Category: The Logical Feminist

What Fresh Hell is This? Same Old Same Old.

What Fresh Hell is This? Same Old Same Old.

Posted on by Karen Moe

What fresh hell is this?

Or, you’ve got to be kidding. But this fresh hell is far from it as in something shiny and new, not to mention ground-breaking as it is represented as being. And, always unfortunately when maintaining a culture of exploitation, there’s no you’ve got to be kidding me. There it was. On the shelf in the Memoir and Culture section in the privileged book-store position of cover-facing-forward, a glossy hard cover printed in a custom (read expensive) format: Modern Whore. The thing is: there’s nothing ‘modern’ about it. Disguised in the latest lingerie, this horrifying reality is another case of same-old-same-old.

Again, unfortunately, it’s impossible to miss the come-hither cover. Innocent barrettes that decorate a demure side-part hearkening back to the innocence of 1950s bobby-socks are meticulously combined with huge hoop earrings that have been worn by African American and LatinX women as symbols of strength and resistance for decades. However, in a white-supremacist patriarchy where women and girls of colour are oppressed by the stereotype of hyper-sexualization and the reality of their over-representation in prostitution,[1] this combination of the submissive goody-two-shoes (read: white) and appropriation of women of colour don’t-mess-with-me resistance fulfills the patriarchal ridiculousness of the virgin/whore dichotomy and, to male fantasy and delight, in one female body. Internalized sexism is also present as contemporary young womanhood aspires towards female empowerment through only their sexuality; there is no revolution here as said liberation is motivated by the continued prioritization of the male gaze and maintaining his dominance in the capitalist free (for them) market of men buying women’s bodies.

In her opening sentence, the Modern Whore announces triumphantly that she worked as a sex worker for five years. And, yes, naturally, as a representative of this new generation of ‘happy hooker,’ she worked as an agency escort. What does that mean exactly? It means that she never has been on the street barely surviving—or leaves out this part for the sake of marketing the delusional, albeit profitable, glamor of selling one’s body (predominantly women and girls) to be used by another (the extreme majority men).[2]

She leaves out or is blissfully unaware

of the coerced ‘choice’ of being a prostituted person because of economic, race, gender, mental illness, and drug addiction. All of these factors connect to poverty and, as is logically reported in Last Girl First, “[s]ex buyers would not have access to women’s bodies in the first place if the women were not in situations of immense financial insecurity and fighting for survival.”[3] As one of many irrefutable statistics in CAP International’s 2022 publication Last Girl First!: Prostitution at the intersection of sex, race, & class-based oppression, when interviewing two hundred prostituted people on the streets in San Francisco, 88% of respondents and 92% of the minors considered themselves ‘very poor’ or ‘barely surviving [and] when asked why they ‘entered’ prostitution, 89% said ‘needed money’ and ‘hungry.’”[4] Prostitution survivor Rachel Moran sums it up: “The only thing that prostitution ever liberated me from was homelessness.”[5]

These books tell the truth.

However, as Moran testifies in her memoir Paid For: My Journey Through Prostitution when she was prostituted both on the street and as an escort “no area has a monopoly on degradation … [and] it is just as customary to be humiliated in a five-star hotel.”[6] Last Girl First reports: “incorporating the classification of ‘high-end’ and ‘low-end’ prostitution poses a real societal danger. The myth of glamourous prostitution makes the reality of prostitution invisible whether it is on the street or indoor, it is based on commodification, objectification of women, exploitation of vulnerabilities and male violence.”[7]

Not only has it been framed that this self-proclaimed Modern Whore seems to have missed all of this reality and, like her foremother happy hookers like Annie Sprinkle and Scarlot the Harlot who entered prostitution out of curiosity, intrigue and fascination,[8] the Modern Whore simply retired from escorting. No struggle. No stress. As Annie Sprinkle says while candy-coating the exploitation of the majority of prostituted women and children in her bizarre “13 Tips to Cure Sex Worker’s Burn Out Syndrome”: if you are working as a so-called sex worker and start to feel ‘burned out’ (read: in prostitution survivor and activist Brenda Myers-Powell’s words, after “having your body used like a toilet by at least five men a day”)[9] “[s]pend time alone, get in touch with your feelings, be aware of what colours you wear and, if the Sex Worker’s Burn Out Syndrome is chronic, get the hell out of the business.”[10] The Modern Whore doesn’t say why she ‘retired.’ Apparently, she just up and left with no pimps or sex traffickers after her as is so common that there are thousands of safe houses for women in North America not only providing shelter for battered women, but also for prostituted women trying to escape violent pimps.[11]

To make things even more wholesome

for the chipper Modern Whore, when she retired, she went to work on an organic farm. Okay, I’m sorry, this is too perfect! Such a politically correct choice of a retirement occupation definitely adds to the marketability of the book and the sanitisation of the sex trade! I’m not denying that any of this isn’t true. I have no idea. And it doesn’t matter if it’s true or not as books have the power to contribute to what we think and the subsequent creation of reality. As Donna J. Haraway enlightens: “[i]t matters what thoughts think thoughts.”[12] In capitalist consumer culture, popular culture is the source of what can be referred to as the ‘master’ thoughts that generate, yes sorry free-will folk, what we think. And sells out books.

Regardless, lucky her. But how does this invisibilization of power abuse that drives the sex industry affect not only all women (prostituted or not),[13] but the world as a whole in terms of maintaining a system of exploitation? But here she is, celebrating that which devastates and destroys, effortlessly exiting prostitution with the privilege of joining a golf club upon retirement; off she goes to work on an organic farm where she can take off her appropriated hoop earrings and embrace the purity of her barrettes.

But wait:

I thought that the dominating doctrine of political correctness threatens to cancel us if we don’t only use the term ‘sex worker’ to refer to the majority of people who have been coerced in a variety of ways to have their bodies sold for sex or risk being SWERFED[14]. The Modern Whore and her sensationalization of the term in her title and Sprinkle with her extensive list “Why Whores are my Heroes” celebrate the signifier ‘whore,’ a term that hearkens back to the male sex buyer stereo type “The good whore with the golden heart.”[15] Cosi Fabian, another 90s pro-sex work trail blazer with her mantra of The Holy Whore: A Woman’s Gateway to Power, describes prostitution as the ultimate form of female empowerment. Unbelievably, Sprinkle actually goes so far as to proclaim prostitution a ‘public service.’ Thankfully, Moran brings us back to the reality of the sex trade for the majority: “[w]omen who contend they enjoyed prostitution simultaneously do not present the experience as it is really lived. It is therefore not prostitution they are defending; it is an incomplete version of it.”[16]

 

In the beginning of the book, the Modern Whore relates how she met her photographer: “I regaled her with stories from my escorting years and posed for pictures in tractors and hay bales. We knew we had to make art together.” Okay, art, that has the right to call itself so, has nothing to do with repetition. Art is about innovation. Art is about offering spaces—be they through poetry, literature, visual art, performance, music—where we can immerse ourselves in something new, a reality that has been here all along and requires the artist to show it to us. Art is about transformation. Art is about creating alternative thoughts to think with. Again, as another layer of clichéd sexism that the Modern Whore presents as something she has thought up herself, if one Googles “sexy woman hay photos,” like the centuries of female oppression in patriarchy, the instances are endless. The only thing different (sort of as it’s been going on since the turn of the twenty-first century) is that the young woman is objectifying herself.

Okay, seeing as art has come up, let’s analyse the photographs as if they actually are.

