feminist blogs

This entry was precipitated by watching the film The Burning Times by Donna Read that examines the re-construction of the term "witch" from wise-woman to shriveled satanic bastion of evil as well as the phenomenon of "witch madness" which swept Europe and led to tens of thousands -- at minimum -- of women being tortured until they "confessed" to being a witch and then being burnt at the stake.

One of the interesting points touched on in the film was that the demonization of wise-women, midwives, etc. in that era reflects the demonization of a way of knowing and a system of knowledge.

To my eyes, this a very perceptive point. This was, after all, the rise of the industrial revolution and mercantilism-capitalism and along with it "science." "Science" as a system of knowing, way of knowledge and tool of ruling class influence through the power of being seen as "experts" wasn't simply predicated on and its own growth; for "science" to become the dominant and sole discourse on how to know the physical world, the body, etc. required -- as does the birth of most social structures -- the destruction of what went before i.e. the destruction of the wise-women and midwives who were an affront to everything "science" stood for. Firstly in that it was controlled by women, rather than men, secondly because it held a respect and connectedness with nature rather than viewing it as a passive vessel to be remade by the activity of men to suit their purposes, thirdly in that this system of knowledge showed women as intelligent, active, wise, independent rather than "emotional" "passive" "irrational" and dependent on the labour of men while labouring in social reproduction -- the physical reproduction of humans, their socialization, education, health and welfare, the reproduction of culture, ideology, etc. -- as free labour to subsidize mercantilism and capitalism and finally because it already existed, was respected, and conferred the status -- and ideological power -- of "expert" on those wise-women rather than on themselves.

Thus, to facilitate making "science" -- also liberalism and capitalism -- the dominant knowledge systems those wise-women had to be re-cast as "witches" and their system of knowledge had to be simultaneously brutally suppressed by coercion and discredited by a culture war so that when the dust settled "science" would stand unopposed and unquestioned as the "authority" and the only legitimate way of knowing.

While -- for the most part -- the brutal physical repression of knowledge systems outside the Western-liberal-capitalist framework of "science" has lessened, and now dismissal and ideological exclusion from the discourse -- as well as stripping the rights of -- non-Western ways of knowing has become the primary vehicle for attacking other knowledge systems. One quick example is that in neo-liberal intellectual property rights something is defined as patentable property only if it has been created by "science" out of "raw material" and has industrial applications. I'll note here that just as in the era of the Enclosure movement in Britain when the common rights of the peasants to the land were rendered non-existent within the discourse of the natural right to (private and only private) property when one applies their (individual or corporate) labour to it to change it and make it "productive" reflected the very same definition of common lands as "empty."

The result of this is that seeds that have been that knowledge passed down over many generations and held in common in many communities in the global South have literally been taken, changed negligibly by the application of "science" and then patented by companies in the West. For example; their have been tribes in the global South that have been using plants as medicinal for thousands of years, but they have no rights to that knowledge it is "empty knowledge" until someone takes the leaves of this plant and uses lab equipment to extract the active ingredient. It remains patentable by outsiders even though that culture had been using the same knowledge for thousands of years.

At least on the upside these cases involve much less state terrorism than was present in the witch-trials. I'll write a second post to lay out the argument that the witch-trials were a powerful and multi-purpose state-terrorism strategy.

Placing equality and difference in antithetical relationship has, then, a double effect. It denies the way in which difference has long figured in political notions of equality and it suggests that sameness is the only ground on which equality can be claimed. It thus puts feminists in an impossible position, for as long as we argue within the terms of discourse set up by this opposition we grant the current conservative premise that since women cannot be identical to men in all respects, they cannot expect to be equal to them. The only alternative, it seems to me, is to refuse to oppose equality to difference and insist continually on differences -- differences as the condition of individual and collective identities, differences as the constant challenge to the fixing of those identities, history as the repeated illustration of the play of differences, differences as the very meaning of equality itself.

Joan W. Scott, Gender and the Politics of History, Revised Edition, 1999, p. 174-175.

