Tag: feminism

Everyday Lecher

Everyday Lecher

Posted on by Karen Moe

In 2022, I published my first book.

It’s called Victim. For those of you who don’t know about it, the subtitle is: A Feminist Manifesto from a Fierce Survivor. Some people asked me why I called it that, Victim, why I named my book, a manifesto no less, with a word that traditionally denotes weakness and defeat. I responded, as I still do: I named it with reality.

Okay, that still may not fully answer your question because: why is it a reality that a word conventionally equated with weakness has anything to do with strength and even triumph over trauma, as I named my North American book tour? That’s because, even if a person (usually a woman) is a survivor of sexual violence, we are still victims. We are changed. The violation and subsequent trauma never fully goes away. And this doesn’t have to be a bad thing; the same way that the word ‘victim’ isn’t necessarily a bad thing: both are reality. Like I say in Victim, as simultaneously a victim and a survivor, I am “[a]live in the wisdom of what I have survived. Fierce in not accepting what doesn’t have to be true.” (153) And this is certainly true. The fact that I am alive in the wisdom. Because I definitely know a creepy lecher when one leches on me. And I am fierce in not letting him know that it is true: you’re abusing power. Stop.

Last week, I needed help. From a man unfortunately: the financial advisor of my deceased father and now the one who manages my mother’s finances. I am, again unfortunately, one of the many people in the North American land of individualism and excessive personal boundaries, a person whose sister has estranged me. And, yes another unfortunately, she is also the executor of my mother’s will—and my mother isn’t doing well. Recently, I found out my sister could sell the house without my consent. I thought we were all equal: my brother, my sister and I; but, no, mimetic to the hierarchical culture we live in, we’re not. And I also found out—perhaps predictably—that she doesn’t want to lose her power.

I needed advice as to how I won’t lose my home.

The house that I have been living in for the majority of my life since 2016. The house and place that I am very attached to. I certainly wouldn’t have sought his advice if I knew he is an everyday lecher, though. What I mean by the nomenclature “An Everyday Lecher” is because, in patriarchy as a system of ingrained misogyny and power abuse, these kinds of men are everywhere, committing acts of what they construe as a bit of flirtatious fun. It may sound minor. But another “what’s-she-complaining-about?” But it’s not. Sexual harassment is connected to rape. The particular man doing the sexual harassing may not be a rapist, may never go that far; however, it should go without saying as the most obvious logic: everything is connected.

Here’s yet another tale of sexual harassment and power abuse,

in the banality of a Starbucks no less, sipping English Breakfast tea, backgrounded by an Indigo/Chapters, Canada’s most common book store, not to mention but another greedy corporation manspreading around neo-liberal land (re: capitalism on crack). The Everyday Lecher sat down and immediately felt that it was his right to reach across the table and start stroking my skin. He was a dear friend of my father’s after all (and I wonder what my father would have thought of that, the entitled stroking of his daughter’s skin, that is). More: as he stroked and I pulled away, as I was of course taken aback by this friend of my deceased father’s hand lunging across the table, his eyes clamped onto my chest and, laughing playfully, like a goofy Lex Luther (he is kind of a dork), he exclaimed: “I like your ample bosom!”

Okay, you may be thinking: “what’s she complaining about? Things could be so much worse!” Yes, you’re right! They could be. Like the all-out sexual assaults I have survived and been victimized by; like child sex slavery in Cambodia, Myanmar, Thailand, Mexico, Latin America, Africa and wherever another war-torn country is ripped open for a new batch of female vulnerability and male, entitled, violence (don’t get your backs up, men, you’re not all lechers, rapists and sex tourists). Yet, throughout the reading of this post, don’t forget the ‘everything-is-connected-of-course’ reality.   

Then: (because I’ve had challenges with men and found myself in emotionally abusive relationships since the beginning of the string of my relationships with emotionally abusive men due to the emotional abuse inflicted on me in childhood by my father who, himself, was a victim of sexual assault and unresolved trauma and, subsequently, took it out on me, the child he saw the most of himself in), I am quite often single, having just survived another emotionally abusive relationship. Even though the conversation that day in one of the 32,660 Starbucks in the world was supposed to be about probate fees and a strategy to keep my sister from having the ability to sell the house out from under me, the Everyday Lecher’s conversational priority was to comment, every few minutes on how ‘dateable’ I am while continuing to reach across the table and stroke my skin, as he called it, not my arm, but my skin: “I like to stroke your skin,” he kept saying, starting to make me feel very uncomfortable, yet still always surprised when behaviour which shouldn’t be common at all happens in the first place.

I put on my jacket.

Because I was cold. And, I’m not sure but maybe subconsciously, because I wanted to cover myself, make my skin inaccessible to him. I have been afraid of men all of my life. This is because my dad was scary. It’s lessening now. But it’s still there, so I don’t process right away, especially when it’s a dear friend of your deceased father’s and you are kind of shocked this kind of thing would happen in the first place. Again.

“I don’t like it that you put your coat on. I can’t touch your skin now,” he lechered from across just another of millions of round, grey Starbucks tables. My skin started to crawl; the all too familiar anxiety began to roil in the pit of my stomach. And yet, I was there to get some answers, a possible solution as to how to save the house that heals me, how to save my father’s orchard (we had forgiveness at the end of his life—yes, a lot of context to fill you in on like everything in life— which makes the orchard even more precious to me;) my flower garden filled with sweet peas every summer; so many trees that will most likely be cut down by soulless capitalists when the house sells in order to build a monstrosity as monetarily profitably as possible; the beach that has calmed me since childhood with the clearest water where I swim every summer. As I swim, like just ten days ago now, roll around like a euphoric seal, as I float with arms outstretched and am a part of purest water and the bluest sky, I exclaim to myself and to other blissed out swimmers:

“The water is as crystal silk!”

Whenever I am away from this sea and not feeling well, I visualize its expanse, and I feel better. Always. I can’t lose this house. This place. This land. I’ll do virtually anything to keep it, even put up with an everyday-lecher/father’s-financial-advisor’s entitled, creepy advances.

The meeting ends.

There is a sort of possible solution (which ended up didn’t work out and that’s another story about first world individualism, lack of empathy, and more possible familial estrangement). Because he apparently idolized my father, he wants to see my dad’s bicycle, the one I ride when I’m in Canada. Ridiculously—yes, trauma can impel us to do ridiculous, albeit justifiable, things—I became a child again, that little girl who was abused by her father, and I tell the Everyday Lecher about the sweet peas in my garden that grew so tall this year they are a part of the apple tree. He made a comment about my ‘sweet pea’—an obvious clitoral allusion, even without the skin stroking and bosom staring previous. Yuck! The sweet pea comment would be cute coming from a real boyfriend, but from your dad’s investment guy? Yuck! And connecting my deific sweet peas with his lechery? “Men suck!” as my good friend and comrade in calling out sexual violence in all of its forms, Catherine Owen, said when I told her.

The next morning, I had to say something, of course. I texted:

“Don’t feel entitled to touch any part of me and make sexual comments again.” He responded:

“I shouldn’t have been so familial,” his response. Familial?! That’s even creepier! I had to phone him:

“Your behaviour was far from ‘familial.’ Would you insist on stroking your niece’s skin? Comment on her breasts? And then, as the climax of this apparently harmless family affair, make a clitoral innuendo?” He was shocked, the perpetrator became the victim in his patriarchal mind. He went on and on about how he would NEVER do that (the sweet pea part he found particularly ‘hurtful’). His voice was rising with horror and hurt. You did. I stated. I have been leched on by enough men in my 56 years to know a sexual innuendo when I am assaulted by one. And yes, like all of us who have lived through sexual violence, I have PTSD. It surfaced because of this everyday seemingly benign sexual violence from across but another Starbucks table. No thanks. 

In the end, the Everyday Lecher couldn’t respond to my familial rebuttal. How could he? My undermining of his diminishment of sexual harassment to some kind of familial affection rendered him speechless. The object of his abuse of power had made him ridiculous and, hopefully, deep down, to himself as well.

He didn’t help me as much anymore, predictably. All of the assistance he’d promised and empathy he’d given during the meeting disappeared. And, he couldn’t look me in the eye when he came over to give my mom an update on her investments.

Epilogue:

It’s logical that victimhood never fully goes away. It’s logical, too, that we are survivors because we have survived, we are strong and we live with and do not allow the undeniable change we experience by being victimized defeat us. It’s logical that PTSD raises its re-traumatized head when we are assaulted again—even if it’s just some unconsented to skin-touching by a man who was one of your dad’s best friends and not being shoved against a wall or onto a bed or drugged and abducted and raped.

But it doesn’t have to be logical for men to be entitled to touch us, make lascivious comments all in good fun, excuse their power abuse as mere familial affection (I can’t help but wonder if he treats his niece in the same ‘familial’ fashion). It doesn’t have to be logical that we are exaggerating, making something out of nothing, maybe even making it all up. No. Such enculturated-male-in-patriarchy-entitlement that is embedded into the heads of men in positions of power can and must, someday, make no sense. Let’s call them all out. Let’s render all of their justifications and excuses ridiculous.

Me in my beloved garden in Lantzville BC. Where the sweet peas meet the apple trees xoxoxoxoox

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The Doing is the Hope: The War in the Woods is Not Over at Fairy Creek.

The Doing is the Hope: The War in the Woods is Not Over at Fairy Creek.