There she is: eyes downcast with that titillating blend of innocence and naughtiness, brow slightly furrowed in a state of faux worrying or a girly-girl pout that narrates the age-old male fantasy of victimization and the oh-so-violatable female vulnerability. There she is: demurely licking a  lollipop, 3 mouth soft and ready to replace the lollipop with a cock. Who comes immediately to mind? Nabokov’s Lolita, of course. And, in terms of non-art as repetition, surprise: minus Lolita’s sunglasses, the modern whore’s cover is an absolute copy-cat for one of the promotional photos for Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 film of Vladimir Nabokov’s controversial and ground-breaking work of literature. However, unlike Nabokov who problematizes the psychology and pathology of a pedophile, this modern-little-girl-whore-come-and-shove-your-cock-in-my-mouth-daddy photo is but a repetition of what men who abuse power want to remain. The Modern Whore is an irresponsible hyperbole and a reductionist Lolita, a character who is meant to complexify pedophilia, not sensationalize it.  

During her international investigation of the sex trade, journalist Lydia Cacho reports how sex tourists in Cambodia will pay $300 US to rape a child/virgin.[17] Because there is so much more money to be made exploiting children is why traffickers look for younger and younger girls. Last Girl First explains: “The demand of sex buyers for ‘virgin’ girls illustrates the relationships of control and domination at work in the prostitution system. The criterion of virginity is a real ‘selling point,’ with sex buyers seeking ‘purity,’ submission and docility. In Mexico, for example, so-called ‘virgin’ girls are specifically trafficked to gangs and armed groups who seek to ‘offer’ them to buyers willing to pay a high price.”[18] This is an ideology of misogyny and power abuse and anything, even a shiny coffee table book that proclaims sex-work can provide easy money, freedom, joy and a lot of [sex-positive feminist] d—k, serves the impunity of male violence.

But what’s the harm in a little fun?

Oh, Logical Feminist, you take everything too seriously. You’re such a downer! Look: she’s just playing with bananas. And guess who also eats a lot of bananas! Surprise! Lolita! However, where there is pathos to Lolita’s banana eating, the Modern Whore’s fetishization of banana/cocks is a superficial rendering of a work of art that opens us to sensations and questions previously unthought.

And, yes, sigh, yawn, there she is, shot from above as the photographic angle of domination, surrounded by a circle of jerks (don’t excuse the pun). Once again, with brow furrowed as a little girl not-quite-sure-what’s-going-on-but-doing-it-anyway expression,[19] kneels the modern whore. The lollipop hasn’t been replaced by a literal cock quite yet; however, the four circle jerks are holding their personal banana/cocks as some sort of benevolent offering—three of them with hairy distended bellies who would never be able to have sex with a beautiful young woman unless they paid her (which is of course what is being represented). As in all pornography that features an exploited woman, the abusers are not fully in the shot as their impunity is literally a part of the composition. However, they are all holding their bananas at crotch cock hard-on level as the Modern Whore takes turns getting off the all-in-good-fun pieces of fruit.

The punctum of the shot, though, the key to the reality of the photograph, the detail that could easily go unnoticed if one is flipping through the book either aspiring to be like her or straight up jerking off to her is the male hand on her head, poised to push her face cock-ward. This is the truth of the image: the fact that, even though she acts as though she’s into it, structurally speaking, this circle jerk play pen represents force, be it ideological or literal or both—and women having their heads shoved down against their will to suck off a man is the opposite of novel.

Here is what the Modern Whore’s banana photograph really means. Researched by Robert Jensen for his article “Blow Bangs and Cluster Bombs: The Cruelty of Men and Americans”: “ Blow Bang #4 is a video tape made and sold in America. It is a videotape that American men watch and masturbate to. It consists of eight different scenes in which a woman kneels in the middle of a group of three to eight men and performs oral sex on them. At the end of each scene, each of the men ejaculates onto the woman’s face or into her mouth. The copy on the video box describes it this way: ‘Dirty bitches surrounded by hard throbbing cocks—and they like it.”[20]

“It’s official. You can laugh with a cock in your mouth,” says the Modern Whore’s photographer after the banana/cock shoot. I guess you can if you don’t care about anyone except yourself.

I know, I know,

the happy hookers and modern whores are so much more fun! Only thinking about yourself is so much easier and, therefore, more fun. Not thinking at all is more fun! Trying to change the way things we have been trained to think have always been this way is so hard! But who is all of this indolent fun for, anyway? There is no fun being had by the women and children who often have to service more than ten men per day and need to disassociate in order to, as I say in Victim, “paradoxically keep it together.”[21] Rachel Moran certainly wasn’t having any fun when she was living how: “[i]t is difficult to describe how hollow a woman feels after she has been used sexually by ten different men.”[22] Maybe the modern whore is one of the estimated 1% who actually may have exercised some level of ‘free will,’ or maybe she isn’t telling us everything as a fool-proof marketing scheme in a male supremacist market. However, as Meghan Murphy wrote during her years extensively researching the hypocrisies and harms of so called sex-work as regular work like all others, the modern whore’s sensationalization of her personal fun servicing male domination serves to “drag everyone else under the bus.”[23]

Read this book.

As is sagely stated in Last Girl First, the myth of the glamourous sex-worker “fails to analyse the prostitution system in a structural way but rather derives from an individualistic, capitalistic and ultra-liberal vision.”[24] The lethal and profitable combination of individualism and capitalism have resulted in a global, patriarchal, free market culture where everything, especially the bodies of women and girls, has a price. “The core of prostitution’s true nature … [is] the commercialisation of sexual abuse,”[25] proclaims Rachel Moran. It’s no wonder that the Modern Whore is, as described in its Amazon synopsis, an “engorged edition of the sold-out memoir-cum-art book,” as it plays into the system that sells it. “It’s Playboy if the Playmates were in charge,” is the Modern Whore’s elevator pitch as revolutionary fraud because, beneath all of this thoughtless fun, this has nothing to do with play. The playmates are the partners of what Sayak Valencia calls “the most ferocious type of neoliberalism”[26] where personal liberation is actually so many other people’s prisons and, maybe when one lets go of their cock and thinks, hers too.

 

#iloveendnotes

[1] Last Girl First: Prostitution at the intersection of sex, race & class-based oppressions put out by CAP International (Coalition Abolition Prostitution) with the research (and I mean RESEARCH by Héma Sibi) in March 2022. 18. I believe, and will be reviewing the book in the Logical Feminist shortly, that if you read this book, there is no way you could continue to support and apologize for the sex industry—and, if you still can, you haven’t really read it (or felt it).

[2] First World women go to such locales as the Dominican Republic and Jamaica with the intentions of having sex with young, exoticized, locals men; however, the percentage is very small in comparison to the millions of men who travel abroad for sex with young women and girls and any abuse involved— like between the women (or girls) and the men— is non-existent. The title of Tanika Gupta’s 2006 play ‘Sugar Mummies’ is telling in that the women have taken on the behaviour of ‘sugar daddies,’ not rapists; nevertheless, using one’s economic privilege to access another human’s body upholds a culture of domination and violence that is inherent to masculine supremacy.

Journalist and author Julie Bindel points out in her 2013 article, the women who travel south “are looking for attention and excitement but end up, often without realising it, being one half of a prostitution deal.” Of course, as with the male sex tourist trade, poverty is the key component due to the economic disparity between the First and Third Worlds and the young men would most likely not have sex with the middle-aged women from the north if they did not have, and give them, money. The trend of women buying sex in tourist destinations like Jamaica can also be connected to female ‘raunch culture’ where fun feminists of the US, Canada and Northern Europe are all about sexual prowess and have, out of proclamations of sexual liberation, adapted patriarchal behavior. See Julie Bindel: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2401788/Sex-tourism-Meetmiddle-aged-middle-class-women-Britains-female-sex-tourists.html https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/aug/09/comment. gender

[3] Last Girl First: 60

[4] Ibid.

[5] Moran: 152.

[6] Ibid: 90.

[7] Last Girl First: 158-159.