Today, 31 March 2005, is César Chávez Day—the 78th anniversary of Chávez’s birth near Yuma, Arizona, and a state holiday (I’m told it’s officially celebrated in California, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, Utah, and Michigan) commemorating his lifelong work as an union organizer, agitator, and Chicano activist in the Southwestern United States. Chávez, together with Dolores Huerta, co-founded the ground-breaking United Farm Workers, and organized and inspired a generation of organized labor and Chicano community activists. Hugo Schyzer has some more thoughts on Chávez’s legacy today; and of course you can find plenty to read from the United Farm Workers’ website.

As far as commemorating Chávez goes, they’ve said it better than I could. I’ll be commemorating the day by talking some more about libertarianism, organized labor, and the struggle of farmworkers in southern Florida—the workers organized by Coalition of Immokalee Workers and the Taco Bell Boycott they launched and, just a few days ago, won—a campaign that was directly inspired by the UFW grape boycott that Chávez helped craft and win, and a campaign that was thrilled to receive the UFW’s endorsement in August 2001.

A few days ago, I prodded Daniel D’Amico in this space and in commentary on his blog over his criticisms of the Taco Bell boycott. He’s since come back with a reply to my prodding and to some similar concerns raised by other commentators. And since we have a nice convergence between the date and a question that might be of some interest—that is, libertarianism and labor, and the compatibility of principled anti-statism and a fighting labor movement—I figured that now is as good a time as any to offer a response to the response.

Before we begin, though, let’s hop onto a long tangent about terminology. Daniel leads off his argument by saying:

The Austrian school and libertarianism alike are against government control of market transactions, but the CIW appears to be refraining from such tactics, so what’s my problem anyway? Simply put I believe, there are more ways to be anti-capitalist than just using government. Mainly promoting ideas that capitalism is evil or claiming it resorts to rampant market failure are, in my view, anti-capitalist.

Some of Daniel’s other commentators had asked him what he thought made the boycott anti-capitalist, but I didn’t and I’m not going to. I don’t have any strong opinions on whether or not the Taco Bell boycott is “anti-capitalist” because I haven’t got any strong opinions about what “capitalism” (or, a fortiori, “anti-capitalism”) means. It seems to me that has been used to describe at least three different things, two of which are mutually exclusive and one of which is independent of those two. These are:

1. The free market: “capitalism” has been used, mostly (but not exclusively) by its defenders to just mean a free market, i.e., an economic order that emerges from voluntary exchanges of property and labor without government intervention (or any other form of systemic coercion).

2. The corporate State: “capitalism” has also been used, sometimes by its opponents and sometimes by the beneficiaries of the system, to mean a corporate State—that is, active government support for big businesses through instruments such as subsidies, central banking, tax-funded infrastructure, development grants and loans, special tax exemptions, funding plants, acquiring land through eminent domain, government union-busting, and so on down the line. Since government intervention is always, by nature, either services funded by expropriated tax dollars or regulations enforced from the barrel of a gun, it’s worth noting that being “capitalist” in the sense of a free marketeer requires being “anti-capitalist” in the sense of opposing the corporate State, and vice versa. The fact that state socialists and the anti-communist Right have spent the past century systematically running these two distinct senses of “capitalism” together (in order to make it seem that you had to swallow the corporate State if you believed in the free market—which the Marxists used for a modus tollens and the Rightists used for a modus ponens) doesn’t make these two any less distinct, or any less antagonistic.

3. Boss-directed labor: third, capitalism has been used (by for example, Marxians and socialists who are careful about their use of language) to refer to a specific form of labor market—that is, one where the dominant form of economic activity is the production of goods in workplaces that are strictly divided by class. Under capitalism in the third sense, most workers are working for a boss, in return for a wage; they are renting out their labor to someone else, in order to survive, and it is the boss and not the workers who holds the title to the business, the shop, and the tools and facilities that make the business run. (Or, as the Marxists would have it, the means of production.) It’s worth noting that “capitalism” in this third sense is a category independent of “capitalism” in either of the first two senses: there are lots of different ways that a free labor market could turn out (it could be organized in traditional employer-employee relationships, or into worker co-ops, or into community workers’ councils, or into a diffuse network of shopkeeps and independent contractors) and someone who is an unflinching free marketeer might plump for any of these, or might be completely indifferent as to which one wins out; whereas an interventionist statist might also favor traditional employer-employee relationships (as in Fascism) or any number of different arrangements (as in various forms of state socialism).