Posted on by Karen Moe

In 2020 and 2021,

thousands of people came to defend some of the last remaining pristine, temperate old growth forest in the world at Fairy Creek on southern Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada. Surpassing the old growth forest blockades at Clayoquot Sound on the West Coast of Vancouver Island in 1993—known as The War in the Woods—with over 856 forest defenders arrested, Fairy Creek became the largest act of civil disobedience in Canadian History with 1,194 arrests. In May 2021, a court injunction was given to the logging corporation, Teal Jones, by the BC Supreme Court judge that made it illegal to freely protest on unceded Indigenous land of the Pacheedaht, Ditidaht and Huu-ay-aht First Nations and the brutality of the RCMP (Canada’s federal police) “led to serious and substantial infringement of civil liberties, including impairment of the freedom of the press to a marked degree.”[1] The Fairy Creek Blockades became the new War in the Woods.

Because of the Indian Act in 1876 that formally colonized the Indigenous peoples and began both the literal and psychological genocide that continues today, the relations between First Nations people in Canada are extremely complex. The communities are divided. One side is the Band Council, a governing body set up by the Indian Act, that is bribed by the Crown and serves the government and the corporations and supports old growth logging; the other side is the ancestral First Nations who fight to defend the land and revive their traditions and, in Pacheedaht Elder Bill Jones’ words, “re-plant the seed of self-realization” that was taken from the first peoples through the Indian Act and the residential schools. It was and is the Ancestral First Nations who invited the Forest Defenders to help them defend their land and save the pristine eco-systems of the Fairy Creek watershed and its surrounding forests. The Band Council, as puppets who serve the government and the corporations, say that the Forest Defenders are trespassing. The then BC NDP premier John Horgan, through the corporate interests of the mainstream media, said: We have consulted the First Nations. They don’t want the Forest Defenders there. However, all of the First Nations people are not consulted and insidious subterfuge blocks the truth from the average British Columbian, the majority of which want to protect the old growth. As you can see, it’s an insidious mess.

The rapes and murders of Indigenous women are synonymous to the rapes and murders of Indigenous forests.

On June 5th 2021, “the Pacheedaht, Ditidaht and Huu-ay-aht First Nations issued formal notice to the B.C. government of their intention to defer old growth logging in the Fairy Creek and Central Walbran areas for two years.”[2] The mainstream media reported that the forest is being protected; why are the Forest Defenders still there? However, what was not reported by the mainstream media is that the deferred area is only one-third of what was being fought to protect and now, two years later, not only has the majority of the other two-thirds been logged, the two-year moratorium of the other one-third is ending on June 5th. Horrifyingly, on June 8th the deferred forests will re-open for logging. The now BC NDP premier David Eby, despite (or maybe because of) his ambivalent promise for a “paradigm shift” in forestry, has said and done nothing.

We have been invited by Elder Bill Jones and the ancestral First Nations to return to Fairy Creek to witness and fight for the little that is left, the one-third that we were able to temporarily win in 2021 because of the courage and resiliance of the Forest Defenders. We all need to go back, including those of us who weren’t able to come in 2021. There is perhaps nothing more logical than saving some of the last remaining intact ecosystems in the world for the health of our planet and for our children. Not to mention the fact that there is so little left and the ideology of corporate greed is perhaps the least logical way of being possible. With the next five years predicted to be the hottest in human history, logic couldn’t be more obvious.

The beginning of the peaceful renewed protests to save the old growth are beginning on June 4th, 2023 at 11 AM on the BC Legislature lawn in Victoria, BC. If you are in Victoria or can get there, it would be wonderful to have a large group to show the BC and Canadian government, the citizens of BC, and the world that we are still here. And, starting on the week of the 5th of June when the deferral ends, come to Fairy Creek to stand up for the fact that, in the words of Aunty Rainbow Eyez, “We need our Old Growth. The War in the Woods is not finished.”

In honour of making a Come-Back, I’m going back to some of my writing that I wrote during the peak of the Fairy Creek Blockades in the Spring and Summer of 2021. Today, I am re-publishing an article that I wrote for Vigilance Magazine dedicated to the Forest Defenders of Fairy Creek in June 2021. In singer-song writer Luke Wallace’s words: “We can make a come-back … I can be the comeback.”[3] We are all the instigators of truth, justice and logic. The doing is the hope. See you there!

The Logical Feminist aka Tanager.[4]

The Doing is the Hope: The Forest Defenders of Fairy Creek

It’s impossible to doubt when you’re in it.

Noble stands of Hemlock and Yellow Cedar, un-haunted by stumps, the only phantoms the layers of longevity, the conflations of life/death that soothe as they stimulate. There is no one or the other here. Amidst the old-growth, lichen, alive in the brightest possible green, has the texture of kelp. Ocean merges with forest. The air is wet. Mist adorns the rainforest as it rains, feeds itself, and this air, its density of oxygen, feeds us. It is impossible to doubt the necessity to save the intact bio-diversity of Fairy Creek—some of British Columbia’s last—when you have felt exactly what it is that must be saved. When the fibers of your being become acquainted with the fiber of what is being so fiercely fought for. In the words of elder Bill Jones of the Pacheedat Nation, the ancient trees “are guides, teachers, spiritual beings.”[5] When embraced by this absolute ecosystem, our bodies are nourished as our spirits soar. This magic is truth.

When at the Fairy Creek Blockades, I had a life altering experience. This experience is even more profound in that these forests of South West British Columbia have always been cathedrals to me; I know how crucial this battle is; I feel cutting down of old growth as deeply as rape; I know that humans are not the only creature who are violated; I have yelled justified rage when the flesh of an ancient tree is cut into and, when that tree falls and the earth shakes, I have been stung by the stunned silence at the loss of the millions of non-human creatures who lived there. But, until my journey to the blockades at Fairy Creek, I had never felt the warrior spirit of Tree Defenders who will never, as long as any old growth in British Columbia is being threatened, give up. And this warrior spirit, the people who are putting their bodies on the line to save the ancient trees, the people who have made the bodies of trees as important as their own, has made the importance of an untouched ecosystem even more profound. It has consolidated the obvious, what everyone really must know if they dig down deep enough: ancient trees are not objects to be plundered for profit, they are ancestors who must be protected. Beings worthy of worship.

I asked activists: “What do the old growth trees mean to you? How do you feel when you look up at one towering above you?” As is so often the case, kids say it best:

Trinity:

“I feel happy because I can see all of these birds. Birds and their families in the trees. I feel like I’m in a fairy tale because when I see the tall trees and I look up, I feel like something is going to come out of the trees … I really like trees.”

Finn:

“I feel very happy that they are there and I feel like, it’s just so beautiful and I love all the moss and how soft it is and how some trees’ bark is smooth and some is rough and then some have old man’s beard and then you can feel it and then there’s lichen that grows on trees and if you rub it against your skin, it makes it very smooth. Trees give you energy.”

It’s a very long walk to Waterfall Camp.

And that’s only one way. 10 km in; 10 km out. The loggers and the RCMP can drive there. The Tree Defenders have to walk. Carrying water, food, and bags of concrete to build their sleeping dragons with.

Sleeping dragons are holes that the Forest Defenders dig into the logging roads at strategic points; if industry and their RCMP henchmen get through, they will be able to slaughter bio-systems, some trees over one-thousand-years-old. The forests, like a healthy human society could be, are multi-generational: the young coexist with the ancient, the middle-aged reach higher and higher into the multi-layered canopy; the yet undiscovered species thrive without us: insects, birds, owls, and the thickest moss is another forest. All exist in a way of being that we, the destroyers of the West, could learn from if we only thought far enough ahead to survive—and not kill everything else in our wake.

After the RCMP have dismantled a camp, the first thing the Forest Defenders do is come back. And do it all over again. Dig the holes to make the sleeping dragons. Shove in the pipe as wide and as long as an arm. Surround it with concrete. Hurry. Before the RCMP return and fill up the holes with Styrofoam, before we can get our arms back in. Lie across the road. Chain ourselves there. Climb the tripod. Chain ourselves there. Don’t come down from the canopy until it’s saved. These ancient trees, these complete forests, are as important as my body. I witnessed people who have the courage to love the future beyond them.

And wait.

While the others pile up the rocks again. Drag the logs and branches back. Re-assert the blockade vehicle somehow, by people with the superhuman strength of living justice, and get it back across the logging road again. As I approached Waterfall camp, I became acquainted with a heightened level of awe.

On the logging road that curves through a decimated land with its aches of stumps, I encountered Green Duck. Why Green Duck? I asked him about his camp name. I like ducks and my favourite colour is green, he responded. No messing around. Camp name done. Let’s get to work.

I had seen him the night before at a meeting at Hayhaka Camp. Forest Defenders were organizing the installment of a Camp at 2000 Road, another entrance to another cut-block of old growth. Cut-block, I thought. The irony of trees as flesh about to be butchered. He reported something extraordinary that had happened earlier that day. I can’t remember what. But I’ll never forget how. His arms were wide, his stance fortified by pride, his young face animated with the energy of doing the right thing. A young man emanating the power of the ancient trees he is defending.

How’s it going? I asked, standing in the middle of the clear cut, a dead world made of brittle gasps. Victories, triumphs, do you think we’re going to win? My question was irrelevant as soon as it was asked:

“The police arrived at 4 am in hiking gear under cover and not identifying as police officers. One put a hand over a Forest Defender’s mouth so that he couldn’t warn the others. It took them four hours to get someone out of the last sleeping dragon. They’d filled the rest of them, they tore us down by noon and then they were out of there. By 4 pm, we had a four foot blockade up, we had lots of people on the way to come stay the night and help rebuild. It’s astonishing. We’re here for the long haul. We need to re-build that blockade otherwise they’ll move further up that road and that’s what we can’t have. We can’t have them get to those old growth forests. No matter how disheartening those police officers are, no matter how criminal their acts might be, in the end, we’re still here smiling. We’re still here because it’s right, it’s our purpose. We know that if you don’t stand now, there’s no other time to stand. These are the triumphs,” Green Duck told me.