[8] Carol Leigh aka Scarlot the Harlot coined the term sex-work. She writes in her article, “Inventing Sex Work”: “I had fantasies of being a prostitute, but had never considered actually doing it …. At least I could try it … just try it …. From the very first day I was fascinated …. I was excited and intrigued to be in this environment, working with women from all over the world who were surprisingly strong and smart” Whores and Other Feminists, 227.

[9] As reported by prostitution survivor and co-founder of the Dreamcatcher Foundation Brenda Myer-Powell in Last Girl First: 159.

[10] Annie Sprinkle “13 Tips to Cure Sex Worker’s Burn Out Syndrome” in Whores and Other Feminists Jill Nagle ed.: 67.

[11] In Canada alone, there were 557 safe houses in 2021/22 that are supported by the Canadian government. This statistic does not include private facilities (or the US).

https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/220412/dq220412b-eng.htm

[12] Donna J. Haraway Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016: 35.

[13] As Moran writes in Paid For: “Some women have no problem with pornography. Well, I do. I know from having been photographed in sexually explicit poses that there is a lot more going on behind these glossy graphic images than most people take the time to consider. It is a demeaning and exploitative business that is hugely damaging to women, both within and without the industry.”: 73.

[14] Sex Worker Exclusionary Radical Feminist. See … for a further discussion of this reductionist term and dismissive labeling.

[15] The source of my commitment to the abolition of the sex trade was when the serial rapist who abducted me in 1994 stated “There’s nothing like a good whore. The good whore with the golden heart.” As I conclude in Victim: A Feminist Manifesto from a Fierce Survivor, after researching and analysing the Pro-Sex Work and Sex Trade Abolitionist controversy, “there is nothing positive about agreeing with a serial rapist.” Victim: 126.

[16] Moran: 159.

[17] Cacho, Lydia. Infamy: How One Woman Brought an International Sex Trafficking Ring to Justice. Ceclia Ross, trans. New York: Soft Skull/Catapult Press, 2016: 78.

[18] Last Girl First: 49.  

[19] Sexually abused children do the same thing as they are psychologically devastated by the confusion when they know the abuse feels bad, but they think it is what they have to do for the adult abuser who is usually a male relative and, hence, have feelings of loyalty and love for the one who is hurting them.

[20] Robert Jensen in “Blow Bangs and Cluster Bombs: The Cruelty of Men and Americans” in Not for Sale: Feminists Resisting Prostitution and Pornography: 28.

[21] Karen Moe Victim: A Feminist Manifesto from a Fierce Survivor. Lantzville BC/Mexico City: Vigilance Press, 2022: 254.

[22] Moran: 52.

[23] https://www.feministcurrent.com/2013/08/02/interview-meghanmurphy-on-the-sex-industry-individualism-online-feminism-and-the-third-wave/

[24] Last Girl First: 159.

[25] Moran: 172.

[26] Sayak Valencia. Gore Capitalism. South Pasadena, CA: semiotext(e) intervention series 24, 2018: 265.

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An Unexpected Gift.

An Unexpected Gift.

Posted on by Karen Moe
The only whole heart is a broken one because it lets the light in—David Wolpe

During my Cross-Canada Trauma & Triumph Tour

for Victim: A Feminist Manifesto from a Fierce Survivor last fall, I had a bit of respite in Toronto, Ontario and went to a poetry reading. It was in a back alley, in a dilapidated nook off Queen and Spadina. I didn’t know such places still exist in the rampantly gliterizing TO as shiny towers rise all around and most rough around the edges have been smoothed out. But there it was. Around the corner and down a pitted lane: bad wine and dense poetry, the kind of poetry that takes you not only to one place, but into the multiplicities of perception, breaking up the concrete surface and, in Donna Haraway’s words: “undoes thinking as usual.”[1]

Much to the thrill of my creative serendipity, one of the poets quoted David Wolpe:
The only whole heart is a broken one because it lets the light in. I had just written in my journal the night before: “In order to have real and long-lasting change, must we all know, be acquainted with trauma? Must we all have broken hearts so that light is let in?”

There are, unfortunately, countless realities as to why this is so, why we live in a world made of trauma and why if we want there to be any transformation and healing we must feel—even hurt—along with it. However, depressing as this may sound on the surface, this is not a bad thing. Heartbreak is not only logical: it’s hope.

The Dzunuk’wa Society—Wild Women of the Woods at COP15 2022. Photo Courtesy of Arvinoutside.

Fairy Creek, BC, Canada,

comes to mind as the sacred stands of old growth keep coming down along with all of the species who lived there, some undiscovered before their extinction. As I write, The Dzunuk’wa Society—Wild Women of the Woods, the Guardians of the Forest[2] founded by three women of Indigenous roots (along with Pacheedaht Elder Bill Jones, friends and allies) are currently at COP15 in Montreal Canada with a cross-cut of a 750-year-old cedar that they salvaged from a clear cut showing the world what the ancestral First Nations[3] and the forest defenders have been fighting and sacrificing to save since August 2020. Not only did they bring the 9’ 6” piece of evidence from Vancouver Island, BC to Montreal, the indigenous activists also brought their ceremonial drums with the plan to play them in front of the slice of what was once an ancient tree, what they affectionately call “The Cookie.”

However, security at COP15 forbade them to play their drums and have the ceremony they had travelled thousands of miles to share. As Aunty Rainbow-Eyez—one of the founders of Wild Women—said on an Instagram Livestream on December 12th in a shaking yet strong voice: “They’re keeping us in pieces so we can’t all come together. People can carry on with their day because it doesn’t affect them personally. We have to help each other be whole. Because the people’s voice is so strong, there’s nothing stronger than the people’s voice and a ceremonial drum that comes straight from spirit.” She then added, metaphorically and literally, that the drums are a weapon. And yes, they are a weapon of peaceful resistance as the spiritual sway of ceremonial drumming has the capacity to affect emotions, move us beyond our individual cloistering, and undermine the intrenchment of the colonial system that, in Rainbow Eyez’s words, is trying to keep is a part. I particularly like the way she chose the word ‘trying,’ the progressive form of the verb dislodging the fixity of the past tense. It is through the wisdom that comes with deep feeling, and the reality of broken hearts, that we will be able to come together and be whole.

In Mexico, one comes across in-your-face-trauma every day.

This is not to say that systemic trauma is not readily available to acknowledge in countries like Canada and the US. After all, the third world exists in the first. In Vancouver BC, Canada, there is the Downtown Eastside, for example, with sexual violence, mental illness, drug addiction, stigmatization, ostratziation from familial support creating what in many ways is a kind of fourth world.[4] And, as the hierarchy of skin colour and race buttresses white-supremacy, the majority of the prostituted women and girls on the streets of the DTES are Indigenous, a continuation of the colonial fetish of the exploitation, abuse and dehumanization of the colonized.[5]

As I wrote in my last post, femicide is an epidemic in Mexico. But what I didn’t tell you in that particular piece of writing is that the 10-16 murders a day of Mexican women are directly related to the immasculinisation of Mexican men. Machismo, as an exacerbation of violent male supremacy, is a response to male disempowerment.[6] In Mexico, immasculinisation is guaranteed because of the economic exploitation of third world labour by the first and the entrapment of young men by lack of opportunity.[7] Because there are so few options, young, disempowered men are wooed by the possibility of power and prestige offered by the drug cartels. The assassinations of young men are through the violence of the cartels, which is directly connected to the fierce competition to get the narcotics to the drug-addicted markets to the north. This, in turn, is fed by the epidemic of drug addiction in Canada and the US which is a result of dysfunctional families, the colonization of Indigenous people in first world nation states and, most often, the childhood sexual abuse that results in mental illness and PTSD and the self-medication with the drugs that are tainted by the blood of young Mexican men.[8] And round and round we don’t have to continue to go.