With these distinctions on the table, it’s worth pointing out that many 19th century libertarians—Benjamin Tucker chief among them—who considered themselves both radical free marketeers and radical critics of capitalism; what they meant was that they attacked capitalism in senses (2) and (3)—holding that state intervention on behalf of big business was unjust and at the root of most social evils, including the exploitation and impoverishment of workers which they identified as being part and parcel of capitalism in the third sense. (They also believed that exploitative and impoverishing practices would collapse in a free market; although many of the practices of landlords, bankers, bosses, etc. were not coercive in themselves, Tucker and his circle argued, they were evils that workers would not put up with if it weren’t for a background of systemic coercion and restriction of competition. So they were worth railing against, even if they were not themselves forms of aggression.)

I point all this out because I don’t think there’s actually anything about being a libertarian, or an Austrian about economics, that requires you to plump for “capitalism” in the second or third senses. Both Austrian economics and libertarian theories of justice require you to be a free marketeer, of course, but whether that makes you “capitalist,” “anti-capitalist,” or just doesn’t decide the matter one way or another depends on how you pin down the term “capitalism.” Part of my worry is that the way that statists have jammed together three completely different concepts under the chimerical term “capitalism” has tended to blind libertarians, in the 20th century, to some of the insights that their forbearers in the 19th century had. The idea is usually that if something is “anti-capitalist,” it is therefore anti-libertarian. But that only follows if it’s anti-capitalist in the sense of wanting to use violence to intervene in the free market. My worry is that Daniel has probably got a good argument for showing that CIW’s actions are anti-capitalist in senses two and three, and mistakenly figured that undermining capitalism in those senses tends to undermine capitalism in the first sense, and therefore destructive. In order to try to avoid confusion on the matter, I’m going to be sticking to the term free market when I talk about what Austro-libertarians are committed to defending.

With that out of the way, let’s look at what Daniel objects to in the rhetoric of the Taco Bell boycott and its supporters. Here’s one objection:

Simply put I believe, there are more ways to be anti-capitalist than just using government. Mainly promoting ideas that capitalism is evil or claiming it resorts to rampant market failure are, in my view, anti-capitalist.

There are two things that this might mean.

1. It might mean that you can undermine capitalism in the sense of the bosses’ labor market without going for government intervention. That’s certainly true, but it’s not yet clear that this is a vice. If you think (as I do) that there are serious economic problems with the sort of bureaucratic, boss-controlled, centralized, top-down corporate commerce that rose to dominance in the 20th century, then undermining that—by pointing out, for example, that it typically involves crippling knowledge problems, fosters a culture of petulant entitlement among the decision-makers, exploits the workers and systematically shuts them out of important channels for autonomous and rewarding labor, and so on—then undermining capitalism in that sense can only be counted as a good thing. If you also think that the cultural and material conditions created by boss-directed labor profits from and tends to promote the growth of corporate statism that expropriates wealth in order to support the bosses, then that gives you even stronger libertarian reasons to support anti-capitalist agitation in this sense. And indeed there are good reasons for Austrians and their fellow-travelers to think these charges against boss-centric are solid—the knowledge problems that Mises, Hayek, and Rothbard pointed out in central planning also apply when that central planning is done by bureaucratic corporations; the potential of free market competition ameliorates the problem but doesn’t eliminate it, and if decisions are being made on the margin in a market that is already dominated by centralized interlocking bureau-corps, which are supported not only by their existing market share but also by a network of cultural attitudes towards work and jobs, it looks like it is going to be a long, hard struggle to undermine those structures and make the threat of serious competition into a practicable reality. The sort of long, hard struggle, in fact, that groups like the CIW are, at their best, engaged in.

