Tag: revolution

Is Less Better? Women’s Day in Mexico City 2025

Is Less Better? Women’s Day in Mexico City 2025

Posted on by Karen Moe

Can it be a good thing

when the number of women at an International Women’s Day march decreases by what could very well be half from the year before and many years before that? Usually, organizers are actively recruiting and hoping for more and more protesters every year. However, in a country that has one of the highest rates of violence against women in the world, could a decrease be a positive?

Mexico is one of those countries. In an article written in 2024, an estimated 10 women and girls were recorded as being murdered by an intimate partner or family member and, with only 1 in 10 victims daring to report, the real statistic is much higher. Moreover, with a 95% impunity rate, the number of predators convicted is as exceedingly low as the number of women and girls murdered is exceedingly high. Because of the extremity of machismo culture in Mexico, feminism only began to build as an organized and vocal movement in approximately 2014, originating in the Lesbian community. Until then, the majority of women were reluctant (or afraid) to speak out. It wasn’t until 2019, after a series of rapes and femicides that received national attention, that the women of Mexico had finally had enough of male violence and began to rise up en masse.

Besides the thousands of femicides that are reported and ignored by authorities or not reported at all, one femicide that received a lot of publicity—because of the ferocity with which her family fought for justice—was the 2017 murder of twenty-two-year-old university student Lesvy Berlin Rivera Osorio by her boyfriend on the campus of the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de México (UNAM). Lesvy’s body was found hung in a telephone booth; her boyfriend Jorge Luis Hernández González had hanged her to death with the telephone cord. As is usual in Mexico, her murder was catalogued and filed away as a suicide. The real case was closed. In order to buttress their victim-blaming tradition of suicide, the Public Prosecutors Office took to social media with accusations like “Osorio was an alcoholic and a drug user who was no longer studying at UNAM and had been living out of wedlock with her boyfriend.” Authorities insisted on investigating the victim’s sex life and family relations to build evidence of promiscuousness and mental instability that would back up their fabrication of suicide. More effort was put into making up evidence to discredit her case than investigate her murder.

Wall of unconvicted rapists and murderers, Mexico City Women’s Day march, 2025.

Impunity reached a searing point in Mexico City

in the summer of 2019 when a series of assaults were committed by the police. In July and August, three women were raped by police officers; on July 10th, a 27-year-old homeless woman was raped by two other police officers; on August 3rd, a 17-year-old woman was gang-raped by four policemen in a police car; on August 8th, a minor was assaulted by a police officer in Museo Archivo de la Fotografía in México City. The women had had enough.

In direct response to the sexual violence committed by the police, women rose up on August 12th, 2019. This was the first time they expressed their rage publicly by starting the controversial act of writing on and defacing historical monuments (the first one being The Angel of Independence)—from which the women have since been criticized and their movement, to this day, discredited. Yet, regardless of the ridiculous accusations that the women are just as violent as the men who rape and murder them, what did they write on the base of Mexico City’s iconic Angel of Independence? “You are not going to have the comfort of our silence anymore.” And, with these words, the Feminist movement in Mexico had officially begun.

“You are not going to have the comfort of our silence anymore.” Photo courtesy of Restauradoras Con Glitter. 2020

In a continued response to the impunity of the Mexico City police for the multiple rapes in the summer of 2019,

the women rose up again on November 25th, 2019 for the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women and the protests became increasingly vocal both in voice and act to the point where the city began covering the statues of the conquistadores (male colonizers) with saran wrap and surrounding the large monuments with corrugated metal to keep the women from covering these legacies of colonialism with such words as: Mexico Feminicidia! Basta Ya de Impunidad! (Enough Impunity Already, No Desaparecidas Ni Muertas, #NiUnaMenos (#NotOneLess), and plaster the walls with photos of unconvicted rapists and murderers. Saran wrap was gleefully torn off the monuments, climbed on and spray painted and the barriers torn down. The women were determined to be seen and heard.

On February 14th, 2020, there was a protest outside of President Obrador’s residence in the Zocalo—President Obrador, who did so much for the Mexican people initiating social programs and combating the Cartels from where they start with his Bullets Not Guns program and one of many legislations for justice, made a grave error when his response to women demanding more attention to be paid to the femicide epidemic discredited their cause as an act of the opposition. Then, on February 15th, 2020, seven-year-old girl Fátima Cecilia was found dead, her body wrapped in a plastic bag in a garbage can on a vacant lot. Fury escalated and the attendance of the Mexico City Women’s Day March from the Angel of Independence to the Zocalo began to surge: from 2020 to 2024 the march grew from 90,000 to 180,000.

Women climb on and vandalize monuments as other women cheer. Mexico City Women’s Day march, 2020

 

Women destroy the barricades, Mexico City Women’s Day march, 2020

I have been attending the Mexico City Women’s Day March (or 8M and it’s called here) since I moved here in 2015 and have watched it grow into one of the largest marches in the world. I was at the protest on November 25th, 2019. I remember tear gas, fires, the barricades kicked and then shoved down and gleefully jumped on to the cheers of onlookers and the hundreds if not a thousand police lining Reforma with their riot shields. I remember more tear gas. I remember when, after the city began to have only women police defending the monuments during women’s day, protesting women having fierce altercations with the women police officers accusing them of being traitors that often resulted in violence. I remember the year when the then mayor of Mexico City, now Presidenta Claudia Sheinbaum, gave all the women police officers flowers, and the controversy amongst the women protesters that ensued. I remember in 2020 when protective barricades were first put in place to protect the prioritized colonial monuments from vandalism. I remember the women climbing up and over those barricades and vandalizing the monuments of the conquistadores, nonetheless. I remember every surface along Reforma covered with revolutionary writing, and the irreverent pictures including photos of some of the 95% of rapists and murderers who received impunity plastered in every available space. And I remember on one of the 8M marches between 2020 and 2024 when I was walking back to Insurgentes and from the Zocalo at 5:30 to get my bike, the march we still happening. The women were still coming like a torrent 6 hours after the march had started.

