape culture are both obnoxiously neofeminist, but I could see people who are not neofeminist using them. (Simply by groping around for alternatives and doing the lazy thing by using the available terms.)
Group Two would be sex workers (see?) who hate men. Now, misandry is an epidemic, our culture is sick with it. Male lust, the “male gaze,” male hobbies, the concept of maleness itself are all under attack. We can’t simply say it’s a few ivory tower academics either. I see plenty of stuff sponsored by gigantic, capitalist corporations that are deliberately designed to attack and degrade men for being men.
Of course, misandry comes at various levels from “stop mansplaining and let the women talk for a change, pervert!” to “we need to perfect non-sexual reproduction so the males can be ground into Soylent Green once and for all and feed the feminist utopia.” It is weird to see it coming from sex workers, since it seems like it would be harmful to their work if they genuinely hated men. However, they aren’t really exceptions, in this they fit into the current cultural and corporate zeitgeist.
I’ve noted that sex work is a good middle class living in an economy that certainly doesn’t offer an abundance of such opportunities. Normally, if someone gets offered a good job and turns it down for something that doesn’t pay, we don’t have much sympathy for the person. However, with sex work (prostitution, whoring) society takes the opposite approach, better to take starvation wages at a grueling, miserable job than earn a real living at this kind of work.
However, the money making potential of this kind of work means is that you’ll get all kinds of people doing sex work, and some will truly hate it and resent their clients. Presumably they wish the clients would just mail them the money and never see or talk to them. I think these are a small minority, but they might be very vocal.
I’ve know a few sex workers in my day, most of them treated any political involvement with sex work issues with the same terror one might feels at discovering a scabby rat in your bedroom. They didn’t want to be involved with politics, terrified it might give the police a motivation to be extra-attentive to them. (In my opinion, all sex workers are political simply because they are doing the forbidden work.)
Marx condemned sex workers while praising “real women”. He also used the word “prostitute” as a casual insult.
Fortunately not all leftist factions are hostile to sex workers’ rights.
A lot of people who are hostile to capitalism are hostile to plutocracy and don’t know the right word.
And a lot of people who are hostile to capitalism are pillocks who want to tell other people what to do and think, and resent the power that a free market gives little people to tell their ‘betters’ to go climb a tree.
I can’t say I am surprised by the misandrism. It just shows that these people have zero interest in gender equality. The only thing they are pissed about with (perceived or real) female social inferiority is that it is not the other way round and where they are the ones doing the oppression.
From my observations, there are no fundamental differences between men and women besides biology (which admittedly can make a significant difference in how the individual interfaces the world and the other way round). This also means that about half of all idiots and assholes are female. These misandrists just are some of them and they are part of the overall problem.
As to the amount of work needed to keep society going, it is theoretically a massive amount less than the time we spend working today. Most of the time we spend working is wasted. However, there is no known solutions to reduce this waste significantly. Capitalism is pretty bad, but Marxism is far worse. The only setting where a limited solution to the problem seems possible is small communities where everybody knows everybody and greed is not tolerated. But that does not scale at all.
I would verify Maggie’s assertion that the ranks of the prohibitionist movement are occupied with misandrists. When I was a researcher for Demand Abolition I brought up the data from a DOJ study on juvenile commercial sex that was conducted by John Jay which showed that about half of the juvenile sex workers were males and their business was male on male. I asked – What was to be done with Farley’s claim that “prostitution is violence against women” if no women were involved in half the transactions? The refusal to consider evidence that challenged a premise of their ideology revealed, to me, a deliberate agenda against liberties of consenting men and whores. To what end? It is anti-male first and essentialist feminism second. It is more against the men (demand).
And as far as some sex workers being misandrists – I knew one man who acted out his rage against his mother on hookers – what is to keep a transference of anger at Dad from being played out by a woman against her male client? I am wondering if these women were ever really whores but were instead trying to settle their past trauma business by flipping a sexual power paradigm they felt trapped by. (this example is not representative of all sex workers)
Once when I heard there was a reverse sting going down I expressed sympathy for the men that would be caught and my sentiment shocked staff. They had nothing but disdain for the men. So I pushed back – “These stings trap the ‘lower level buyers’ who take the brunt of the anti-demand initiatives – once again the high level that pads out most of the business is untouched just like Wall Street got off with a hand slap. This is patently a classist movement – if you say it is not then why are the upper class and power brokers conspicuously absent from the arrest blotter?”
I could go on and on….Peace and GREAT article!
“This is patently a classist movement – if you say it is not then why are the upper class and power brokers conspicuously absent from the arrest blotter?”
I like this, I always assume those guys are let out the back door by the cops with a “begging your pardon, sir.”
On the other hand, there are the occasional important people who get caught (Elliot Spitzer, that one was poetic justice, since he was a great persecutor of whores in his day, while hypocritically hiring them when it suited his desires.).
If you are a man, the main people who will give you sympathy in these kinds of scenarios are sex workers. It does produce a certain amount of solidarity between call girls and their clients when both can possibly be arrested, and I believe the majority of escorts would support their clients even if only clients faced the possibility of arrest (at least the ones they liked).