If you’ve read this far, bear with me: even though the source of the heartbreak is often horrifying, the heartbreak in itself is liberation. As filmmaker Jennifer Abbott told me when I asked her why she commits her life to fighting for social and environmental justice: “I do what I do because I want my life to have integrity and to be meaningful.”[9]

Detail from the barricade surrounding La Glorieta De Las Mujeres Que Luchan, Mexico City. (See December 7th 2022 post for the full article).

We cannot forget about the men.

Last Sunday, riding my bike down Reforma in Mexico City, it was impossible not to stop if you have a feeling heart; the stairs of the famous Glorieta del Ángel de la Independencia were draped, shrouded, with red nets. Around the edges of the round-about, as an in-your-face-feel-this-Christmas-wreath, were photographs of young men, face after face after face after face of young missing and mostly-likely murdered young men. Large-scale vinyl posters call out desaparecido (missing) lo has visto (have you seen him) as they are carried around the country by the mothers, sisters, cousins, nieces, and friends who never give up looking for their lost loved ones, even when the looking becomes more of a quest for awareness-raising than a hope of ever finding their individual loved one again—an accusation as activism motivated by heart break.[10]

I didn’t know what to say to the women who sat on the steps weaving the nets. What do you say to people who sit surrounded by the faces of their disappeared sons, brothers, nephews, cousins, friends and their undying pleas for help? I wanted to thank them, though, congratulate them on the potency of this installation, how the young men are trapped in the inevitability of their own blood-shed. Sangre de mi Sangre, blood of my blood, the blood of all our blood. The name of their organization is Collectivo Hilos (The Collective of Thread). Lo siento mucho (I’m so sorry), I fumbled and told them I would share their story with the world beyond Mexico.

Why are all of these young men missing? Why do so many men in Mexico assault and murder their girl-friends and spouses? Why is there often no other opportunities but for the young Mexican men to be recruited by drug cartels as foot soldiers and end up disappeared and dead? Why are there so many drug-addicted, mentally ill, sexually abused people on the streets in Canada and the US? Why are what remains of old growth rainforests around the world being destroyed and, with it, the future of the planet and all that lives here, not just us? As the Mexican women weave their red nets, we are all caught in the collective thread. These are not separate incidents, cut up by borders, race, class, obliviousness and sheer good luck. And knowing this, and feeling this, is a gift. If all trauma were collective, if we become whole through the wisdom of awareness, if we embrace the necessity of our broken hearts, dark will become light.

Happy Solstice!

Merry Christmas!

The Logical Feminist (aka Karen Moe)

#iloveendnotes #contextisrevolution

[1] Donna Haraway quotes from https://www.e-flux.com/journal/75/67125/tentacular-thinking-anthropocene-capitalocene-chthulucene/; https://www.dukeupress.edu/staying-with-the-trouble

[2] From the Dzunuk’wa Society, Wild Women of the Woods Instagram: Stand with us to protect our irreplaceable rainforests for generations to come… 

Ending the logging of all Old Growth forests for the next 7 generations & beyond.

The Dzunuk’wa Society, founded by three women with Indigenous roots (along with Elder Bill Jones, friends and allies), began work to protect the ancient temperate rainforests — the irreplaceable Old Growth of British Columbia…and we won’t stop until they are protected. 

The current system favours short term industry profit over people. The current system dishonours the intention of the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous People (UNDRIP), fails to protect indigenous sovereignty and natural law and is destroying our natural systems – our lands, forests, waters, air, and the future of the children.

They are raising money to continue to guard and help save what is left of the last stands of temperate rainforest in the world. Click here to donate

[3] As opposed to the Band Council who are the colonial government representatives on the reservations that were both set up by the Indian Act in 1876 and has insidiously oppressed the first peoples ever since.

[4] See Gabor Maté The Realm of the Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

[5] “Prostitution exploits and reinforces racist representations and inequalities by transforming women’s bodies into objects of market and desire: it is the fruit of colonial sexual imaginaries which have shaped the mentalities of colonising societies and conditioned those of the dominated. In this sense, the purchase of a sexual act is rooted in these colonialist and imperialist dynamics and it is a fundamentally racist act.” Last Girl First: Prostitution at the intersection of sex, race and class-based oppressions. CAP International, 2022: 106

[6] See Sayak Valencia’s Gore Capitalism for an in depth analysis of the third world, emasculated man. What she calls, the ‘endriago subject.’

[7] In 2021, I visited the NGO Nacidos Para Triunfar in Monterrey and wrote an article about young men in Mexican barrios being recruited by the drug cartels to be foot soldiers (and many end up murdered) and how Nacidos Para Triunfar works in the barrios to make peace treaties between the clikas (small street level cartels) and offer the predominantly young men education and employment.

https://www.vigilancemagazine.com/post/justice-begins-with-the-one-beside-you-the-quiet-revolution-of-nacidos-para-triunfar

[8] Mexico has an overt hierarchy of skin colour. Significantly, of all of the photos I saw of disappeared and assassinated young men on Sunday, none of the had white skin, re: all of the victims were Indigenous, or at least mostly because the Spanish Conquistadores mixed with the Indigenous in comparison to in Canada where the European coliners and the Indigenous colonizers were mainly segregated in the reservation system.

[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Abbott
Hear Jennifer speak about her life and work here on a YouTube documentary:
“Empowering the Invisible.”

[10] See The Raw Truth: Francisco Toledo’s Duelo and the Disappeared of Ayotzinapa for an interview with the late artist, Francisco Toledo, where he talks about his series of ceramic sculptures, Duelo, being “an accusation, a statement to the government, declaring it internationally, telling the whole world about this injustice.” https://www.vigilancemagazine.com/post/the-raw-truth-francisco-toledo-s-duelo-and-the-43-disappeared-of-ayotzinapa

https://www.vigilancemagazine.com/post/la-cruda-realidad-duelo-de-francisco-toledo-y-los-43-desaparecidos-de-ayotzinapa

I am:

an art critic, visual and performance artist, author and feminist activist. My work focuses on systemic violence in patriarchy: be it gender, race, the environment or speciesism. My art criticism has been published internationally in magazines, anthologies and artist catalogues in English and Spanish and I have exhibited and performed across Canada, in the US and in Mexico. I am the recipient of the “Ellie Liston Hero of the Year Award” 2022 for being instrumental in the life sentence given to a serial rapist who abducted and brutalized me and countless other women. Since that time, as I write in my book, Victim: A Feminist Manifesto from a Fierce Survivor:

“And, believe it or not, what I suffered and survived …. all of those years ago gave me a gift of knowing my strength and what I can survive. And now, resistance, fighting for justice for all, is what I live for. My life is far bigger than myself.”(186)

My personal experience of surviving and triumphing over sexual violence and trauma is the origin of Logical Feminism.

I live in Mexico City and British Columbia, Canada. Victim: A Feminist Manifesto from a Fierce Survivor is my debut book.

“Not One Less.” This is the symbol for Mexican Feministas. Feminism also includes men.
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Triumph Under Threat: Mexico City and the Women Who Fight.

Triumph Under Threat: Mexico City and the Women Who Fight.

Posted on by Karen Moe
La Glorieta De Las Mujeres Que Luchan, Mexico City.

I was elated and surprised.