2. On the other hand, this might mean that there are ways to undermine the free market other than calling down the government. That’s true, I guess, but it’s unclear that the things Daniel cites are examples of it. It’s true that spreading economic fallacies is dangerous, and undermines people’s willingness to stand up for economic freedom even if the person spreading the fallacies isn’t personally calling for government intervention. But whether saying capitalism is evil or that capitalism involves frequent and systemic market failures does that or not depends on whether the critic is using capitalism in the first sense, the second sense, the third sense, or an unstable congerie of different senses. If it’s in the first sense, then clearly it involves an economic fallacies—liberty as such is always an economic (and moral) good, and the Austrians have shown that, while the utopia of neo-classical equilibrium is just that—utopian nonsense—liberty doesn’t create systemic market failures, but rather creates the opportunities and incentives to overcome them. But if capitalism is being used in the sense of the corporate State, then both the condemnation and the accusation of systemic market failure are obviously right. If it’s being used in the sense of boss-directed labor, then the charges involve economic fallacies and undermine the free market only if you thinkthat boss-directed labor is a necessary condition for a free market (which it obviously isn’t), or a necessary condition for a flourishing free market (which is a premise that has not yet been convincingly argued). In fact, I’d say that the history of big business support for stifling Progressive regulation—cf., for example, Gabriel Kolko’s The Triumph of Conservatism—the economic record of big corporations over the past century, and the considerations about bureaucratic planning that I mentioned above are all very good reasons for saying that the link doesn’t exist, that if anything boss-directed labor is corrosive to the free market, and that if it takes a fighting union to weaken or supplant it, then that’s as good an argument as any for vibrant, agitating, government-free union organizing.

   Now, it’s true that most labor organizers and labor activists today are hardly consistent libertarians, and it’s likely that their rhetoric is going to jostle back and forth between different meanings as they go along just as much as when anyone else uses the terms. But that’s not a reason to issue a blanket criticism of the action as anti-market; it’s a reason to call for a clarification of the argument, and an attempt to grasp the dominant principle in the particular case—as stated in their talk and as manifest in their actions. Coming back to the CIW and their supporters specifically, it would be a lot easier to convict them of being swayed mainly by anti-market maxims if they were, for example, a State-protected union, or if they were calling for State action against Taco Bell or its contractors, or if they were proposing that the free market in farm work is the problem, rather than the practices of specific farm employers. But they aren’t; they are making a point specifically about the common labor practices of farm employers in southern Florida, as far as I know aren’t attributing their evils to the free market (maybe their supporters in JVC were making this claim; I don’t know), and they did a lot of really quite fascinating and groundbreaking work in doing labor organizing and achieving goals without the suffocating help of the federal labor bureaucracy. All of these facts are well worth noting when we try to piece out what we should think of as the dominant trends in CIW’s campaign.

The other strand of Daniel’s objection I find a lot more puzzling: he objects that their means (boycotting) are not efficient in obtaining their ends (higher real wages and living conditions for the Immokalee workers), that this is so because the boycott strategy ignores the effects that a drop in demand for tacos will have on wages related to the production of tacos, and so that alternative means would be more effective at obtaining the ends of higher wages and living conditions for the Immokalee workers.

It seems to me that the question of obtaining the end has already been settled now that the boycott has been won. Taco Bell established a pass-through program, the workers will be getting more money, and whatever effects the slow-down in Taco Bell sales might have had on the workers have now ended with the boycott. Workers will be getting about $100 more or so per year, and the amount will increase if CIW can leverage their success in the Taco Bell campaign to convince other companies to adopt a similar policy. So I’m especially puzzled by Daniel’s argument that the drop in demand for tacos (and thus tomatos) hurts the CIW workers rather than helping them. Sure, the boycott may have hurt their income for the three years of the boycott—although my suspicion is that the change on the margin per worker was probably pretty neglible. But people make decisions that will result in less income for the short term in order to get a better result in the long term all the time. Boycotts and strikes are an example; so are school, investment, and quitting your job in order to become an entrepreneur. One thing you have to keep in mind here is that it was the workers themselves who decided that the trade-off of potential present losses for future gains was worth it; that doesn’t guarantee that the decision was a wise one, but it’s certainly not a bizarre sort of decision to make and here, at least, it seems to have begun to pay off.