Mexico City Women’s Day march, 2020

But this year, 2025, was verging on the opposite.

Hundreds of thousands were expected; however, unlike last year when an official count of 180,000 was reported on March 10th, as of March 12th, no official count is available for this year. Maybe that is because it was so comparatively unsensational. My friend and I arrived at Insurgentes and Reforma at 2:30, an intersection where—based on the numbers over the last 5 years—the parade should have been crammed with women at that time. The boulevard was virtually empty. There were only a few women straggling around or sitting on the side as confused as I was. There was little to no writing on the walls; barely any of the buildings had been boarded up. We couldn’t even hear drums and chants. There were definitely no helicopters thumping ominously over head or drones with their swat-deserving buzzing above. Yes, a few of the conquistadors’ statues had been painted green and purple and playfully blasphemed by green scarves with the women’s symbol and purple flowers perched on their heads. But that was about it.“Where is the march? Where is everyone?” I asked a row of women, their placards leaning against a wall on the side of the broad boulevard.
“They’re up there. They passed about half an hour ago.”
“Do you know why?”
“No,” they responded. “We don’t understand either.”

Some playful “vandalism” at the Mexico City Women’s Day march, 2020

My friend and I walked for about 15 minutes and finally reached the march.

There were the usual triumphant chants, and the on-cue jumping that the young women do in time with their chant about snubbing their noses at machos, a cumbia marching band with dancers and hoola-hoops; there was a 2-women feminist punk band blaring irreverence with their electric guitars followed by a feminist ukelele group strumming and the placards with the powerful proclamations for justice that Mexican women pride themselves in. There were a few walls plastered with the faces of rapists. Feminist graffiti became more visible. A few of the infamous militants clad entirely in black, balaclavaed and armed with spray paint climbed on top of bus shelters to write: #creaenella (believe her). A large sign to give justice to Fatima was help up by women who had climbed up onto the sides of a monument. But, after 3 hours, I only saw 3 women police officers. I didn’t have to get through a wall of police with their riot shields when I wanted to run farther up to get photos of the march from different perspectives. There was levity, bereft of the abundance of drawn, traumatized faces. It was different. It was more like a Woman’s Day march in Canada, in a first-world country—albeit with Mexican frivolity and flavour. It was more a celebration of women rather than the funeral marches ignited by guerilla warfare of years past. 

Triumphant women at the Mexico City Women’s Day march, 2025

I’m not saying the Mexico City 8M wasn’t powerful this year

and women were not speaking out passionately against the continued reality of extreme gender-based violence in Mexico and the impunity for male perpetrators. I am wondering what it means when a march that was enormous and one of the biggest in the world was so much smaller; I am curious as to why there was less overt anger and retaliatory vandalism and what that means and whether a decrease in the number of women at an International Women’s Day march could be a mark of improvement in the lives of women in a country that has been scourged with gender violence for decades, if not centuries. Yes, there are still some reports that nothing has changed and that the 25% decrease in homicides in Mexico with the new administration of Presidenta Claudia Sheinbaum has affected nothing. Yet, with the numbers at an all-time high on 8M 2024 and this year’s march—even held on a Saturday when most people don’t work—so much smaller, how can one explain this very obvious decrease? How can one explain the subdued anger? The tempered ferocity, the lack of police corresponding to the lack for the need for police enforcement? With national day care, assistance for single mothers, abortion now available to women nationally and the other social programs implemented by Obrador that could be decreasing the immasculanization and anger of men—which is so often the cause of violence against women—being continued by Sheinbaum and the decrease in homicides be making a real difference in the lives of women in Mexico? Could it be logic that when a people are better off, violence lessens in general and, thereby, decreases the rates of femicide and rape? It’s hard to say in a country where the conservative opposition will do anything to undermine a socialist government. However, in the meantime, we can only hope that the decrease in numbers at Mexico City’s Women’s Day March 2025 is a sign that violence really has lessened in Mexico—for women and men. 

Yours, 
The Logical Feminist. 

 

“I come for the girls and boys who are no longer here. The girls and boys are not to be touched.” 8M, 2025.

For a more extensive look at the birth of the Mexican feminist movement, see my 2020 article:
“The Life of a Woman is More Important than an Historical Monument.”

For an analysis of violence perpetrated against Mexican men, see this article on a solution:
“Justice Begins with the One Beside You: The Revolution of Nacidos Para Triunfar.”

For an analysis of the President Andrés Manuel López Obrador administration’s (2018-2024) strategy to end violence where it starts, see Part One of my article on the Morena Revolution:
“And this is a Good Thing: Contextualizing the 2024 Mexico Election. Part One.”

Mexico City Women’s Day march, 2025

 

Mexico City Women’s Day march, 2025
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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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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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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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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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