I couldn’t believe that the Mexican federal government and the City of Mexico had allowed, even embraced, a symbol of the women who fight against the femicide epidemic in Mexico on the grand Reforma Boulevard, the one with the famous Angel of Independence that bedazzles tourists and nationalists alike in the middle of the traffic-clogged roundabout at Reforma and Monterrey. Even better, this celebration of the women who fight stands on the pedestal where Christopher Columbus had stood since 1877 on a similarly prominent Reforma roundabout. Erected on September 25th 2021 by the feminist activist group Viva Nos Queremos, Antimonument (We Want Us Alive, Anti-Monument) in partnership with National Connection Network (mothers of victims of femicide, water defenders, survivors of acid attacks, Triqui, Otomí and Nahua women, and the mothers of the disappeared students from Ayotzinapa)[1], La Glorieta De Las Mujeres Que Luchan (Roundabout of the Women Who Fight) is now threatened to be removed. Too good to be truly true.

“The Roundabout for the Women Who Fight: Stay and Resist! Not One step back!”

As many know,

Christopher Columbus was an Italian explorer who navigated four voyages across the Atlantic and was sponsored by the Catholic monarchs of Spain. His landing on the shores of Cuba and then the Gulf Coast of Mexico started the European colonization of the Americas and the subsequent oppression and exploitation of the Indigenous peoples who have lived here for Millenia. The Europeans claimed to have ‘discovered’ what they called the New World, implying of course that there was no one here—or of human status anyway— and that the resource-rich land was wide open and for the taking and, therefore, it was perfectly fine to ‘take the Indian out of the child’ as was said by Canada’s first Prime Minister John A. McDonald in his statement of the intention of Canada’s residential schools[2] or, as in the case of Cuba, all out extermination and, as in Mexico, enchant with the awe-inspiring aesthetic of Cathedrals through the story of Juan Diego, an Indigenous man who beheld the miracle of Guadalupe, the dark skinned Virgin Mary. But that’s another, albeit related, story.[3]

Back to Reforma 2022:

Like all nation states that wouldn’t exist without the stealing of the land and the brutalization of Indigenous peoples, regardless of the removal of all of the Christopher Columbuses, the colonial origin is still very much alive in its haunting. However, we are in an era of awakening to the atrocities that underlay Western Civilization as statues have been falling in countries where colonialism originated and those where the greed-glutting operations were carried out: numerous renditions of Canada’s Prime Minister John A. Macdonald have been toppled or removed and blood-red paint has been splattered on Queen Victoria; British activists rolled slave trader Edward Colston into Bristol Harbor; multiple Columbuses have come down in the US along with a lot of lynching forefathers (to name a few).[4] However, is the bedrock of colonialism being upheaved as the symbols of the glorified perpetrators fall? It’s hard to say.

A young woman at the November 25th prostest got the International Day to Eliminate Violence Against Women. She had painted her t-shirt with the names of many victims of femicide.

The Mexico City government had planned to replace Columbus with “The Young Woman of Amajaca,” a replica of an ancient statue of a young Indigenous woman. It cannot be denied that replacing the key colonizer with a replica of a Pre-Hispanic monument (and of a woman even) is an improvement.[5] Significantly, though, as in all colonial countries, Indigenous women are the most vulnerable to sexual assault and femicide. Is it not more critical at this time to honour the lives—disappeared, murdered, assaulted, resisting, fighting—now, the fate of this Pre-Hispanic representation of long before the needs of now?

The feminists and the families of missing children decided: No.

The government’s token gesture of honouring an idealized pre-colonial past is not enough. With their anti-monument towering triumphant, painted the colour of the glitter and smoke Mexican feminists use to demonstrate their resistance to male impunity and sexual violence, the names of disappeared and murdered women written on the walls, and a clothesline hung across the surrounding garden where women have written personal accounts of assaults, the activists have made this roundabout a site for protests and gatherings that have drawn attention to the epidemic of killings of women and girls in Mexico. “This place is from now on the roundabout of women who struggle and will be dedicated to those across the country who have faced violence, repression and re-victimization for fighting injustice,” Viva Nos Queremos, Antimonument wrote on their social networks.[6]

Photos of disappeared and murdered loved ones on the ground of the Zocalo where the parade ended.

Rather than a token exoticization of Mexico’s pre-Hispanic, pre-Columbus past, the anti-monument represents the present of colonialism rather than exoticizing what was. A representation of the innocence of pre-exploitation is far from relevant in a country where an estimated 12-16 women are murdered per day by their husbands or boyfriends.[7] Instead of remembering who was oppressed, the anti-monument raises awareness for the present, the bravery of the women who resist and fight for present and future lives free from violence. As coalition member Érica explains: “It’s not about putting up a monument to worship the past, but one to recognize the present fight, all the women who have disappeared.”[8]

But are Mexicans happy about it?

Actually, it appears, this time, possibly so.[9] Unlike on November 25th, 2019 and March 8th, 2020 when militant feminists vandalized all of the colonial monuments along Reforma and popular opinion valued the monuments over acknowledging the femicide epidemic,[10] there has been public outcry that this act of activism should stay where it is: in the strategic location on Reforma, for Mexico, and the world, to see.

It would be a logical decision by the government to let the women who fight and the families who have lost their loved ones have this symbol of the struggle, a place to gather to remember and resist and the opportunity to raise far-reaching awareness from a prominent and symbolic location. Building “The Young Woman of Amajaca” would cost $12 million pesos and the feminists argue that “with those 12 million pesos they could do creative workshops in schools and public squares against violence, equipment for collective searchers, support for shelters, etc.”[11] When it comes to justice, such logic is often lacking.

Close to as many police as women marching on November 25th 2022.

With not even access to rape kits 

as part of the government agenda to trace perpetrators through their DNA and at least acknowledge the validity of sexual assault; an eery presence of police lining Reforma on par with the women who marched November 25th for the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women; large scale photographs of missing and murdered young Mexican woman sprawled and plastered on all surfaces of the Zocalo; an UNAM conference earlier that day entitled “The Right to a Life Free of Violence: the Hard Road to Feminist Justice” where corpses were the main topic on the agenda, for we women, we humans who fight, it is far from finished.

Some of the hundreds of names of disappeared and murdered women that are written on the walls that surrounded the pedastal for Christopher Columbus after it was removed. The presence and celebration of Columbus will not be be removed from the city, though: he is bing moved to Polanco (a wealthy colonia in Mexico City).

 

#iloveendnotes 

[1] https://www.netflix.com/mx-en/title/81045551

[2] https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/here-is-what-sir-john-a-macdonald-did-to-indigenous-people

[3] https://www.mexperience.com/the-virgin-guadalupe-and-juan-diego/

[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/us/confederate-statues-photos.html

[5] The occupation took place in a context in which México City officials announced they would remove the statue of Columbus, a colonialist figure, and that it would be replaced by a statue by artist Pedro Reyes. His statue was called Tlali, and it was the subject of complaints due to the way he represented the body of an Indigenous woman. https://piedepagina.mx/mexico-city-activists-defend-monument-to-women-in-struggle/

[6] https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/mexico-city-takes-down-feminist-anti-monument-1234637007/

[7] It can be argued that an epidemic of machismo due to the emasculated third-world male in patriarchy is mainly responsible for the femicide rate in Mexico. See Sayak Valencia’s Gore Capitalism.

[8] https://piedepagina.mx/mexico-city-activists-defend-monument-to-women-in-struggle/

[9] https://www.animalpolitico.com/2022/10/glorieta-mujeres-luchan-antimonumenta-cdmx/

[10] See my March 2021 article in Vigilance Magazine “The Life of a Woman is More Important than an Historical Monument.” https://www.vigilancemagazine.com/post/life-of-a-woman

[11] https://www.sopitas.com/noticias/plan-gobierno-cdmx-antimonumenta-reforma-esconder-circuito/?fbclid=IwAR3Xw5qvSI8asImA4s2uE32mojEA2KW-XK9D_-_WJqk3f_gxe7msBc6-TDI

 

 

La Glorieta De Las Mujeres Que Luchan, Mexico City. 