Daniel’s right to point out that the Taco Bell boycott didn’t encourage consumers to patronize competing tomato-purchasing industries (in order to keep tomato prices steady or raise them by increasing demand for substitute uses of tomatos, while encouraging Taco Bell to change its ways in order to recapture some of the lost business). But surely here he has misunderstood the strategy behind the boycott. Tomato-pickers aren’t paid directly by the tomato-using industry that consumers buy from; they’re paid by big tomato farmers, who put sell their tomatos to Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, Heinz, Pace, et al. as contractors. Since none of those competing tomato-users has a pass-through system either, there’s no reason why the boycott should want to funnel business to them; that would merely be shifting business from one sharp dealer to another; and while it might give Taco Bell an incentive to change its ways, it would reward other tomato-using companies for engaging in exactly the same practices as Taco Bell.

Further, Daniel’s too uncharitable to the CIW when he suggests the following as an alternative, higher-valued use of resources that the CIW could have employed:

Any form of productivity. Allegedly the housing prices in the Immokalee area are exorbitant, and contribute to the poverty conditions of those who live there. So this is an entrepreneurial area that could host the energy of riled activists that is instead being diverted by this boycott. If these activists were instead producing houses, clothes, and consumable goods to be exchanged with the Immokalee workers they would be more successful in improving their quality of life.

But look, these are things that the CIW is already working on. They have already established, among other things a (tremendously successful) grocery store in Immokalee (run on a co-op model, providing goods at near-wholesale prices) and a multilingual community radio station (which helps keep workers communicating and up-to-date on community news). CIW isn’t just a fighting labor organization—although it is that; it’s a community organization and they’ve put a lot of resources into improving living conditions in Imokalee on the ground. They’ve done this in a lot of ways: by putting money into producing community resources, by organizing general strikes and boycotts to negotiate higher wages, by exposing slavery rings, fraud, and violence in the fields (sometimes through the government, sometimes through the press, and sometimes through direct action by workers). The workers have made their decisions about when and how to apply their resources by developing strategies over time to prioritize their needs, and when they launched the Taco Bell boycott it was because they decided it would be worth it to use some resources in the boycott in order to gain better pay and conditions later using a public education and pressure campaign. Now, the mere fact that they decided that this would be best doesn’t mean that they were right; but it’s important to see that their decision wasn’t different in kind from any number of other decisions in the free market, such as: quitting your job, going back to school, starting your own business, investing your money in what you think will be a winning stock, buying a tool, etc. There are plenty of cases where each of these decisions would be wise and plenty where each would be foolish; that depends a lot on the specifics of the case at hand. In this particular case, it looks like the boycott has paid off nicely for the workers—both in direct results and in precedent for future campaigns—and unless you can come up with some pretty specific plans and give some pretty strong reasons in favor of thinking that they would have been a better way to improve farmworkers’ quality of life, I think the presumption is going to be in favor of chalking this campaign up as a good move for the workers.

Of course, you might instead argue that it benefitted the workers, but only at the expense of either Taco Bell, or consumers, or both. That’s a separate argument, but it’s one worth worrying about when we talk about campaigns in which part of the outcome is raising the price of a consumer good. But of course here we need to keep a couple of things in mind. First, the marginal increase in price of the tomatos for Taco Bell is $0.01 per pound of tomatos; in total it will cost Taco Bell about $100,000 / year more than they spent before. If Taco Bell eats that cost it will hardly be noticed, and if the fraction of that cost on the margin is passed on to Taco Bell patrons, it will hardly make a difference. But also, second, that even if the change were likely to make a difference on the margin, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the change in price comes at the expense of the people buying the tacos. One way to look at CIW’s strategy in the Taco Bell boycott is that they were working to earn more money for themselves by changing consumer preferences; what they aimed to do, and succeeded in doing enough to win the boycott, was to educate Taco Bell consumers and get them to recognize the worth of a decent standard of living for farmworkers, and to take that value into account when they deliberate over purchasing a taco. Of course, once they take that into account, they will be willing to pay more for the taco in order to secure the decent standard of living for farmworkers. But it’s not at all clear that this is an loss to them. Sure, it means more money going out, but it’s money being exchanged for something they now value. You could argue that they only ought to value the pleasure of eating the taco, and drop the sentimental concerns about farmworkers; but Jesus, why would you argue that? The market isn’t an arena for machines to maximize their store of precious metals or for hedonic calculators to maximize their bodily pleasures; it’s a process that emerges from the deliberations that free human beings make about what they want and how they can achieve it. People have every right to value tasty food, of course, but they have just as much right to value solidarity with fellow workers, concern for fellow human beings, charity for people suffering, and a lot of other things that come into play when we think about the labor practices of the people we do business with.