“What were you doing when the last of the old-growth fell?” a placard asks at the Fairy Creek Headquarters. “Everything,” the Forest Defenders act.

 

 

It’s a long walk to Waterfall Camp

and, just when one starts to really wonder how much farther, rows of rocks begin to block the road. Continuing, longing for the destination to be around the next bend, the lines of rocks become wider and taller and are soon topped by branches that form a mesh of sticks and twigs, a chain-link fence made of forest. I knew I was almost there when I came upon a parade of RCMP trucks along with their battalion of men and the token woman; those who pose as public servants but behave like mercenaries. “Are you OK?” the one woman cop asks Forest Defenders who have their arms self-locked into logging roads during a routine safety check. “Of course I’m not OK,” the silent Forest Defender doesn’t answer. “None of this is OK!” the hypocrisy of such a question rings through the forests under threat.

The police trucks can only go so far until they have to clear another barricade. The cops are becoming increasingly grumpy as they bend and hurl and bend and hurl stacks of rocks that are never going to end because the Forest Defenders will always put them back. You see, unlike in countries like Mexico, Honduras, Columbia, and Brazil[6] where environmentalists are most expediently silenced, the grumpy Canadian cops will always have to keep moving rocks and logs and, so far, cannot fully serve their system of exploitation and simply assassinate these pesky people who care beyond themselves. Canada is a first world country after all. We have human rights. I will not use the disclaimer of ‘so-called’ here because, in terms of human rights, despite the atrocities the nation state of Canada commits against Indigenous peoples, we can still protest. We can still dissent. As we did in 1994 where over 20,000 protesters saved the Upper Carmanah; as when a significant portion of Clayoquot Sound was designated a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve in 2000 because the protesters didn’t give up for two decades. Both of these wins are far from perfect, but they were still possible. We can still win. Something. We still have some human rights. Especially the white people. Another reason why we descendants of colonizers need to join the front lines that our culture has made necessary.

I keep walking.

Up the hill of the final stretch to Waterfall Camp. The police move in circles of hurling more rocks and then standing to discuss the endlessness of it all. And then deciding, OK hurl some more rocks, drag away a few more logs. Waiting out their shifts. They let me pass. I say I’m writing a fair story. That wasn’t a lie.

And then I saw them. Separated from the approaching RCMP by three more victorious barricades, a group of forty or so Forest Defenders, defiant behind their final wall of stones and sticks, resistance art, juts and weaves of forest on top of sharp stones left behind by recent blasting, installations that await the arrival of those paid to tear them down.

These were the people Green Duck had told me about. The ones who’d been up all night. Re-building. And now waiting for the cops. Arms locked in sleeping dragons. A young woman wearing a mask that proclaims “Revolution” towers defiance from a tripod. The others a wall of not-giving-up. Ready as they are every day. When this scenario plays out again. They know each other. The cops and the Forest Defenders. A ridiculous round and round. Madness when the answer is so sane. “See you tomorrow,” a young woman called out with a grin on that Saturday afternoon when they won and the police retreated. Tired of hurling rocks as the Forest Defenders stacked three for every one they cleared. We can still do this. They cheer.

As the RCMP approach the blockades the Forest Defenders chant: “We want your children to see these forests too!” And I wonder, what must the police officers think when they hear this? They must. Hear. Something.

Why are you here? Testimonies of Truth:

Because these forests originated after the last ice age, so some of the trees are about one thousand-years-old. Fairy Creek is a single intact valley and there is no reason, except absolute greed, to log it. This is priceless. I’m here because I decided that it’s time to defend the side that’s right. I’m doing this for my children and my grandchildren who will want me to save these trees. This is priceless. I’m here standing for the trees because when I went back to the magical place where the chanterelle mushrooms grew, the whole forest was eliminated. Priceless. It’s impossible to replant the wild. This is priceless. We deeply care about the old-growth forest, the biodiversity and the ecosystems. We’re Indigenous and the lands are very sacred to us. There are so many layers to saving and preserving the forest. This is beyond commerce. Priceless. I’m here because the continued colonization of the Indigenous peoples operates through a silencing of the lack of full consent by publicizing the coerced. Because the government and the RCMP are at the service of corporations and the mainstream media never tells the whole truth. This is priceless. This is priceless. I’m here as a barrier between colonial violence and the land, between the loggers and the old growth and between the RCMP and the Indigenous youth. Because I know that even if the last of the old growth is logged, the current forestry practice is unsustainable. This is priceless. I’m here because clearcutting respects absolutely nothing. Because I want my grandkids to grow up and see thousand year old trees. They’re five and six. This is priceless. And if I have to get arrested, I get arrested. I came here because I love trees and I love our planet. I’m here because I want there to be life for future generations. Priceless. What they’re doing is arresting people, but they can’t arrest our hope. I stand in solidarity with elder Bill Jones and the Pacheedaht who have not been consulted because they say No.

At the end of this always journey for justice,

I climbed up to Cloud Camp, through an ancient forest that silently, oh so generously, gives us breath. It poured that day. The mud lay as banks of snow. It couldn’t have been more perfect. I had come to meet the Tree-Sitters.

I climbed and slipped and descended into lush valleys that ring with the indescribable calls of Tanagers. Mae West lopped past, effortless, the extent of his determination had grown into an acute awareness of slippery roots and trails that thread along cliffs, so deadly now as the rain didn’t stop. The trees became larger, some with planks for the Tree-Sitters primed for the warning: “The police are here!” I arrived clothed in mud. A circle of Tree-Sitters sat with their dripping tarp and warming fire. Dora told me that tree-sitting for days is like being in a monk cell in the canopy. Red talked of tarpology as he prepared to climb up and get to work because an old growth forest had healed him. A young woman said: the trees are home.

I came upon Lorax high up in a hemlock, flying on a perch made from a boat. How long will you be up there? My question. As long as it takes. His answer.

I asked him what he’d been doing. A bit of writing this morning, he said. What? I responded. I’ve written a poem. The rain continued: loving, laughing, irreverent. A perfect finale for these stories of unrelenting life. Will you read it to me? And he did. From high up in a hemlock, a Tree-Sitter living for as long as it takes in a flying boat in a rainforest that still has the chance to always nourish the earth. Because the Forest Defenders have made it so.

Let’s give the last words to Lorax:

Click play to hear Lorax’s poem!

All photos by Karen Moe

*

#iloveendnotes:

[1] https://thenarwhal.ca/topics/fairy-creek-blockade/

[2] https://thediscourse.ca/vancouver-island/old-growth-logging-deferrals-fairy-creek

[3] Lyrics by @lukewallacemusic

[4] My camp name at Fairy Creek. The Tanager is a golden bird of the temperate rainforest. They are rare and are one of the thousands of species that are threatened to become extinct by old growth logging.

[5] Quoted on the Rain Forest Flying Squad’s Facebook post on June 7th, 2021.

[6] https://www.cfr.org/in-brief/who-killing-latin-americas-environmentalists

About the Blogger:

Karen Moe is an art critic, visual and performance artist, author and feminist activist. Her work focuses on systemic violence in patriarchy: be it gender, race, the environment or speciesism. Her art criticism has been published internationally in magazines, anthologies and artist catalogues in English and Spanish and she has exhibited and performed across Canada, in the US and in Mexico. She is the author of Victim: A Feminist Manifesto from a Fierce Survivor: Vigilance Press, 2022. Born and raised in British Columbia, Canada, Karen now lives in Mexico City. 

 

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Irrefutable: Last Girl First Proves the Absolute Necessity to Abolish Prostitution.

Irrefutable: Last Girl First Proves the Absolute Necessity to Abolish Prostitution.

Posted on by Karen Moe

I don’t think anyone

can read this book and still support the sex trade in any way—well-meaning as some of that support may be.[1] I don’t think anyone will be able to view prostitution as not only a job like any other, but necessary and beneficial to, paradoxically, the world’s most vulnerable people who would have no other way to survive if their bodies were not commodified. Rigorously researched, Last Girl First: Prostitution at the intersection of sex, race & class-based oppressions[2]is a testament that proves the abolition of the sex trade is absolutely necessary. This book is irrefutable logic. If you support the sex trade in any way, I dare you to read it.

From the first page, the study opens the reader to the big picture. It is crucial to look at a system of exploitation as a whole rather than cling to the delusion of individual choice being somehow separate from the system that we are all an intrinsic part of. Right away, the book demonstrates the necessity of revolutionizing the ideology of individualism that is responsible for upholding the exploitation of the other in order to serve the self. In this book, the sex trade as a system is thoroughly exposed in order to comprehend completely and be motivated to act accordingly:

“Prostitution does not only involve the person in prostitution but also other actors such as the sex buyer who imposes a sexual act for money and the pimp, who profits from the prostitution of the prostituted person. It is therefore important to decentralise the view: prostitution is not an individual choice but a social and commercial system that is exploitative.” [3] (Italics mine)

The view of the sex trade and all exploitation in neo-liberal[4] patriarchy must include all that produces it, maintains it and, most importantly, all who are devastated by it.

The indisputable fact that prostitution is a gendered atrocity is an intrinsic part of the contextualization of the study. Even though it should go without saying: the main gender sold are women and the main buyers men. It’s impossible to claim otherwise. Yes, there are a tiny percentage of women who purchase sex and, thereby, participate in the capitalist disparity of power abuse between the bought and the sold; however, this is such a small percentage and, as such, it is ridiculous to attempt to use a smattering of first world women to undermine the reality of the male buyer and female bought in a male-supremacist hierarchy.[5] In order for a hierarchy to uphold what is at the top, those below must be exploited. As a revolutionary tract that looks at the system as a whole, Last Girl First lists each of the micro-hierarchies that reinforce one another and produce the buying and selling of “the most socially, economically, psychologically and ethnically disadvantaged groups…: patriarchy, racism, colonialism, class, war and militarisation.”[6] It is through the interaction of these oppressions that men exploit (predominantly) women’s or girls’ bodies for their sexual ‘pleasure’—or pathology.