 

 

About the Blogger:

I am an art critic, visual and performance artist, author and feminist activist. My work focuses on systemic violence in patriarchy: be it gender, race, the environment or speciesism. My art criticism has been published internationally in magazines, anthologies and artist catalogues in English and Spanish and I have exhibited and performed across Canada, in the US and in Mexico. I am the recipient of the “Ellie Liston Hero of the Year Award” 2022 for being instrumental in the life sentence given to a serial rapist who abducted and brutalized me and countless other women. Since that time, as I write in my book, Victim: A Feminist Manifesto from a Fierce Survivor:

“And, believe it or not, what I suffered and survived …. all of those years ago gave me a gift of knowing my strength and what I can survive. And now, resistance, fighting for justice for all, is what I live for. My life is far bigger than myself.”(186)

My personal experience of surviving and triumphing over sexual violence and trauma is the origin of Logical Feminism.

I live in Mexico City and British Columbia, Canada. Victim: A Feminist Manifesto from a Fierce Survivor is my debut book.

 

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The Logical Feminist has a lot of Thoughts on Sex Work/Prostitution:

The Logical Feminist has a lot of Thoughts on Sex Work/Prostitution:

Posted on by Karen Moe

During a webinar on sexual violence,

I was told by a pro-prositution academic that I’m against prostitution because I don’t like it personally—implying that I am a judgemental prude and don’t like what she defined as  ‘freely’ chosen sexual autonomy. And, yes, she was right. I don’t like prostitution. I don’t like the selling of people’s bodies for sexual use (predominantly underprivileged cis and trans women, girls, young feminized gay men and, especially in the so-called third world[1] sex tourist destinations of Thailand, Cambodia and Latin America, to name a few,[2] young women, girls and boys). This has nothing at all to do with some reductionist accusation of a personal aversion, the opposite: my dislike and fierce desire to abolish the sex industry at large has everything to with a society of systemic violence and how condoning and even celebrating the use of a marginalized person’s body by a person of privilege (it should go without saying that the extreme majority of sex buyers are men[3]) feeds into a predatory system of exploitation and violence in general, which is what Western culture (white-supremacist patriarchal neoliberalism aka global capitalism and individualism on steroids) is made of.

As I wrote in my book Victim: A Feminist Manifesto from a Fierce Survivor, “[a]bolitionists of the sex trade who defy this culturally implicit rule [of using the term sex worker] and choose to use the term ‘prostituted person’ have been reduced to and demonized as “prudes and pearl-clutchers.”[4] In truth, we are feminists who take an expansive perspective that includes all forms of violence and power abuse; we are feminists who equate so-called sex work as culturally accepted sexual assault,”[5] or, in prostitution survivor Trisha Bapti’s words: “pay-as-you-go-rape.”[6] During the webinar that day, after the prostitution topic—that was brought up by yours truly—had shifted to a discussion on toxic masculinity (and, yes, that being a bad thing), I immediately commented: if there were no toxic masculinity, there would be no work for the sex workers. The academic scowled in my direction. She had no response.

Before I am accused of abandoning vulnerable people (who I’ve heard are also empowered by their sexual autonomy)

who have to have their bodies sold in order to, among all of the other things, pay their rent, let me be very clear that I am not talking about abandoning some of the most vulnerable people in Western culture (and those who claim they like being prostituted and have freely chosen this occupation most often while they are in it)[7]. Again. The opposite. The whole idea and accusation when a sex trade abolitionist like myself is SWERFED (a SWERF being a Sex Worker Exclusionary Radical Feminist) is truly bizzare to me. It is completely illogical where the accusation of ‘exclusionary’ comes from when the sex trade abolotionist mission is to include those who are excluded from having basic human rights, dignity and respect. As I write in Victim, Sex Industry[8] “abolitionists advocate for the Nordic Model, where sex buyers are criminalized, and prostituted people are protected and offered education, counselling, and support while transitioning to safer, more respectful lives and alternative ways of making a living.” 

The loudest pro-sex work voices are prostituted people (most often in the so-called first world)

who claim to have freely chosen prostitution. As Annie Sprinkle, who entered the sex trade out of “curiosity,” states in her sensationalist “Forty Reasons why Whores are my Heroes”: along with wearing exciting clothes and other candy-coated statements of idyllic whoredom “[w]hores have careers based on giving pleasure”[9]—implying that prostitution is some sort of public service (she said that once as well but I currently can’t find the source). Indeed, I whole-heartedly agree with Sprinkle that prostituted people are heroic and I absolutely agree with sex worker’s advocates that prostitution is ‘work.’ In fact, it may be the most difficult work in the world. Even though I understand and respect the good intentions of Sex Worker’s Rights Advocates to proclaim that sex work is work like all others in order to keep vulnerable people safe, I highly disagree that sex work is ‘work’ like all others. What other kind of job is there a safety handbook advising workers to “take a course in hostage negotiating skills, advises that one plans an escape route before any job, recommends parting the pubic hair of a client and looking for crabs, and counsels members to not wear chains or other jewelry they could be strangled with?”[10] In what kind of job, as prostitution survivor Rachel Moran describes, are you comforted by having planned an escape route before starting your shift?[11]

Yes, it is imperative for our culture to prioritize the safety of some of the most marginalized people,

but condoning being prostituted as just another job in the office (or even, as in Sprinkle’s case, an exoticized profession to be aspired to), in the end, from a big picture logical feminism perspective, serves to maintain a toxic culture based in power abuse, exploitation and violence. The sex industry normalizes exploitation and, as prostitution survivor Rachel Moran calls it: depravity.[12] Yes, I don’t like depravity. Politically correct pro-prostitution academic: you’re right.

But how should I know?

What right do I have to say anything, have an opinion at all because I have never been a prostituted person? The closest I have ever come to the sex industry in terms of being paid for sex-related work was a stint waitressing at a strip club and an attempt to be an on-line stripper, both instances because I was broke and unable to find another job—coerced consent on a much smaller, albeit comparative, scale. You can read about what I refer to as these triumphant failures in Victim. However, even though I have never been a prostituted person, I have been a sexually assaulted and abducted person and it turns out that I did the exact same thing that the majority of prostituted people report to have done for self-preservation: I disassociated. Raped women and prostituted women have this survival strategy in common.

In her forty-five years plus researching the trauma inherent to violence against women in prostitution, Melissa Farley reports how “women say they can’t prostitute unless they dissociate.” She defines this phenomenon: “[d]issociation is a mental tuning-out to avoid unbearable and inescapable stress. … A dissociative response mitigates the john’s cruelty by splitting the experience off from the rest of the self.”[13] Rachel Moran, and the majority of the prostituted women she worked with, did the same things. Moran confides how, “[o]ne of the ways I protected myself in prostitution was to divide myself, to literally split myself into two characters; the authentic me, and the imaginary version.”(143-144). When I was abducted for almost 24 hours by a serial rapist (who just so happened to frequent Nevada brothels when his luck temporarily dried up abducting women), I did the exact same thing.

I learned about dissociation while I was writing my book Victim

and I realized that “even though I have only ever been a rape victim and never a victim of prostitution, I knew I did this. I didn’t have a term for it, but I know that I had to separate myself from my body while being sexually assaulted to, paradoxically, keep it together. I remember the first time I did it. It was probably during the fourth or fifth rape. I remember thinking: I have to get away from this. I can’t really be here. I know this is going to go on for a while. I have to figure out a way to protect myself. If I can’t literally escape yet, I have to escape somehow. Part of me, the most precious part of me, must not be here.”[14]

Lucky me. I was a prostitute for less than 24 hours.

