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Archive for the ‘Philosophy’ Category

Diary #663

Despite my age and its attendant painful levels of maturity, I always look forward to this as the time of year when I get to have a box of tiny dinosaur clowns in my bathroom for three weeks.  Regular readers will remember that the bathroom is the best place to raise them; it’s warm, safe from cats, and in a location where everyone in the household can set eyes on them several times per day.  When I go in to wash my face first thing in the morning, I can change their water and top off their food (if necessary), and I always like to spend a few minutes watching their silly antics (running around banging into each other, standing in the corner peeping as if unable to turn around, etc).  In just a few weeks they’ll be gawky pullets, well on their way to chickenhood, but in the meantime they’re terribly cute for a painfully-short time.  And that’s OK, because let’s be honest: if they stayed baby chicks for long, pretty soon their constant peep-peep-peeping would be just another background noise like dogs barking or floorboards creaking.  Some of life’s greatest pleasures are pleasant precisely because they’re so ephemeral; if rainbows were always a feature of the sky, few would ever bother to look up at them in wonderment and appreciation.

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Rikki de la Vega is a writer and activist in Boston. She has written 17 books of erotica and erotic science fiction through Sizzler Editions. Her nonfiction book Prudery and the War on Sex (from which this is excerpted) is due for publication by Digital Parchment Services sometime in April 2023.

Among the indictments included in the Declaration of Sentiments, issued in 1848 from the Seneca Falls Convention on women’s rights, was this condemnation of male privilege:  “He has created a false public sentiment by giving to the world a different code of morals for men and women, by which moral delinquencies which exclude women from society, are not only tolerated but deemed of little account in man.”  We still face this gendered double standard today, where men suffer far fewer consequences for sexual license, and women much more.  Many first-wave feminists, as they were strongly influenced by the religious attitudes of the time, believed that the answer was to insist on male chastity.  But another branch of the movement was convinced that a radically different approach was needed, that of empowering women to insist on equal partnerships based on mutual choice, affection and pleasure.  This was the Free Love movement.

Most people these days associate the phrase “free love” with the hippies of the 1960s and their unbridled approach to sexuality.  The original movement, however, was focused more on the legal, religious and social strictures that went hand in hand with marriage at the time.  Marriage in the nineteenth century meant women were subsumed under their husbands, with no legal identity or rights; divorce was also difficult to obtain, and virtually impossible for women even in cases of abuse by the husband.  Free Love advocates proposed the alternative of “free unions” of consenting partners, without the need for any legal or religious sanction, and likewise dissolved by mutual agreement.  The freedom they were calling for was freedom from archaic and oppressive laws and attitudes which kept women in bondage, as well as perpetuating the link between marriage and social or financial status.  Free Love advocates also affirmed women’s right to sexual pleasure, and of decoupling sex from reproduction by promoting the use and availability of contraception.  This was controversial primarily because it went against the Cult of True Womanhood’s view that women were (or ought to be) only interested in sex as a means of fulfilling the goal of becoming mothers, but also because birth control was seen as obstructing God’s design.  While the movement to promote birth control availability was separate from the Free Love movement, there was considerable overlap between the two, due to their commonly shared belief that women should have more choice and independence around sex and procreation.

Two other movements that intersected with Free Love, and one another, were the political Left and the freethinkers.  Utopian socialists such as the followers of Robert Owen, as well as various stripes of anarchists, often saw the oppressive marriage and divorce laws of their day as part of capitalist and state oppression, and many Free Love advocates embraced radical political views.  The freethought movement’s rejection and critique of religious beliefs and institutions, and their devotion to free and rational inquiry, led to at least an open discussion of Free Love ideals, and acceptance of them in practice as well as theory by many of their leaders.  One of the earliest and most vocal advocate for all three of these was Frances “Fanny” Wright, a Scottish-born intellectual, writer and activist who had established one of the first utopian socialist communities in Nashoba, Tennessee, and gave public lectures on labor rights, freethought, Free Love and women’s equality at a time when it was considered taboo for women to speak in public at all.  The Free Love movement’s overlap with both anticlerical freethought and political radicalism was one reason why so many feminist leaders regarded them as something of a liability.  But more pronounced was the entrenchment of Social Purity advocates within the drive for women’s suffrage and their mischaracterization of the Free Love agenda.  British feminist Elizabeth Wolstenholme had scandalized more conservative women’s rights activists with her free union with Benjamin Elmy, a freethinker and feminist like herself.  While she was initially recognized for her tireless efforts, British historian Laura Schwartz of the University of Warwick notes: “Wolstenholme became the subject of an orchestrated campaign against her continuing public association with feminist organisations.”  In the United States, mainstream feminist leaders turned against Victoria Woodhull for openly stating in a public address in 1871:  “Yes, I am a Free Lover. I have an inalienable, constitutional and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or as short a period as I can; to change that love every day if I please, and with that right neither you nor any law you can frame have any right to interfere.”