Don’t agree yet? Okay, here’s a bit of so much more:

After the wholistic definition of prostitution as a system

of sexual exploitation is laid out, a glossary of terms is provided where each component of the sex trade is defined so that there will be absolute clarity in not only the terms that will be used in the book, but also, the scope of normalized exploitation. The purpose of this book is two-fold: to prove the sex trade’s inherent violence as undeniable and a system that must be abolished, and to change mentalities and perceptions of women in society and, ultimately, eradicate demand. The Glossary lists: a person in prostitution/prostituted person (as opposed to the politically correct, misleading and damaging term ‘sex-worker’); survivor of prostitution; sex buyer; child sex tourism, sex tourism; pimping, the pimp; trafficking in human beings for the purpose of sexual exploitation; the “red light districts/areas”; brothels; indigenous people; minority; migrant person; refugee; asylum seeker; internally displaced person. Next, the different legislative approaches to prostitution are explained: The Abolitionist Model also known as the Nordic Model or the Equality Model; The Partial Decriminalisation Model”; The Regulatory Model also known as the Legalisation Model or the Total Decriminalisation Model; and The Prohibitionist Model. Once all of the parts of the system have been explained, the foundation within which all of these parts interact is given.

“Throughout time and history, women and girls from systemically discriminated and marginalised communities have always been disproportionately targeted by the prostitution system. Socio-economic factors and historical and political trends contribute to their over-representation in the prostitution system.”[7]

Weaving together statistics, personal stories from prostitution survivors, and reports from organizations like Kafa (Enough) Violence and Exploitation in Lebanon, Breaking Free USA, Indigenous Women Against the Sex Industry (Canada), The National Center for Youth Law, the Columbian NGO Initiativa Pro Equidad, and Apne Aap India (to name a few sources of front lines testimonies provided in the first 51 pages), Last Girl First builds its analysis of prostitution as an intersection of sex, race and class-based oppression and proves how no oppression exists in isolation. Everything is connected; systemic analysis is essential for understanding.

When one thinks and feels in the big picture context of

exploitation of which sexual violence is a part, it should be glaringly obvious that the women and girls at the bottom of the patriarchal—most often white supremacist, but always male supremacist[8]—hierarchy suffer most. And, in a far from post-colonial world where the racializing, capitalist infrastructure is perhaps more voracious than ever, prostitution is a continued mechanism of colonization and profit. The beginning of Last Girl First moves from the over-representation of indigenous women in prostitution in Canada and the US, to the legacy of the British colonization of India, to the contemporary colonization of Tibet by China, resource extraction like mining and oil and gas by international corporations and sex tourism. We are given the infrastructure of the sex trade as a part of the history of imperialist patriarchy and capitalism whereby the women of the conquered people are converted to commodities to be exploited along with the land that was—and continues to be—taken from them.

In the next section, women and girls from oppressed castes in Asia are discussed along with asylum seekers and migrants. From the cut-throat perspective of patriarchal capitalism, the displacements of war are a great source of sexually commodifiable women and girls. As one of many statistics in this chapter informs: “In Europe, migrant women and girls are estimated to represent 84% of women in prostitution in thirteen European countries.”[9] Anyone who says that the legalization of prostitution in Germany is a “but a job opportunity like all others” needs to know that 90% of the (always very young) women being bought in Germany’s mega-brothels are migrant women predominantly from Eastern Europe and Africa and, now, with the war in the Ukraine, the displaced women of the Ukraine have become a large source of women trafficked to the legal brothels of Western Europe. As a manifestation of one of the many horrors of legalized prostitution in countries like Australia and Germany, the women are dehumanized in order to fulfill the sex-buyer’s demand to “own the woman [and] … do whatever you want with her.”[10] In one of the 3,500 registered brothels in Germany, “nearly 1,700 sex buyers flocked … during the opening weekend, complaining afterwards on forums about … women no longer being ‘consumable’ and ‘worn out’ after a few hours.”[11] Bound by the reductionist ideology of free choice for all, the women working legally in these mega-brothels need to service six men per day before they make any money themselves. So, basically, not only are the always younger and younger women brutalized and traumatized by six different men, they are not even being paid for their suffering. Like in the Netherlands and Austria where prostitution is also legalized, German nationals with the security and opportunities provided to women who are not displaced by war have better things to do with their lives—like take advantage of state-funded university, as one of many non-exploitative opportunities available to the privileged—than voluntarily signing up for a career of dehumanization.

One of my next books is going to be on child sex slavery. Not only do such horrors need to be exposed (what I call and will entitle my book, “inconceivable reality”), the fact that child sex slavery exists at all is absolute evidence that the system of exploitation we live in needs to be revolutionized. Last Girl First defines minors in the sex trade as “an alarming phenomenon which is constantly on the rise worldwide.”[12] As the basis for despicability in patriarchy as a system of male impunity, one surely cannot be affected by the fact that “[t]he demand for ‘virgin’ girls illustrates the relationships of control and domination at work in the prostitution system.”[13] An example in Mexico is provided where virgin girls are offered to sex-buyers at a high price. One could say, “Oh well, that’s Mexico. It doesn’t happen in civilized countries like Canada, for example.” But wait, we then find out that “[i]n Canada, the average age of entry into prostitution is reported to be 13.”[14] Yes, atrocity is in the back yard of the so-called first world if we take the time to look and/or read books like Last Girl First. If sex buyers are looking for younger and younger girls to exploit (and we must not forget that the majority of sex buyers seeking young girls in countries like Mexico are sex tourists from countries like Canada and the US), there is no things-are-getting-better-for-women when we include all women as the male fetish for the conquest of vulnerability is stronger than ever—not to mention the lack of empathy necessary to be able to pay to rape a child.

I ask:

do you want to be involved in this in any way except to fight for its abolition? Any justification of prostitution as sex “work” and work like all others along with the ideology of freedom of choice—including, paradoxically, circumstantial and coerced ‘choice’—maintains such horrors. Period.

It needs to be read;

I’m not going to explicate the whole book for you. This is one of those books where you can flip to any page and find more truth backed up by both primary and secondary research. When I read—especially such an important book of revolution as Last Girl First—I have a pencil handy. I underline, parenthesis, asterisk, exclamation mark, write “Wow!” “WTF?” or “Arggghhh!” on the margins. This is one of the books where I have been compelled to underline and asterisk almost the whole thing. What follows is a collage of some of the parts that leapt off of the page for me:

Women and girls from systemically discriminated communities … disproportionate impact … the sources of prostitution … the structural and systemic discrimination inherited from colonialism … in Canada … children from First Nations communities … represent 90% of the victims of sexual exploitation where Indigenous represents less than 10% of the population … victims are sold in Moldova, Romania or Bulgaria for a few hundred Euros and then taken to Turkey, the Balkans or Cyprus where exploiters enslave them and break down any will to resist by using gang rape, food deprivation, confinement and physical violence … before sending them to Western Europe to satisfy male demand … Roma women … Dom ethnic women … prostitution as a weapon of war … Iraq … Myanmar … “spoils of war” … a culture of impunity for perpetrators … sex buyers who take advantage of extreme poverty … prostitution in exchange for food … is actually part of a wider oppression inflicted by dominant groups on dominating groups … in 2018, between fifteen and twenty thousand minors were identified as victims of sexual exploitation in Cambodia, a country described as a “key destination” for paedocriminals travelling in South East Asia … in Brazil, a leading sex tourism destination, many sexual predators—mainly from Western Europe and the United States—travel to the coastal and north-eastern tourist regions seeking to force sex on children … the glamourization and trivialisation of prostitution, as well as the perception of women’s and girls’ bodies as objects of remuneration, “a means of making a career” and even tools for emancipation, contribute to the increase in prostitution of minors and students … “Student Sex Work Toolkit” … when asked why they “entered” prostitution, 88% said “needed money” and “hungry” … sex 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 … sex buyers, in a position of power because they have the financial advantage, reportedly pay women in prostitution 66-79% less if the latter insist on using a condom … for 90% of the women surveyed, their first sexual encounter was in fact a sexual assault or rape … in the United States, overall, 20% of homeless youth are LGBTQ, while the latter represents 58.7% of victims of sexual exploitation on the streets … discourses normalising and promoting prostitution as a desirable and emancipatory economic option for LGBTQ people contribute to encouraging their entry and confinement in the system … in the UK … 95% of women in street prostitution use crack or heroin … in Canada and the US, all members of the Indigenous communities, with the aim of breaking all links with their original culture—considered as inferior—and to replace it with patriarchal and individualistic colonial codes … PATRIARCHY AT  THE ROOT OF THE PROSTITUTION SYSTEM … male domination at work in patriarchy involves the establishment of a continuum of sexist and sexual violence aimed at maintaining the established order … while prostitution is portrayed as free choice for some, … it first and foremost affects those who have the least choice.

These are some of the parts I underlined and asterisked to page 111 in a 193 page book. Can anyone not acknowledge these undisputable and impeccable sourced statistics and testimonies? (If so, please comment at the end of this post and share why and how this is possible! If you’ve come to my blog, you obviously care about justice. Dialogue is essential for understanding and transformation that serves justice for all).