That’s because I wasn’t a literal prostitute. I was abducted. I was sexually assaulted countless times. But I got away from the serial rapist/john and this blessedly short stint of being brutalized and mentally tuning-out to avoid unbearable and inescapable stress. But, even though I have never had a literal (non)choice but to consent to my body being sold for the sexual use by men in order to (most often) barely survive,[15] after having been raped many times in one day and one night, I do know something about, in Rachel Moran’s words, “how hollow a woman feels after she has been used sexually by 10 different men.”[16] Besides having this in common, prostitution survivor, Rachel Moran, and multiple sexual assault survivor, Karen Moe, in the end, have another thing in common: a lived knowledge that “[e]quating selling bodies for sex as a job like any other, despite good intentions, condones violence and exploitation as an acceptable part of society”[17] and, therefore, “is hugely damaging to women, both within and without the industry.”[18] The logical conclusion: the sex industry is hugely damaging to everything.

Do you think this is logical? If not, please share your logic in the comments section below. There is no possibility of creating a world without violence without dialogue. Thank you for reading! 

 

A big shout out to Last Girl First: Prostitution at the Intersection of Sex, Race & Class-Based Oppressions published by CAP International. Buy it! Amazing and important and oh-so-current! I didn’t literally quote from this amazing book in this post because I lost the book on an airplane with all of my notes and have to read it again! So, soon, very soon. This will not be the only post on this topic, of that there is no doubt!

For more about pretty much everything I’ve written here, check out Victim: A Feminist Manifesto from a Fierce Survivor, in particular pages 115-126, the section that is called: “I’m Not Cool.”

 

#iloveendnotes #thereisnorevolutionwithoutcontext 

[1] Instead of the designations of ‘first’ and ‘third’ worlds (with first alluding to #1 and, therefore better than and the #3 just needs to ‘develop’), I prefer exploiting and exploited.

[2] During my Trauma & Triumph Tour for the publication of my book Victim: A feminist Manifesto from a Fierce Survivor (2022), I learned that sex tourism literally exists in the privileged (and presumed pristine) country of Canada. The so-called Third World exists in the First, especially in relation to indigenous, colonized, communities. I’ll tell you about this in another post.

[3] First World women go to such locales as the Dominican Republic and Jamaica with the intentions of having sex with young, exoticized, locals; however, the percentage is very small in comparison to the millions of men who travel abroad for sex with young women and any abuse involved— like between the women (or girls) and the men— is non-existent. The title of Tanika Gupta’s 2006 play ‘Sugar Mummies’ is telling in that the women have taken on the behaviour of ‘sugar daddies,’ not rapists; nevertheless, using one’s economic privilege to access another human’s body upholds a culture of domination and violence that is inherent to masculine supremacy.

Julie Bindel points out in her 2013 article, the women who travel south “are looking for attention and excitement but end up, often without realising it, being one half of a prostitution deal.” Of course, as with the male sex tourist trade, poverty is the key component due to the economic disparity between the First and Third Worlds and the young men would most likely not have sex with the middle-aged women from the north if they did not have, and give them, money. The trend of women buying sex in tourist destinations like Jamaica can also be connected to female ‘raunch culture’ where fun feminists of the US, Canada and Northern Europe are all about sexual prowess and have, out of proclamations of sexual liberation, adapted patriarchal behavior. See Julie Bindel: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2401788/Sex-tourism-Meetmiddle-aged-middle-class-women-Britains-female-sex-tourists.html https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/aug/09/comment. gender

[4] Victim: A Feminist Manifesto from a Fierce Survivor: 119. In her rigorously researched book, The Pimping of Prostitution: Abolishing the Sex Work Myth, Juliel Bindel points out how “acceptance of the sex trade has entered the mainstream” (xxx) and that “myths about the sex trade include saying that prostitution is necessary, inevitable and harmless… [are] propagated by the ‘sex workers’ rights’ movement, [and] are based in misguided neoliberalism and fallacious mythology.” (xxxii). And wait: before you jump on the SWERF and TERF Julie Bindel band-wagon, I highly recommend you read the book. It’s always good to have information before harsh judgements are cast and not leap willy-nilly into what is currently the mainstream of demonization.

[5] Victim: A Feminist Manifesto from a Fierce Survivor (118-119)

[6] Quoted in Rachel Moran Paid For: My Journey through Prostitution. New York: Norton, 2015: 113.

[7] See Rachel Moran on how she, too, proclaimed that she was content working as a prostitute in order to “protect herself from the truth … [and] protect her dignity.”(131). She continues to explain from her lived experience (and this has been related by many other prostitution survivors) that claiming, most often, while in the sex industry that it was a ‘free’ choice—without any aspect of coercion for economic, gender, race, sexual abuse, drug addiction related reasons—is “the prostitute’s defence mechanisms of defiance and denial combined, … attempts at preserving a wholesome sense of self and struggling to stay psychologically healthy in the most thwarting and hostile circumstances”(131).

[8] And it is an industry. As Lydia Cacho comments in her book, Slavery Inc: The Untold Story of the International Sex Trafficking, “the sex trade is the most profitable in the world, even more so than the arms and drug trades.”(4)

[9] https://anniesprinkle.org/forty-reasons-why-whores-are-my-heroes/

[10] Victim (120-121) sourced from The Australian Scarlet Alliance Handbook quoted in Victor Malarek The Johns: Sex for Sale and the Men who Buy It: 209, 210. Malarek also reports how “[t]here is no other occupation—other than war—in which so many women are routinely beaten, raped, maimed and killed each and every year.”(228)

[11] Prostitution survivor Rachel Moran confirms this claim when she describes an aspect of the mentality of the prostitute as being “comforted to have an escape route should things go wrong, which suggests, of course, that you always anticipate that they may.” Moran: 66.

[12] Moran: 73.

[13] Melissa Farley Prostitution and Trafficking in Nevada: Making the Connections. Prostitution Research & Education, 2007: 35; 4.

[14] Victim: 254.

[15] Besides Lydia Cacho’s report on what the majority of prostituted people in the world experience (and many others), see this article by D.A. Clarke “Resisting the Sexual New World Order” in Rebecca Whisnant and Christine Stark, eds. Not for Sale: Feminists Resisting Prostitution and Pornography. Melbourne, Australia: Spinifex, 2010: 156. Another useful resource on the reality of prostitution for the majority is Kat Banyard’s Pimp State: Sex, Money and the Future of Equality. London: Faber & Faber, 2016.

[16] Moran: 52.

[17] Victim: 119.

[18] Moran: 73.

 

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Logical Feminism: the premise is simple, its execution crucial.

Logical Feminism: the premise is simple, its execution crucial.

Posted on by Karen Moe
Photo: Adriana Barboza

Logical Feminism: anything that has anything at all to do with power abuse and exploitation is wrong.

I say ‘anything at all’ in order to highlight the fact that power abuse, exploitation and its maintenance often go unnoticed and, as in the case of those who support the sex industry, for example, regardless of good intentions, functions under the proverbial umbrella of ‘free’ choice, rather than the reality of coerced choice which results in no real choice at all. (Stay tuned for a post about Sex Workers Rights Advocacy and Sex Trade Abolitionism.) [1]

In order for logical feminism to effect any long-lasting change

as opposed to being merely an untenable utopia, we need to become aware of our positioning in the patriarchal hierarchy of privilege[2] and be self-reflexive as to the toxicity we have internalized. When discussing his abusive father, transman Thomas Page McBee says that men need to “have the courage to look at the injustice within themselves to join the fight for something better.”[3] As radical feminist Robert Jensen stated after he had done the work to look at the injustice within himself: “I was socialized in patriarchy into a toxic masculinity that not only subordinates women but also crippled my own capacity to be fully human.”[4] Because we live in system of exploitation and predation—and as a male system, men do have the most hard work to do[5]—such revolutionary work is not only about men: it’s about all of us and everything.