Maggie, is absolutely right, there is a strong connection between neofeminists and Marxists. In fact, radical feminism is spawned from Marxist feminism. Their opinions on the cause of prostitution, however, somewhat differ. Marxist feminists believed that gender oppression was a function of class oppression, because it kept men and women divided, like how they saw racism as keeping “race” groups divided. Prostitution was simply an extension of this system, a corruption of wage labor.
Radical feminists rejected Marxist feminism because they believed it offered an incomplete picture. They continued to use Marxist theory, but went further by placing men and women in to separate classes under a system they called “patriarchy,” which primarily enslaved women to men as sexual commodities and homemakers through marriage. Under this view, modern day prostitution is a symptom of both capitalism and patriarchy. They also do not see prostitution as labor, but as an expression of men’s “sex right” to use women’s bodies. Thus, the basic reason why they believe prostitution is wrong is because it’s the extreme expression of women as sexual commodities on the capitalist marketplace for the satisfaction of men’s “sex right.” And also, they fanatically believe that women never choose to be sex workers, either because they are enslaved by a pimp or the patriarchy excluded them from a job with a living wage.
Well, that’s how I understand their nonsense anyway. A little critical thinking should reveal that radical feminists are wrong because prostitution has been observed in other species, and only humans are known to have a social organization based on class. But a more important question should be, why is our government essentially taking a bunch of Marxists seriously?
One more thing… hunter gatherers! I’m less sure about this one, but I recall that there is evidence that the men in some hunter gatherer societies hunt/hunted large game in order to show off to the ladies, and the best hunters would offer the ladies abundant feasts in exchange for some sexy fun… even though most of the meat would end up getting spoiled.
It’s interesting what happens north of the border:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/commentary/faith-groups-oppose-legal-prostitution-because-they-care-about-womens-lives/article12605618/comments/
The commenters skillet the religious zealot author like a fish.
Freaking awesome! 🙂
That made my day!
But Maggie, there ARE people who only work as much as they want to at whatever job they like, and yet somehow things still get made and the toilets still get cleaned. We call these people “wealthy.” They can hire somebody to do any job they don’t want to do. And, it’s the group most of us fantasize about joining.
More and more, fewer and fewer of us are having to do the jobs we don’t like to do. Sometimes this is because (ans mentioned by Kris2) we get machines to do it. Sometimes it’s because we find a group we can pay to do it for us, and not pay them very much (illegal immigrants, outsource to China, etc.).
Capitalism doesn’t really work without a class system to exploit. Communists tried to deal with this by eliminating class, but guess what? Communism doesn’t work without a class system to exploit either. So either they developed a class system (and thus were Marxists in name only), or they failed. Sometimes a bit of both happened.
Gradually, we are passing that “work fit only for THEM” stuff to machinery. It doesn’t mind. It doesn’t care that it isn’t paid as much as the guy in the head office, or that it isn’t paid at all. It doesn’t want a vacation.
The problem, of course, is that the underclass still needs to eat, whether or not a machine can do it better and cheaper. Solve that, and we can have the best of capitalism AND socialism. Right now, we’re starting to slip into the worst of both, and nobody seems happy with that. Well, except the ruling class of course.
I’m strongly inclined to a universal basic income (funded from a progressive income tax). It would mean that, to get a job done that no-one really wants to do, you have to pay a lot of money. Supply and demand – the supply of unskilled work [fn1] is huge as long as those people are pushed into working. Take that away, and you have to get the price high enough that doing those horrid jobs would be better than living on the UBI, which would make them fairly well paid, giving a bigger incentive to automation.
The question is whether there is enough automation yet that people doing jobs either because they like them, or because they’re being paid very well (or a bit of both, which is probably most people) will do enough work to keep the economy going.
If there is, then that can take off – automation is highly incentivised, so more innovation is driven to automating away work, resulting in increasing labour productivity and more growth. If there isn’t, though, then the whole system collapses in a heap, so it’s a big risk to take.
It squares a whole bunch of those circles, because it doesn’t take away incentives to excel, but it prevents the underclass from revolting.
[fn1] “Unskilled work” is work that most anyone can do without a year of training or education and where the differences between the competent and the brilliant are modest. That doesn’t mean there isn’t some real skill in it, but the best toilet cleaner isn’t that much better than the average toilet cleaner, and you pretty much anyone can clean toilets adequately. Whoring (or sports if you want an example to use on another website) isn’t unskilled because of the huge differences between the brilliant and the average; Family doctoring doesn’t have the same quality differential, but does have a high baseline in terms of the education requirement. Those are the main restrictions on labour supply in the current market; “don’t want to” doesn’t work as a restriction on supply when you have to do something – there being plenty of people who can only do what they’re given.
Universal basic income is one of those ideas that, when you first see it, seems crazy. Just GIVE away money, to EVERYBODY!? Whether they’re poor or not? Everybody!?
But the more I read, the less crazy it sounds, and so now, yeah, I’m for it. Not that it has a chance in hell right now, of course. The “disincentive to work” mantra would kill it. But maybe someday we’ll be ready for it. And if the automation isn’t high enough now, it will be by then.
Maybe they are feminists in disguise. Wolf in sheep’s clothing much?
Sorry; NEO-feminists. Important to distinguish between the two, eh?