As I wrote in my first post on prostitution,

I have often been accused and chastised especially by politically correct, pro-prostitution academics: “How would you know and what right do you have to speak about this, to have an opinion, if you have never literally been in the sex industry?” And, yes, they are right: I have never literally been one of the majority of circumstantially coerced women and girls or one of the 1% of women who gloat that they freely choose what everyone else has been scathed by[15]; however, not only have I been a victim and survivor of sexual violence on three occasions, I am also a woman in patriarchy. And, like all women in patriarchy, (and men conditioned to abuse emotionally and/or physically and who have, in Robert Jensen’s words, a crippled capacity to be fully human[16]) I am personally affected by the normalisation of that which rapes us. As Last Girl First states, all of the factors in the system of sexual violence “are cross-cutting: they do not only apply to women from systemically discriminated communities but go beyond this categorisation and affect women in general.”[17]  

If you were already an abolitionist before reading this or if I have convinced you, it should go without saying that I cannot recommend the importance of this book enough; if you still think that there is something good about the buying and selling of bodies and that sex-work is a necessary and benign employment opportunity, I cannot recommend the importance of reading this book even more. I have striven to give a representation of the researched reality that composes Last Girl First: the intersection of sex, race & class-based oppressions. Read it. Please. Then get back to me. It is one of my greatest wishes that everyone not only comprehends, but feels and acts on the logic of abolishing the sex trade.

Your friend in justice for everyone and everything always,

The Logical Feminist.

Order a copy of Last Girl Firsl: Prostitution at the intersection of sex, race & class here.

PS: If you have found this post provocative and important,  share the logic!       

#iloveendnotes

[1] The reasoning for the Sex Work is Work platform is that de-stigmatizing prostitution and making it a job like any other will increase the safety of prostituted people. The very need to increase the safety of people in the sex industry is proof in itself that prostitution is not just another job. Moreover, countries like Germany, Australia and New Zealand that have legalized and decriminalized prostitution have not resulted in an increase of safety and security for the world’s most vulnerable people. Instead, sexual violence and the use of a woman or girl’s body for the sexual relief of a man has been normalized. Read this book: Last Girl First: Prostitution at the intersection of race & class-based oppressions, Kat Banyard’s Pimp State: Sex, Money and the Future of Equality and Julie Bindel’s The Pimping of Prostitution: Abolishing the Sex Work Myth for three researched books that explain what has really happened and happens when prostitution is accepted (and even embraced) as a legitimate part of society.

[2] Last Girl First: Prostitution and the intersection of sex, race & class-based oppression. CAP International (Coalition Abolition Prostitution) with research conducted by Héma Sibi. Translated from the French by Karl Walsh, 2022.

[3] Last Girl First: 6.

[4] Neo-liberalism, served by individualism, greed, the unregulated free market and globalisation, is capitalism on steroids.

[5] At a recent presentation of my book Victim that is about sexual violence and a conversation that inevitably led to prostitution, a woman brought up the fact that so-called first world, middle-aged women travel to destinations like the Dominican republic in order to take advantage of the global economic disparity and enjoy the sexual services of young men. This is true. 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. I think it is safe to say that women do not go to so-called third world sex tourist destinations to pay thousands of dollars to rape a child. Although I do not condone power abuse on any level, comparing male sex tourism to first world women’s dalliances in the Caribbean are only superficially comparable. As I responded to the woman who brought up women sex tourists (of course, a valid question and comment): they never result in organ damage.

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

[6] Last Girl First: 7.

[7] Ibid:18.

[8] It is important to note that not all prostitution occurs in white-supremacist patriarchies that were lborn of European colonialism. In Israel and Lebanon, for example, women from the Slavic countries of eastern Europe are trafficked as ‘Natasha’s’ and their white skin and often red hair are fetishized by Israeli and Lebanese men (See Lydia Cacho Slavery Inc.: The Untold Story of the International Sex Trade and Victor Malarek The Natashas: The New Global Sex Trade and The Johns: Sex for Sale and the Men Who But It). In Iraq the Yazidi minority [is] targeted  by the armed group Islamic state where the women are subjected to acts of sexual enslavement (LGF 141-142). Tibet, as an imperial victim of China, is also a prostitution destination where the male predators are predominantly non-European. Moreover, in especially Cambodia and Myanmar, Chinese and Japanese sex-buyers are rampant along with their Caucasian counterparts. The Yakuza (Japanese mafia) are also key players in not only the prostitution in Japan, but also in South East Asia along. And, we cannot leave out the Korean comfort women of Japanese Imperialism. Even though white men brought prostitution to colonial contexts like North America by exploiting Indigenous women (and this is certainly not to trivialize the impact of European colonialism and the sexual violence that continues to be inflicted upon Indigenous women today), they did not invent it: men did in the masculine supremacist hierarchy that is Patriarchy which spans cultures and races.

[9] Last Girl First: 36.

[10] Ibid: 91-92.

[11] Ibid: 167.

[12] Ibid: 48.

[13] Ibid: 49.

[14] When I was on my Trauma & Triumph Tour for Victim in 2022, I connected with sexual assault non-profits around the US and Canada. When in Kenora, Ontario Canada, I found out that young indigenous women from the reservations are abducted and taken to resorts on the Lake of the Woods to sexually service (read: be raped by) men. Canadian men don’t have to go to sex tourist destinations like Brazil or Cambodia: they can be sex tourists in their own country.

[15] Like feminist Meghan Murphy says, the privileged 1% of prostituted women who claim to be, or are, unscathed and preach the glamour and legitimacy of sex work as a good job opportunity, “drag everyone else under the bus.” https://www.feministcurrent.com/2013/08/02/interview-meghan-murphy-on-the-sex-industry-individualism-online-feminism-and-the-third-wave/

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

[17] Last Girl First: 47.

About the Blogger:

Karen Moe is an art critic, visual and performance artist, author and feminist activist. Her work focuses on systemic violence in patriarchy: be it gender, race, the environment or speciesism. Her art criticism has been published internationally in magazines, anthologies and artist catalogues in English and Spanish and she has exhibited and performed across Canada, in the US and in Mexico. She is the author of Victim: A Feminist Manifesto from a Fierce Survivor: Vigilance Press, 2022. Karen lives in Mexico City.

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Follow Up. Fallout. Part Two.

Follow Up. Fallout. Part Two.

Posted on by Karen Moe

I don’t think she will ever read this.

And if she does, I hope that will be a good thing, that she will find some validity, some truth in what I am about to write and what I wrote in the first part of this double post: “Follow up. Fallout.” The reason these two posts are named thusly is because of the post previous: “What Fresh Hell is This? Same Old, Same Old” where a young woman calls herself the “modern whore” and adds to the myth that women can be empowered sex objects, that everyone can be one of the privileged 1% in the sex industry who go unscathed making happy memories of naughty and, yes of course, money—money that is represented as virtually free or, like the prostitution “sex work as work like all others” progenitors of the 80s Annie Sprinkle and Scarlott the Harlot celebrated, getting paid for sexually servicing men was a fringe benefit rather than the point of an inevitably unbalanced monetary exchange (and, as such, ironically, it wasn’t even the regular work they were claiming it to be at all). As abolitionist and prostitution survivor Rachel Moran states: “The only thing prostitution ever liberated me from was homelessness.”[1]

In capitalism, where the one paying always has power over the one being paid, there is no such thing as ‘free money’ as much as there is no such thing as prostitution being work like all others or abuse being liberation. I don’t know about you, but I have never had to give a blow job or let my boss bang me before work; I think I can safely say that myself along with the majority of wage labourers have never not been very aware of the fact that we are working for money and, most often, wouldn’t have performed said services without a pay cheque in mind. And, unless I was truly desperate to feed and house my children or support a drug addiction,[2] I—and I think I can also safely say pretty much all women—would never voluntarily sign up for an occupation on par with active warfare where women are routinely beaten, raped, maimed and killed.[3] But then, the happy hookers named above are either in denial of this reality and/or of the upper echelons of the all-in-one-piece 1% who, because of the cloisters of political correctness and fear of being SWERFed,[4] are able to speak for all people trapped in the sex trade and spread the dogma of the empowerment and even the glamour to be gained when selling one’s body (or, most often for everyone else in the sex trade, having their bodies sold by a pimps or traffickers)[5]. In the end, the good fortune of the modern whore, self-proclaimed pro-sex feminists (implying the rest of us are anti-sex), and sex-work as work advocates[6] affects self-righteous hyper-sexualization of many young women and implemented a revised misogyny that has become embedded in Western culture five decades later.

The fallout I am referring to in these posts about a young woman/teenage girl I know has to do with just these tendencies: the cultural patterns that emerged in the third wave feminism of the 80s and 90s when, in a lot of ways, feminism stopped being feminism at all as a political movement to challenge and ultimately dismantle patriarchy as a hierarchy that has to oppress in order to exist, as a male supremacist hierarchy that began and is centered on the oppression and exploitation of women by men. In feminist activist and author Julie Bindel’s words: “the authentic meaning of feminism is the liberation of women from male supremacy.” In the 80s and 90s though, regardless of women using their sexual liberation as a one-track-mind form of feminism, what has really happened is sex positive feminists have maintained and even fed what they claim to be liberating us from.

In the 90s and early 2000s,

empowered lap dancers and retro Betty Page style burlesque performers took center stage of what it meant to be liberated and all liberation was reduced to sex. Now, in the 2020s, this prioritization of sex has resulted in the hyper-sexualization of young women— along with and as a result of—their unwitting internalized sexism. As sex trade industry advocate Gail Dines says about the contemporary state of young womanhood: “either you’re fuckable, or you’re invisible.” And the young woman I know certainly isn’t going to stand for that.