Technically, I am what is called a ‘radical’ feminist,

a feminist that runs the risk of being TERFED and SWERFED[6] (more on that later). The Logical Feminist is me, Karen Moe. I am a writer, author, artist, feminist and revolutionary. I am the author of Victim: A Feminist Manifesto from a Fierce Survivor (Vigilance Press, 2022). During the writing and research for my book, I found it not only interesting, but also ironic, that the wholistic fight (read: a struggle that exists beyond liberating only the self and continuing to play into the ideology of individualism) to end a culture of violence is deemed radical. However, through feminist Sayak Valencia, I have since found out that ‘radical,’ in its etymological sense, is a return to the root of things.[7] When we dig into it, such a commitment is, indeed, logical—especially when confronting and resisting a system that has spun into a state of ideological and literal warfare against marginalized peoples, other species and the earth globally. We need to start over: re-think, re-act and re-make what doesn’t have to be this way. What is needed is an ideological revolution that prioritizes resistance and justice for all that can be achieved through a politic of empathy: feeling and living beyond the self. We can ground our new radical roots in this.

It should go without saying that any feminism that has anything at all to do with patriarchy (except to overthrow it) is not feminism. 

Believe it or not, there is a so-called feminism called ‘neo-liberal feminism,’ what Valencia calls ‘free-market feminism.’ A movement that proclaims empowerment within that which oppresses is what I call fraudulent feminism (I will be writing a piece about this soon). I know some of you may not like this (and that’s ok because the Logical Feminist strives to be controversial and stir up perceived truths in order to work towards something better), the #MeToo movement—fun as it was in terms of seeing so many powerful men go down after decades of impunity—is included in the oxymoron of self-proclaimed feminists striving to achieve power in a man’s world and reperpetuating a system of power abuse. #MeToo doesn’t and didn’t go far enough and, as such, feeds into maintaining that which is responsible for the sexual assaults and power abuse in the first place: a system of impunity for powerful men. Women striving to become equal to men within his system and proclaiming themselves feminists is what Valencia calls “the most ferocious type of neoliberalism” because it insidiously sustains what it claims to be against. As radical feminist activist Julie Bindel says: “Feminists should not be seeking an equal place at the table but rather to smash the table to smithereens.”[8] This is the goal of this blog: the Logical Feminist is straight up, no holds barred, logic: we will break the bars that hold us in our exploitable passivity.

Feminism is a revolutionary movement that began with the liberation of women

in the male defined system of patriarchy; therefore, the purpose of feminism has always been to resist and challenge the exploitation that this male defined system of hierarchy guarantees. In Bindel’s words: “the authentic meaning and goal of feminism is the liberation of women from male supremacy.”[9] The feminist revolution began with and is based on the liberation of women, and our foremothers made great strides in the fight to overthrow male supremacy. This fact cannot be disrespected or denied. And, unfortunately, it is.

The voice of women (read: cisgender/biologically born women) cannot be silenced at the same time as we cannot deny the voices of all marginalized groups in a culture that thrives on marginalization. We must not devolve (under the banner of evolution) into a hierarchy of a prioritization of voices. Everything and everyone that and who is exploited in patriarchy (and we must add the now neo-liberal hyper-individualist and consumerist global forces that are all a product of patriarchy on even more steroids [10]) is feminized, be they women, children, transpeople, animals, the earth and men through the oppression of race and class.

I am what is called today an intersectional feminist. However, when I came to my feminism in the 90s, we didn’t have a name for it. For me, my feminism has always been grounded in the fact that everything is connected. As Pacheedaht Elder Bill Jones agrees, “everything flows together.”[11] I would add that everything should be flowing together in order to have a healthy and sustainable world but, as one of the most basic factors, the ideology of individualism and hyper-consumerism (patriarchal constructs and unfortunate realities)  keeps us separated from one another, other species and the earth. A patriarchal mantra of ‘divide and conquer’ verges on cliché for a reason.

I am a big picture thinker, writer and scholar. I believe in research and dialogue.

Like everything I write and all of the art I create, this blog will be steeped in research and I welcome all forms of dialogue in response to what will be controversial entries that are meant to dislodge and contribute to an ideological revolution which is our only hope in creating a world without violence. I pledge to you, dear reader and revolutionary, that I will be unrelentingly fierce in living up to my own words of “not accepting what doesn’t have to be true.”[12]

Karen Moe/aka The Logical Feminist.

 

There is no revolution without context: aka Research, Dialogue, and Endnotes! #iloveendnotes

[1] As one of the most prominent examples is the controversy between the idea of free choice to enter the sex industry and coerced choice for ending up there. For discussions of the logical facts that the majority of the time people work in the sex industry because of combinations of economic, race, drug addiction, sexual abuse, sex and gender, see Rachel Moran, Lydia Cacho, Victor Malarek, Finona Broadfoot, Julie Bindel, Simon Häggström, Melissa Farley, myself and countless others, along with the directors of many sexual assault centres I spoke with across Canada during my Trauma & Triumph tour for Victim who expressed the sensitivity of this issue, but fundamentally agreed that there is no choice when one is coerced by marginalization and, in Judith Butler’s words, precarity.

[2] I do not say “white supremacist” patriarchal hierarchy because there are male supremacist cultures like Iran and China where the male perpetrators are not Caucasian. In the colonized contexts of Europe, however, I am referring to white supremacist patriarchal hierarchy. Patriarchy is a predatory system that functions through extreme violence. In Iran, such predation is out in the open and we only need to think of the recent murder of Mahsa Amini on September 16th, 2022 for not obeying the Muslim symbol of female submission as a horrific example of extreme masculine violence wielded in order to maintain power; in the West, the violence to maintain power is more insidious and takes place primarily in the enclaves of the so-called third world, be they outside of the national borders of the first world of the exploiters, or within (we can take Vancouver Canada’s Downtown Eastside and the horrors of post-residential school cycles of sexual violence in particularly remote First Nations communities in Canada (out of sight out of mind) as an examples of third worlds within the first.

[3] Thomas Page McBee. Amateur: A True Story about What Makes a Man. New York: Scribner, 2018: 44.

[4] Robert Jensen The End of Patriarchy: Radical Feminism for Men. Melbourne: Spinifex Press, 2017: 71.

[5] During my Trauma & Triumph Tours in the US and Canada for Victim, I connected with sexual violence centres across North America. During our conversations, it was exhilarating to learn that many of the centres are creating initiatives (as much as funding allows, which is always an issue when a culture does not prioritize dealing with the causes of sexual violence, or even enough to the effects) directed towards young men, the potential perpetrators who are often dual: Victim/perpetrators.

[6] TERF: Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist. SWERF: Sex Worker Exclusionary Radical Feminist.

[7] Sayak Valencia Gore Capitalism. South Pasadena, CA: semiotext(e) intervention series 24, 2018: 273.

[8] Julie Bindel Feminism for Women: the Real Route to Liberation. Great Britain: Constable, 2021: 80.

[9] Ibid: 26.

[10] See Sayak Valenica in Gore Capitalism for an in depth analysis of what she calls “the devastating system of hyper consumerist, gore capitalism” (266) and in particular the dynamic between the third world exploited and the first world exploiter. 

[11] Interview with Elder Bill Jones June 10th, 2022. My next book will be about the colonizing and colonized consciousness. The working title is Re-Indigenize: The Revolution of Pacheedaht Elder Bill Jones. Within the current politically correct confines of Western culture, I will state here that, as a white woman and a descendant of the colonizing culture in Canada, Elder Bill has given me permission to base my book on the story of his life and revolution, so accuse me of cultural appropriation all you want! Ironically, it’s usually other descendents of the colonizing culture (read: white people) who are the most vitriolically politically correct. 

[12] Karen Moe Victim: A Feminist Manifesto from a Fierce Survivor. BC Canada/Mexico City: Vigilance Press, 2022: 153.

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