Finally, Daniel is again too uncharitable when he worries that the CIW’s practices and demands aren’t as free of government meddling as I’ve made them out to be. Let me be clear—as far as I know, CIW aren’t principled anarchists; while I’m excited about the model of organizing that they’ve developed, and I think their successes have a lot to do with the fact that they are free from both the worm of government union protections and the hook of government union controls, I don’t claim that they’re any kind of infallible resource. My point here has been to draw out the aspects of them that have something to teach libertarians. But it’s not fair to accuse them of grabbing for government backing based on this line from their press release:

The Company indicated that it believes other restaurant chains and supermarkets, along with the Florida Tomato Committee, should join in seeking legislative reform, because human rights are universal and we hope others will follow our company’s lead.

It’s not fair because (1) the statement about seeking legislative reform came from Taco Bell, not from the CIW; and because (2) it’s not specified what sort of legislative reform they mean. There are two different things that CIW has objected to in southern Florida: (1) the prevalent low wages and harsh working conditions; and (2) the use of fraud, coercion, and outright slavery against immigrant farm workers. Both of the complaints were part of the Taco Bell boycott campaign, and if the legislative reform is aimed at dealing with enslavement of farmworkers or making local law enforcement more responsive to issues of slavery and trafficking, then there’s no reason at all why an anarchist should object. If Taco Bell is proposing some kind of bureaucratic labor regulation by the Florida legislature, then yes, we’ll have to oppose that when the time comes. But that suggestion came from Taco Bell, not CIW, and if CIW were to come out in support of it, I wouldn’t be terribly shocked, but it would represent a substantial break from the strategy and tactics behind all of their successful organizing and activism so far.

So enjoy César Chávez Day, and wish the Coalition of Immokalee Workers well on their recent victory. It’s OK. In fact, if you care about workers bettering their lives without coercion and in organizations autonomous from the State, it’s pretty exciting. Even if you’re a libertarian. Really. I promise.

Yesterday I was searching Technorati for reports of NUS Women’s Conference 2006 and came across this post, a transcript by Laurelin of a speech given by Finn Mackay at the Andrea Dworkin Commemorative Conference. It came up because Finn refers to the Education Not for Sale fringe meeting at NUS Women’s Conference, where a representative from the International Union of Sex Workers spoke about her experience of the sex industry. Here’s what Finn had to say about us;

But all too often for many women, and young women, those are the only arguments they hear on prostitution. Only recently for example, I attended a fringe meeting at the NUS Women’s Conference, where a group called Education Not For Sale hosted a speaker from the International Union of Sex Workers to talk about ‘Workers, not victims: the struggle for sexual freedom’. And there a group of student women were informed that prostitution is an area where women can feel good about themselves and about their own bodies, where they can explore their sexuality. We were told that trafficking is mainly a myth, and that we should speak instead of ‘migration for sex work’, and besides (and I quote), the amount it costs to be brought over from Thailand you can pay back in less than six months, if you work hard [audience reacts]. Honestly. There was much talk of women’s agency and workers’ rights, and most women at this meeting were silenced by what they had heard, but they did not raise their voices in disagreement, disbelief or disgust. They did not question the position from which this woman spoke, but I don’t think this is because there weren’t women in the room who were questioning and disbelieving, I think it was because the debate had been framed in the guise of liberalism and women’s rights and what we have to do, is remove the lies that cloak this issue, and take back this debate to the real facts of prostitution, in order that we can create a space in which women are allowed, and validated, to disagree with and question the dominant discourse on this issue.