If you haven’t read Follow Up. Fallout. Part One yet, I recommend you do so as to get the beginning of the chronology of where we’re going to arrive. I started out with Billie Eilish’s mega-hit “Bad Guy” and now we are about to devolve into NLE Choppa’s “Slut Me Out.” When the young woman first emerged from my neglected TikTok account (it mysteriously pocket dials; I have maybe five followers; whenever it turns on with a blare, it’s her), I didn’t think, as a feminist and survivor, I could be more horrified. However, with the latest blast, I found out I could. There was her pouty, pretty, indifferent face again, recently developed cleavage, heavy black eyelashes that inevitabilize bedrooms or pending back allies, her nostrils flaring into a fraudulent I’m-so-tough sneer, fraudulent because, like the oxymoron of an empowered lap dancer, any liberation this teenage girl is performing is all about attracting the coveted male gaze in patriarchy. Again. However, I think she actually knows this; this is what she wants and lives for: male attention and trumping other young women as the most desired and, hence, fuckable. And yes, over one-hundred TikTok hearts maintains what I pray is not going to become a fatal fraud.

“Slut Me Out” by NLE Choppa

is two minutes of can’t-get mo’-bad-ass-than-this. If you are sixteen or so and want to impress everyone at high school that you are so cool you’re beyond caring about anything including yourself, this is the song for you. The song starts, (as she did):

“Rip off my shirt if you love me
Spit in my face when you fuck me
Play with my gooch while you suck me
Suck my dick like you was ugly
I’m mean … Hello.”

Let’s start with the last line which is, because of its enigmatic and provocative manner of utterance, the hook. Flat, unfeeling intonation: “I’m mean … Hello” is stated as a sinister ‘oops’ emoji: as in I didn’t mean to, I take no responsibility for my actions and gee whiz aren’t I always inculpably cute in my exquisitely honed, solipsistic indifference? In a culture that is breeding new heights of individualism and self-righteous I-don’t-give-a-shit-about-anyone-expect-myself, the song and video are the opposite of empathy; they are sensationalized desensitization, a glamourized meanness filigreed with a ‘Hello’ that conjures a malevolent lost puppy. He’s stylishly numb: timbre pouting indifference, voice flat—as was hers in her one verse TikTok lip synch.

Continuing our explication from the bottom up,

“Suck my dick like you was ugly” plays right into the misogynist trope where young women who don’t fit into the category of ‘pretty’ are not even on the periphery of the in-crowd and have to work harder to get the male approval necessary to even exist. It’s assumed that this debasement and hard work sucking his cock more avidly than others is both a privilege and an honour. In a culture that pits women against one another in the fight to be the most desired by men, the pretty girls get satisfaction out of knowing they rise above those who don’t make the misogynist grade with their pert noses and butts to match and the constant grooming prioritized surfaces entail. However, all is not triumph for the young and the pretty. Because they succeed in attracting more attention from young men as ‘hot’ and, if they hyper-sexualize themselves in order to make the most of this, they will be deemed sluts and, thereby, presumed to be asking for and deserving to be sexually assaulted—which of course they often are.[7]

As young women self-objectify, their use-value is reinforced in a male supremacist culture and young men see women as things to be used more than ever before. This is certainly not to excuse them. Young men need to be educated on sexual violence and all young people need to be taught empathy. However, it’s reality. It’s logic. As young women strut down high school corridors in high-cropped, low cut tops and sparkling pierced navels,[8] young men, with their teeming testosterone, will be aroused. (Jordan Peterson is definitely correct on this point, but certainly not when according to him the hormone besieged boys don’t have to take any responsibility for not being able to control themselves). The use of date rape drugs is escalating in high schools[9] and as the teenager girl I know performs enjoying, wanting and condoning abuse, male impunity in patriarchy will escalate to the point where, because young women are literally asking to be raped, it is, therefore, consensual and no longer a crime.

And what is a slut, exactly,

now when so many derogatory terms have been appropriated and empowered or de-derogatized? As another late 20th and 21st Century prioritization of sexuality as female liberation, slut walks of the so-called first world are manifestations of a woman’s autonomy over her body and sexuality. Fine. Of course, we want the right to our bodies and to be free to choose our sexual lifestyles. But is that all there is to a slut walk: sexual autonomy? On the surface, yes—which is significant in itself as sexual liberation is again the only point—but when we flesh it out, like all cultural phenomenon, there’s much more than is-that-all-there-is.

Julie Bindel points out “the astonishment of feminists in the Global South [that] we continue to have slut walks” when in a third world reality survival is central. Bindel tells us how the FTN (free the nipple) campaign[10] that, like so-called empowered lap dancers and voluntary prostitutes, once again serves the male gaze and his sexual pleasure they line the streets to watch the liberated nipples—read: still sexualized women’s breasts. From a global perspective, the slut walk is directly connected to the sex-work-as-work mantra that, significantly, is not espoused by the majority of prostituted people who live on the peripheries of privilege in literal third world countries like Cambodia and Nigeria and in the third worlds that exist in the first in such places as Vancouver’s BC, Canada’s, Downtown Eastside low track.[11]

And so, back to the question: what is a slut?

According to the always relevant dictionary definition in regards to the history and predominant cultural understanding of the word: “a person, especially a woman, who is sexually promiscuous” (italics mine).[12] Regardless of slut walks attempting to liberate the term from its degrading and specifically gendered female definition that originated in the 15th Century, when NLE Choppa’s “Slut Me Out” is lip-synched by a teenage girl on TikTok, the dictionary definition is the only definition. This is how she has been conditioned in this era of feminist backlash to define herself. And this is how she is defined: easy, fuckable, usable, and rape-able. And, as an added bonus for men, she has tacitly exclaimed: “Sign me up for all.”

Of course, there is also a psychologically abusive twist that maintains the physical as NLE Choppa asks the women to:

“Where your friend
Bring your buddy
I don’t think you enoughie”

Okay, even though I’m doing everything you want me to in order to not be ostracized in patriarchy as undesirable by men, thanks for the blow to my self-esteem to keep me in my abuse-compliant place. If that isn’t enough, I am framed as trying really hard to fulfill his fantasy of domination when apparently my “favourite thing to say is ‘Cuff Me,’” (italics mine, again). The women represented in “Slut Me Out” are voluntarily demeaned zombies where the center of their worth—their favourite desire ever—is to willingly submit to a man and, even then, not be enoughie.

However,

in a way, the song can be construed as not as offensive and harmful in the fight to end violence against women because it is sung by a man. When I first heard it coming out of the mouth of a teenage girl, though, I assumed it was sung by a woman and I was surprised—and a bit relieved in the moment—when I discovered otherwise. The lyric that made me hot with rage, horror and heartache when it was blasted at me from her TikTok is “spit in my face when you fuck me.” Yikes. Yuck. A man spat in my face once and I left him. How did this happen? How did what could be referred to as misogyny on crack get through all that feminists have fought for since the 70s? And yet, now that I know the ‘me’ is most likely ‘him,’ that’s a bit better, and there is a third person (or persons) who are definitely women that supports the possibility that this ‘me’ is a ‘he.’ And yet, once again, as with the attempted transformation of carved-in-cultural-consciousness definition of slut as a dirty and promiscuous female, when the lyric “spit in my face when you fuck me” is celebrated by a hyper-sexualized young woman on social media and rewarded with hundreds of likes, there is no possibly male ‘me’—it’s all ‘she.’

Of course, I have no problem when cocky men turn the misogyny that their gender is responsible for onto themselves. However, this possibility is short-lived as very soon—to his narcissistic glee—women are stereotypically climbing all over him as he leans back luxuriating on black satin pillows and are ever-so-faithfully, tirelessly, on top. Naturally, in patriarchy with the pre-requisite of bigger the better, he states (definitely no longer the target of his own misogyny):

“Big dick energy, I give it
Don’t believe me then come feel it
Gon’ put this here in your kidney.”

Okay, even better! Damage my organs with your huge dick! Please! And then, promoting the plague of male emotional unavailability: “Don’t text me.”

But wait, the horror!:

poor, massive-cocked, glorified mean-guy is trapped by a lascivious flight attendant in the closet, his now puppy-dog eyes begging duped girl-fans to come and save him. I can feel them yearning starry-eyed from the other side of the screen: I’ll save you so I cannot be ‘enoughie’! Even though she is far from ugly, we know the the flight attendant will have no choice but to suck his dick like she is; however, with her desperate and cougar-ish representation, she won’t have a problem with that.[13]

Ending where it starts, the first line that is written on the opening frame of the video: “Why you being weird to me” victimizes the victimizer. Does he, after all, have his tongue a bit in his cheek as the answer to being rejected and someone (or everyone) being weird to him makes him desperate enough that he asks to have his face spat on while being fucked? Does “Slut Me Out” have something in common with Eilish’s “Bad Guy” when she enigmatically claims her hit pokes fun at the way people present themselves meanwhile representing glorified nose-bleeds, Lolita-esque bruises on innocent knees, in order to, yes again attract the male attention? In both, “Slut Me Out” and “Bad Guy,” if there is any satire to be had, young girls grasping for popularity are never going to get it. And, unlike “Bad Guy” where ambivalence runs through the song to the point where the singer-songwriter’s intentions are inscrutable, for NLE Choppa, except for this one enigmatic sentence, any undermining is undermined by all that comes next.

As a cultural theorist, I am fascinated by this anthropological study of cultural de-evolution; as a human, feminist and victim/survivor, I am horrified by how young women are being expected to want to be degraded and abused in order to, in Dines’ words, not be invisible. It is my hope that for my young woman friend this is only going horrifying a phase (but, unfortunately, her actions are also damaging to those who view it and believe it). It is my hope that she will get through it as equally unscathed as the happy hookers with their “pro-sex” initiatives and empowerment through prostitution who (most likely unwittingly) brought us here. It is my hope that she’ll read this someday and recognize the self she grew out of.

