Tag: logical feminism

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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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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