While it may be argued that the Free Love movement did influence other feminists of their time to demand substantive reforms in marriage and divorce laws, the influence of the Social Purity wing still predominated well into the twentieth century.  This is exemplified by British suffragist Christabel Pankhurst’s 1913 book on sexually transmitted disease, The Great Scourge and How to End It, which insisted that votes for women be linked to the imposition of “chastity” for men and the ending of prostitution, dismissing questions about the role of poverty in pushing women into commercial sex, and not once mentioning the use of condoms (which were not only available at the time but often distributed by various armies to their soldiers).  To her, the spread of syphilis and gonorrhea was the result of a male conspiracy, and women needed political power to rein in men’s sexual appetites.

This division within first-wave feminism over responding to the sexual double standard runs along a continuum between two poles which I’ll call restrictive (as in restricting options for sexual expression, especially for men) and expansive (as in favoring an expansion of such options, especially for women).  It goes on into the second wave and beyond, fueling conflicts over how feminists respond to sexual imagery and literature, sex work, transgender issues, and the inclusion of men in the movement.  This is not to say that every feminist neatly fits on one pole or another, but their place on a spectrum depends upon a number of attitudes and approaches.  The first is the attitude towards gender, and especially men.  There is a tendency for those leaning towards the restrictive pole to uphold the gender binary, to describe gender in collective or even essentialist terms, and especially to view men with skepticism at best and outright hostility at worst (sometimes even ignoring the contributions of men to early feminism, such as John Neal, Marquis de Condorcet, Frederick Douglass, and John Stuart Mill).  When you consider the focus on sexuality issues, it would seem that the restrictive tendency has embraced the old-fashioned stereotype that: “Men only want one thing from women, so watch out!”  But it is more specific than that; the restrictive attitude is that men are likely to link sexuality with dominance, aggression and even violence.  Hence Robin Morgan’s maxim: “Pornography is the theory, and rape is the practice” – even when careful studies show no link between viewing porn and acceptance of sexual violence.  In contrast, the expansive view embraces a more fluid, nuanced and individualistic view of gender, affirming transgender and nonbinary people, as well as seeing that men’s attitudes and behaviors fall on a continuum and can change with education.

The second pair of tendencies is based on how each group tries to achieve their goals.  The restrictive side tends to seek to protect women from real or perceived harms, often through laws that prohibit or punish; the expansive side tends to favor efforts that empower women to find the solutions that would work best for their individual situations.  This difference also shows how the two sides tend to analyze and understand a problem.  The restrictive side takes a more simplistic approach; they see something as bad, they want to do away with it, so they embrace a single approach (such as the Dworkin-MacKinnon model ordinance on pornography, or the Swedish model for dealing with prostitution) and hang onto it for dear life.  By contrast, the expansive side tends to take a more nuanced and pluralistic approach; they will look at the issue, the factors behind it, and the consequences of various approaches, sometimes advocating a more multifaceted strategy that addresses the matter more holistically, such as providing nonjudgmental harm reduction for street-based sex workers, including changing the law towards decriminalization so that sex workers have better tools to deal with the issues in their lives.

The irony that seems lost on members of the restrictive group is how easily political and religious conservatives appropriate their tactics and language.  It should come as no surprise, considering the conservative tendency to adapt in order to gain and maintain their hold on politics, not to mention the tendency of both conservatives and restrictive feminists to see women in almost infantilized terms.  By contrast, the expansive feminist group’s dedication to individual autonomy puts them more in the position of critics to any political administration regardless of ideological label.  Indeed, it would seem that the expansive group is the one which is ultimately more skeptical of government, and thus less likely to be co-opted as their restrictive counterparts appear to have been.

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As a kid who was so far ahead of “regular” classes she regularly fell asleep, got punished, or was sent to the principal due to the stunning boredom, the kind of smug, self-important attitude displayed by the woman in this recent Slate feature (and to a slight extent, by the columnist as well) makes me want to vomit.  Your kids do not belong to you; they are not little puppets for you to virtue-signal with so your friends can see how much you support the vile but popular doctrine, equality of outcomes.  They are individuals whose whole lives will be shaped by your refusal to give them an education that will challenge them, teach them to use their abilities, and prepare them to make a life for themselves outside of your moralistic shadow.  Denying bright kids honors or AP classes doesn’t make you a champion of the proletariat; it makes you an abuser.