Until then?

Where does this lead to? Well, being voluntarily/non-consensually choked, of course. (Looks like there will be a Follow Up. Fallout. Part 3 after all).

Yours always logically,
LF.

#Iloveendnotes

[1] Rachel Moran Paid For: My Journey Through Prostitution New York/London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2015: 152.

[2] Simon Häggström Shadow’s Law: The True Story of a Swedish Detective Inspector Fighting Prostitution. Selina Öberg, trans. Bullet Point Publishing, 2016: 72-73.

[3] Victor Malarek The Johns: Sex for Sale and the Men Who Buy It. New York: Arcade Publishers, 2011: 228.

[4] When I was on my Trauma & Triumph Tour 2022 across the US and Canada for my book Victim, I visited many sexual violence non-profit centres. I asked them about their take on sex-work as really being work like all others and not inherently exploitative. Many of them agreed with me; however, when counselling often mentally ill, traumatized and drug addicted women in the sex trade, they are unable to offer any exiting strategies, other opportunities for prostituted people to support themselves in a way that would most likely be interested in. This is because of the politically correct prerequisite to not question the exploited person’s ‘free’ choice even through implication. Through her extensive research and travels investigating prostitution internationally, feminist psychologist Melissa Farley reports how: “In 9 countries on 5 continents, 89% of more than 850 women in prostitution told us that they wanted to get out.” Prostitution and Trafficking in Nevada: Making the Connections. Prostitution Research & Education, 2007: 27. Prostitution survivor Rachel Moran comments in her memoir, Paid For, how when she was in the sex trade, she acted as though she had freely chosen to be there in order to psychologically protect herself and have some sort of empowerment. It is common when women get out, they realize that there was no free choice involved and that is was all circumstantial and coerced choice. When you think about it, this is logic. However, some sexual assault non-profits, so steeped in the dogma and delusion of ‘free’ will and the freedom to choose exploitation and to not offend by openly offering alternatives, SWERFed me (sex-worker exclusionary radical feminist. See this link for more details)

[5] As Detective Inspector Simon Häggström, the head of the Stockholm Police Prostitution Unit, says: “When it comes to people’s backgrounds it is clear that certain groups are more at risk of ending up in prostitution than others.” Simon Häggström: 72-73

[6] Sex-workers advocates are well-meaning. They want to protect people in the sex trade by destigmatizing it and making it regular work. This is never going to happen because the majority of men who buy sex from predominantly exploited women and girls, hate women and there will always be an unequal power relationship. When a man is paying a woman for her sexual services, he has control over what she has to do. And, if she doesn’t do it, the man feels entitled and it has often been stated by men that raping a prostitute is not rape. Prostituted women always have an escape plan set up before going with a john. And, there are emergency buttons in brothel rooms (that sometimes don’t work). Do any not-prostituted people need an emergency button or an exciting plan before starting their shift? I think it’s safe to say, No. Logic.

[7] One woman every 17 minutes is raped in Canada, one woman every 2 minutes in the US, and one woman every 18 seconds in Mexico. The most common age when a women is raped is 13-30.

[8] The teenage girl who is the subject of this essay proudly showed me what she was wearing to school the next day. I said that’s a belt; but, no, it was actually a ‘shirt.’ There needs to be dress codes at high schools and universities. However, there quite often isn’t because of the politically correct dogma of ‘freedom of choice.’ In the end, political correctness supports and maintains rape culture.

[9] In this article about a Vancouver area high school, young women are starting to fight back; however, when male teachers ‘flag’ teenage girls for wearing revealing clothes, the young women say it’s their choice to wear what they want. Yes, it is. But unfortunately self-objectification as a sex object and the inevitable male response to this does nothing to end or even abate rape culture. Sorry. More logic. https://www.newwestrecord.ca/local-news/new-westminster-students-rally-against-high-school-rape-culture-5368130

[10] Julie Bindel Feminism for Women: The Real Route to Liberation London: Constable, 2021: 14; 80.

[11] The low track is the prostitution ‘stroll’ where some of the most desperate women in Canada are prostituted to pay for drug addictions. According to Gabor Maté who worked as a psychiatrist in the DTES for many years, all of the mentally ill and drug-addicted women being prostituted on the streets were sexually abused as children and continue to be sexually assaulted virtually every day. This is the location where serial killer Robert Pickton found his victims over a ten year period. The disappearances of these women were ignored by the Vancouver Police for almost a decade. See See Gabor Maté In the Realm of the Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction and Lori Shehner That Lonely Section of Hell: the Botched Investigation of a Serial Killer Who Almost Got Away.

[12] A substantial and historical definition of ‘slut.’ “The word’s origins are unknown, but the Oxford English Dictionary coined it as “a dirty, slovenly, or untidy woman” in the 1400s. Until the 20th century, the term ‘slut’ referred to poor women with low standards of cleanliness. ‘Slut’ was not only gendered, but also classed. According to society, the poor women it referred to should be more productive in the labour market. It was not until 1966 that ‘slut’ became what we know it as today; a “woman who enjoys sex in a degree considered shamefully excessive.” https://yeoja-mag.com/origin-word-slut/

[13] There is also the derogatory ‘cougar’ stereotype is at work in this scene as well. It is so annoying when the name of the big cat in BC, Canada forests is brought up and right away men go to the stereotype of a ravenous middle-aged woman preying on younger men. Of course, when an older man is with a young woman, if anything, he is called a sugar daddy. Women can be labeled sugar mamas, as well. However, giving someone sugar is a much more positive metaphor than a female/predatory and terrifying wild animal attacking innocent young men. This annoying topic came up once again last weekend at a dinner party (by a man of course). I explained the above and, alas, a woman said to me, “people can’t say anything these days. There is no sense of humour.” (Sigh). Derogatory stereotypes are never funny: be they racial, gender-based or class-based. In his video, NLE Choppa as a literal and ideological predator in a male supremacist system becomes the victim as he is pulled into a closet by a misogynist myth. From my experience as a middle-aged woman, they are the young men who (often to my surprise) hit on me. Hey, middle-aged women sisters: what’s your take on this myth? Tell me in the comments!

*All images of NLE Choppa and his video “Slut Me Out” are screenshots from the official video on YouTube.

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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Follow Up. Fallout. Part One.

Follow Up. Fallout. Part One.

Posted on by Karen Moe

A follow up to my previous post, “What Fresh Hell is This? Same Old Same Old.”

I doubt she’ll ever read this.

And if she does, I’d like to think that would be a good thing.

As not only a logical feminist, but also, through the wisdoms gleaned from logic, a fierce one, I discovered recently that a young woman, a teenager whom I am very close to, embodies my worst nightmare.

I am a survivor and, what I designate in my book Victim: A Feminist Manifesto from a Fierce Survivor, also a victim because: “the bodies of rape victims stand as accusations. Our scarred, vibrant beings as memorials.”[1] With a memorial, a never forgetting, comes memory; memory is knowledge and with knowledge comes knowing what is going on; by honoring our scars,[2] victim/survivors know not only in our minds, but deep within or bodies. The inevitable scars of surviving violence are legacies of trauma. And, paradoxically, never forgetting the sources of our trauma is a good thing because our awareness can help change the pathology of a culture built with exploitation that creates a generation of young women who could be described as voluntary victims.

How did I find out about this nightmare?

Well, I have a TikTok account as “The Logical Feminist.” I haven’t used it much. Only three or four posts. As you will know if you use social media to try and effectively share a message that extends beyond your personal life, it’s tough to keep up with all of the posting not to mention actually creating the projects that you will post about! That said, it’s on my extensive list to get on the TikTok and get Logical Feminism more extensively out into the world and help stop this nightmare backlash.

Every now and then when I am walking with my phone in my pocket, my TikTok turns on. I have only about five friends and every time the TikTok comes on and startles me out of some peaceful state, it’s her.

The first time it happened, I didn’t recognize her at first. She was lip-syncing to a song insulting other women, internalized sexism blasting from this insolent and, dare I say, lethally ignorant, young woman. Her eyelids heavy with hyper-feminine, excessive black lashes, push-up bra cleavage, her beautiful so-recently-still-a-girl face pouting “I’m more fuckable than she is.” My ire flared instantly and I was just about to comment “You’re an idiot,” when I saw her name and recognized her beneath all of the horror I was seconds away from lashing out at. I felt like I was going to puke; rage, panic and  heartbreak momentarily darkened all hope and, amidst the gains a lot of women have made at least in the so-called first world, I thought: how the hell did this happen? This toxic backlash has to stop.

She’s sixteen now. When she was twelve or so she told me all she wanted was to be ‘cool.’ I thought “Oh No … here it comes ….” But, even though I have been studying and writing about sexual violence, feminist backlash and internalized sexism for decades, I never imagined how bad it could get.

It all started with Billie Eilish’s Bad Guy.

Yes, I know. It’s a great song; it can be seen as a farce, a critique of terrible, power abusive men—up to a point. However, in the numerous interviews when Eilish has been asked what her enigmatic lyrics mean, she doesn’t get close to any analysis of what actually constructs the “bad guy” (what to me as a feminist and one who deconstructs systems of exploitation is obvious); but then, not to excuse her lack of feminist awareness, good art often goes beyond the intentions of the artist. She replies that the song “pokes fun at the way people present themselves.” Okay, if Eilish is taking the piss, it certainly isn’t obvious.