Finn’s pretending that the only arguments presented at the meeting were in favour of sex work. In fact, the speaker (I’m not using her name because I’m not sure how comfortable she’d be with that) was shouted down by more than one member of the audience speaking explicitly against her view that sex workers should be unionised and that prostitution isn’t always inherently violence against women. Quite how Finn can say most women were silenced by what they had heard when we over-ran by a good twenty minutes and many women stayed behind to chat to the speaker, I don’t know.

I’m also left wondering, by Finn’s speech, what she thinks are the “lies” that came out of the meeting. Sure, she’s got a radically different view on what sex work is, believing, as stated earlier in the speech, that the simple act of selling sex is always, inherently, violence against women. The speaker from IUSW presented a personal view of how much she enjoys her job, something which clashes with Finn’s perceptions of the sex industry. So where is the lying? Unless Finn believes the speaker was presenting a false rose-tinted view on purpose, to recruit young women like some bizarre pantomime villain, what would be the point of lying?

Feminists who are against the unionisation of sex workers (as Finn is, she later lauds the Venezuelan government for not recognising sex workers’ unions) on the grounds it “promotes” prostitution have to pretend there are lies and strange motives behind those who speak out about positive experiences of sex work. If they don’t, their entire rationale falls apart; that sex work is bad not because women work in terrible conditions, are driven to it by desperation, are often addicted to drugs, often put themselves at huge personal risk - sex work is bad because the act of selling sex is violence against women, always hurts women and is always exploitative.

To pretend that this attitude isn’t the “dominant discourse” is dishonest; the reason we invited a speaker from IUSW is because the only experiences of prostitution we ever hear are negative. We hear from feminists like Finn telling us that sex workers who say they enjoy their work are lying, or perhaps brainwashed by patriarchy. We hear of the very real exploitation and abuse of vulnerable women (something the speaker did not ignore, contrary to Finn’s report). We hear how charity workers hand out blankets and condoms to women working street corners. We never hear how women can help themselves, can organise together for better working conditions, can choose to sell sex for reasons other than fuelling a drug addiction or keeping themselves off the streets.

But beside all this, Finn misses the point of the fringe meeting. We’re not in the business of “promoting” prostitution, as if ever talking about it without the pseudo-Victorian fallen-woman narrative constitutes promotion. Of course, in the world of some feminists, it does - the women at the meeting aren’t rational beings, capable of thinking critically about the things they are told, in the same way men who look at pictures that objectify women aren’t. Talking about anyone’s positive experience of sex work will inevitably lead to more women choosing sex work, leading to violence against women. Allowing sexist sexual imagery to be produced and displayed will inevitably lead to violence against women. These attitudes stem from a grossly over-simplified view of human nature, of the agency of human beings, of our ability to make decisions and think critically.

I heard the speaker talk about how much she loves her work. That doesn’t mean I’m so simple I now think all sex workers have good experiences or choose to sell sexual services for reasons completely unrelated to economic need. I don’t now want to be a sex worker. I, and the other women present, are more intelligent than Finn gives us credit for - no one is silenced by hearing someone else’s viewpoint.

At some point, maybe after exams, I’ll respond to the other attitudes inherent in Finn’s speech that I disagree with - that sex work means selling your body, not a service and that when money exchanges hands before a woman has sex with a man, he is taking something away from her, from her humanity - and link that post back here.

Who is are "the media"?