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Reporters: could y’all please stop making claims about what politicians and bureaucrats “intended” some awful civil liberties violation to do?  One:  You are not fucking psychic and do not actually know what they intended; you just know what they claim, which for politicians means less than nothing.  Two: Nobody outside of a philosophy class should give a damn what was “intended”; if people’s lives are being ruined by extensive criminal records, sometimes before fucking puberty, the “intent” of those who inflict the police violence is of absolutely no consequence.  This “good intentions” shit is nothing but an excuse for evil, and anyone with the even the most basic education should be able to grasp this.  It’s not like we don’t all know the saying about the Road to Hell.

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You can’t always get what you want.  –  Mick Jagger

People would be a lot happier if they could truly learn the difference between “I want” and “I reasonably expect to get in the actual world that exists”.  Corollary: “Follow your dreams” is text for a Hallmark card or a poster on a ’70s teenager’s wall, not serious life advice for adults with a realistic view of the world.  Like most people, I started out as more emotional than rational; unlike most, I learned to actually become rational rather than merely convincing myself that my irrational wants, desires, “dreams”, etc were not only actually rational, but that I “deserved” to get what I wanted and had the “right” to use violence, either directly or by the State acting on my behalf.  I wasn’t able to accomplish this due to some superhuman cognitive capacity or divinely-granted moral superiority, but rather because childishness ideas about “fairness” were ground out of me by the world at a fairly early age, and when I was 13 I realized that I had to adapt or die.  If anything, my pragmatism was the result of a disability rather than a superior ability:  I was absolutely unable to deceive myself in order to conform to either square society or “normal” nerd society, so I had to find the only strategy that ever could’ve worked for a brain like mine.

January second has always been an important day in my life; over the years, a number of life-changing events have happened on the date or very soon thereafter.  So over the last decade, it has gradually developed into a day when I think about the Big Picture.  Coincidentally, this song was only about a decade old when I recognized the wisdom in it; if you don’t really dig what I’m trying to tell you, perhaps Mick can make it a bit more clear.

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Is anybody out there?  –  “Metaverse gala” attendee

Not an especially seasonal selection, but it seemed the appropriate one for the death of its composer.  The links above the video were provided by Ed Krayewski; Amy Alkon; Radley Balko; Cop Crisis (x2); Jesse Walker, Mike Siegel, and Ally Fogg; and Clarissa, in that order.

From the Archives

I find paywalls distasteful, and so many people find this blog valuable as a resource I just can’t bring myself to install one.  Furthermore, I find ad delivery services (whose content I have no say over) even more distasteful.  But as I’m now semi-retired from sex work, I can’t self-sponsor this blog by myself any longer.  So if you value my writing enough that you would pay to see it if it were paywalled, please consider subscribing; there are four different levels to fit all budgets.  Or if that doesn’t work for you, please consider showing your generosity with a one-time donation; you can Paypal to maggiemcneill@earthlink.net or else email me at the same address to make other arrangements.  Thanks so much!

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I don’t think it’s controversial (it certainly shouldn’t be) to say that street workers suffer far more violence than sex workers with higher screening barriers.  It’s not like every damned study ever done on the subject hasn’t said the same thing.  If this is in any way controversial to some people, I’d say it derives from the modern infatuation with Manicheanism.  Far too many moderns want to believe that all of society can be neatly divided into sheep and goats, “workers” and “capitalists”, renters and landlords, oppressors and oppressed, white and POC, old and young, straight and queer, etc, etc, ad nauseam.  So when people laboring under that grievous cognitive error see a statement like “x is safer than y”, they read it as “X is completely safe and Y unrelentingly dangerous”.  But of course, that’s no more true than any of the others; we don’t live in a Hollywood black hat/white hat world.  The first time I was ever raped on the job, it was by a businessman in a 5-star hotel, but that doesn’t change the fact that on average, I was safer from violence by clients, cops, and criminals than my sisters on the streets.  The chance of a suburban kid being killed by cops firing wildly into her parents’ house is dramatically less than that of an inner-city kid suffering that fate, but it still isn’t zero.  And of course the same can be said for all those other imaginary dualities.  Sex workers who should certainly understand the wrongness of Madonna vs whore will nonetheless subscribe to the equally absurd renters vs landlords or labor vs management dichotomies if they find it politically convenient to do so, even while simultaneously condemning the state’s pretense that sex workers can be cleanly divided by a bright, clear line from “pimps” (despite the fact that this notion is a littermate of the Marxist labor vs management divide).

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