Unfortunately for inevitably impressionable girls, the main thing about the song and the super-slick video is that it’s cool. As a clever, catchy pop-song riddled with artful rock & roll ambivalence, right off the bat the ‘character’ Eilish is playing is a seamless combination of predator and prey. And, as demonstrated by the out-take laughter between Eilish and most likely her brother before the video starts, the brutality that is about to come is funny. This is rock & roll frivolity at its finest, the little snippets between songs that give ravenous fans a taste of their idol’s private life. However, what is about to come is far from funny.

Low-fi super-cool catchy:

Eilish kicks out of mustard-yellow paper that is the same colour as her be-hoodied sweat suit both defiant and energy-sapped as she slouches sulky gangsta’ groove in the baggy suit; cut to “white shirt now red my bloody nose,” and, yes, her nose starts to bleed. I researched the nose-bleed trope and found out that it is supposed to signify sexual arousal. Tellingly, in terms of what is being communicated as young women’s sexuality in this 2019 hit, if she is sexually aroused, she looks pretty numb (and/or indifferent) to the whole thing or like she’s coming back from being raped on a date-rape drug. However, if one doesn’t know about this connection between sexuality and nose bleeds, the young woman is just plain bleeding. And what is blood typically connected to? Well, logically: violence.

Cut from the nose-bleed:

dressed in pressed, white Bermuda shorts are little girl legs with “bruises on both my knees for you”; the bruises are red, raw, and suggest pre-bruise, recently-peeled scabs matching the fact that these bruises are ‘for you,’ as the young woman, simultaneously martyred and tough, is offering her wounds as a macabre valentine to the multiplicity of men who trail behind her on tricycles. Of course, these men are all really hot, those whom she is both victimized by and dominates while she is riding and rocking out on a bright red kiddie-car doing her soon to be very trendy manic-slouch dance as she states in super cool[3] unfeeling zombie-voice I’m the “might seduce your dad type.” (As in my last post, here comes the sensationalized Lolita trope again).

Eilish (or the non-self-character that is impossible to pull off as a rockstar in their music video because fans will always see them as the rockstar) is the epitome of the delusional empowerment so many young women think they achieve through their external and internalized hyper-sexualization[4]. Confiding: her chin is raised in male defensive/offensive defiance and/or having just received an upper-cut as eyes roll insolent and exhausted with “just can’t get enough guy.” However, despite—or perhaps because of—abuse, she states simultaneously gloating and indifferent: “I’m the bad type, make your girlfriend mad type.” Ambivalence reigns as the tough-girl/victim smears the blood from her nose-bleed all over her face.

The final shot is in a dimly lit, luxurious apartment. It isn’t hers. Not that it isn’t possible for an eighteen-year-old rockstar to own such an apartment, I think it’s safe to say it belongs to the man who is at least ten years her senior whom she is apparently dominating or is a five star hotel room paid for by him. This is another layer to the regurgitated mythology that luxury can be gained by young women using their sexuality to manipulate men. And where is Eilish (oops, I mean the character that we aren’t aware she’s playing)? Well, she’s oh-so-scandalously sitting cross-legged and cheeky as a little girl who wants to be more than spanked on of the man’s back as he does push ups (this requires her of course to be the idealized slender female of patriarchy that so many young women ferociously fight against their bodies to achieve).

Simultaneously smug and innocent,

she states, looking as though she is about to pass out (again date rape drug comes to mind): “I like when you get mad. I guess I’m pretty glad” and then asks, “you say she’s scared of me?” (referring again to the jilted girlfriend and the all-powerful “she” existing in her sexuality as the triumphant source of the jilt). Here (another segment, yawn amidst the apparent edgy innovation, of again and again) is the message of women having so much power over men that they betray their girlfriends for us because we are such hot bad bitches; however, by aspiring towards this representation of an indifferent, emotionally shut down person, we simultaneously betray our sisters and, at the same time, this triumph is based on the fact that the men want us because we are self-victimizing and we like, even ask for, abuse. Does anyone really want to be abused even when they have been conditioned to ask for it?

I know, this is gender-politics-twisted-madness and the artful ambivalence of the song and its video swirls round and round. As an art critic, I must admit this is a riot to write about, but there is no way a pre-pubescent girl who wants to be cool will get anything out of the video except the desire—or need—to be like that. She’ll gobble up this dangerous candy; embody what will piss off her parents; be what will put her in the danger that she either doesn’t know about or doesn’t acknowledge or it’s cooler to feign indifference to or, worse yet, it doesn’t matter because putting herself in danger is the whole point: asking to be abused. This is what she’s been trained to do. In the end, this representation of a hot, insolent young woman (who is being played by a teen idol whose concerts sell out in minutes) turns young women who want to be mainstream-cool against themselves.

The only ‘empowered’ lyric exists in the midst of its undoing:

“I like it when you take control even if you know that you don’t own me, I’ll let you play the role. I’ll be your animal.” (Italics mine). Okay: in terms of gender politics, I get it: things are a mess in so called post-feminist so-called first world young womanhood. But, at the same time, what does this mean exactly? What does this mean in terms of young women thinking it’s cool to imitate this contradiction laden way of being a woman? Let’s unpack it, or try to:

  1. She says she likes being dominated and maintaining the male role of domination and the female submission. Men will continue to see themselves as dominant and women as mere things to be dominated and vessels for the enactment of their power. They will continue to dominate and often brutalize women because they are not valued fully as human. And, better yet, the women ask for it now. They have consented to being an object. She is objectifying herself.
  2. This he who is the paradoxically submissive ‘bad guy’ might know he doesn’t own her. Might being a key word. The consent of this role-play has not been consented to and acknowledged as play (read: not entirely real because even play contains reality). How does this play out in what it maintains beyond this apparently benign sex game? Especially when she’ll be ‘his’ animal? Isn’t the animal that she is playing that is ‘his’ but then, at the same time, not owned by him of the same body? He doesn’t own her and yet she is his. It’s titillating. Great rock & roll angst. And edgy rebellion for teenage girls to get their trying-to-figure-out-who-they-are-peer-pressured-to-be-cool-and-part-of-the-in-crowd teeth into.

By the end of the song, Eilish—or the bad-guy-girl she is attempting to be acting—is the bad guy. As her male victims’ decapitated heads hang around her in bags, any sort of empowerment in the song has simply flipped the hierarchy of power abuse: the woman is now as violent as the most violent of men to the point of achieving the indifference of a sociopath serial killer as she playfully pokes a hole in one of her victim’s head-bags. There is no empowerment here as my teenage girl friend has chastised me. This is but a sensationalized reperpetuation of that which exploits and now she, as the exploited, is the exploiter—or, in a still male supremacist culture, so she thinks.

However, in yet another interview where yet another music critic is trying to unravel her enigmatic lyrics, Eilish tries again to explain: “The initial idea for the song is like people that have to tell everybody that they are a certain way all the time? They’re not that certain way. […] In general, I feel like you will never catch a bad bitch telling everyone she’s a bad bitch. It’s on—it’s you.”[5] Okay, I don’t know about you but I only sort of understand this, and I only sort of understand this in the context of an interview and as a convoluted comment on pretension and narcissism. But as an intention readily accessible in the work of art as the ‘bad bitch’ is more glamourized than critiqued? Not so much. Or even at all.

Even though we love it,

even though it is one hell of an ear-worm, I don’t think anyone got what the artist insists she was trying to do in Bad Guy—and this is most likely why so many music critics have had to keep asking her. I know the young woman I am close to didn’t. I think it’s safe to say that all of the other young women and pre-pubescent girls who strive to be cool didn’t. However, there is one almost useful revelation: beneath the unfeeling bravado performed by a bad bitch who, in the end, is the mirror image of the bad guy; through the internalized sexism that has simmered to the point of self-brutalization that pathologically produces a twenty-first century “liberated” young woman, Eilish is crouching on the sidewalk, despondently feeding pigeons (an urban pass-time that is often equated with loneliness and mental illness). Yay! I love it! An acknowledgement of vulnerability! There is a trajectory of logic here as a young woman trying to be a bad guy does quite often fail as she is abused in order to be accepted in the boys club of inherently power abusive men. And yet, again, this inevitability is washed away as the despondency becomes a decadent, stylized, first world depression, yet another act of coolness as the insolent, young woman performs being unaffected by trauma and teenage girl “Duhs” punctuate the groove.

Don’t get me wrong,

Billie Eilish is a brilliant artist and singer-songwriter. The song and its video are a pop masterpiece. However, because all artists find their inspiration in the fodder of the everyday, what does it say about our culture that this song exists in the first place? And what happens when girls imitate the very thing Eilish claims to be critiquing?

My young friend took all of Eilish’s stylized sulky, saucy slouching as real, as what she is supposed to be in order to embody coolness. And, yes, she is ‘cool.’ Hundreds of hearts on TikTok whenever she performs and posts acts of toxic, internalized sexism, but at what cost both to her personally and to reinforcing misogyny and either maintaining or increasing violence against women? Huge.

And after this early adulthood education what has she graduated to? Well, this: stay tuned for NLE Choppa “Slut Me Out.”

Yours,

LF

#iloveendnotes

[1] Karen Moe Victim: A Feminist Manifesto from a Fierce Survivor. Vigilance Press: Mexico City/Lantzville, BC: 2022: 39.

[2] Ibid: 144.

[3] I can’t help but repeat this term ‘super cool’ as it’s the main theme despite being otherwise expressed by Eilish.

[4] Read Natasha Walter Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism for numerous examples where T-shirts that say “So Many Boys, Not Enough Time,” are marketed to the parents of toddlers. 3-year-old girl maturity through young woman (even girl) sexuality

[5] https://www.nme.com/news/music/billie-eilish-breaks-down-bad-guy-lyrics-2543500

*

Note on images: all images of Billy Eilish are wallpaper free downloads except for the first and last which are screen shots from a live concert posted on YouTube.

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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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