Rad Geek's kindly props to yours truly and DED Space (whom I neglected to mention in my excitement) for our having been mentioned in the Inside the Blogs segment on CNN's Inside Politics, led to some interesting musings:

I don't have a teevee these days, so I don't get much of a chance to follow the ins and outs at CNN or Fox News. But I gather this is a short segment run on one of CNN's daily commentary shows. Yeah, that's only a couple of minutes a day, but it is and ought to be exciting. Tom Tomorrow was exactly right just about this time two years ago when he smacked blog-triumphalists upside the head and pointed out that the relationship of bloggers to the mainstream media is roughly that of wood tick to deer. That's still mostly true now, but we are seeing the first creaks and whispers of a change in front of our eyes. CNN is beginning to pull material from blogs because that's just as easy, or even easier to do than churn out more of the same commentary from the same set of blowhard usual suspects. Thus two feminist bloggers got some recognition that they deserve as much as anyone, and a lot more than the blowhard set that usually gets air time on CNN.

The more DIY media that people produce, and make freely available for re-use, the more that turning to grassroots media will become the path of least resistence. This is not about to revolutionize media; it's unlikely to even reform it much in the immediate future. But it is a step in the right direction and it is exciting to see writing that used to exist strictly as marginalia on mainstream media discussions begin to enter, step by step, into the conversation.

Become the media.

Yes, we are the media ... the citizen media. It certainly is nice to get mentioned on what is probably the only MSM programming that doesn't treat "the bloggers" like some special-interest lobbying organization.

It's also a big break for us that women are doing this show. Abbi Tatton and Jacki Schechner I think do a great job at quickie summaries of various blog posts ... and I can only wonder what this CNN "Inside the Blogs" segment would be like if men were hosting it. Would women's voices be noticed at all then? I mean besides Ana. Is there any reason to assume that the phenomenon we see online -- that most men don't notice, don't respect, don't appreciate "women bloggers" or what we have to say -- does not manifest as well in the newsrooms?

And yet we're here, and in this day and age, where radical conservatives want to take away women's reproductive rights, while liberal progressives say that women's rights are not in jeopardy (or are at best secondary concerns), our presence online in itself I think helps democratize (small 'd') the media.

It can be a maddening experience, though. ms. b.'s announcement that she's leaving the fray shows how taxing it can be to "argue with stupid people" like men's rights activists. I agree.

I’m still a feminist, in case anyone was worrying for a minute there. I still believe passionately in my politics and in making things better. I’m just not so sure the blogosphere is the place to do it, and if it is, that this is where my place is. So I’m gonna write what I know, and how I feel, and screw what my blog description limits me to.

Bloghercon

On the flip side, two women who feel very strongly about the blogosphere and women's places in it are Lisa Stone (aka Surfette) and Elisa Camahort (of Worker Bees Blog), who are working to put together Bloghercon. Elisa offers some history of how this came about:

Men, as well as women, have been asking, "Where are the women?" And we have been responding...we're right here. That the same question is being asked now as was asked one year ago or two years ago is frustrating, but the real question is: what, if anything, do women bloggers want to do about it?

There's room in Bloghercon for philosophical discussion on questions like:

-Is blogging genderless? If you didn't know a blogger's name, could you always tell their gender? And does it matter?
-If, as Shelley claims, links are the powerful talisman of the male blogger, and to women sometimes a link is just a link, then what do women want to get out of blogging?
-How can such a new medium already have an "old boy's club"? Or is this just a continuation of an existing club? Does certain content make a woman an acceptable mascot for that club, while other kinds of expression will keep us out?
-Do women marginalize themselves without any help from men? What drives us to do that?

Even more importantly, Lisa and I want to have a Bloghercon to take action:

-Do we care if there is and old boy's club-does it affect us? Do we want to be part of that club? Do we want to change the club?
-If we care, then how can women promote women, without being dismissed as a sewing circle? And should we? Is creating a women's network the answer, or do we really seek gender-transparency?
-Where are the other barriers? And what are we trying to break through those barriers to do?
-What would be measurable success? If we had a Bloghercon again in a year what would cause us to pat ourselves on the back and say "job well done"?

I am a bit torn personally. You see, every time I ask the question, "why are there so few women in the Technorati Top 100?", my next thought is, "Who cares about the Technorati Top 100? Is that a desirable measure? And if not, then what is?"

We can all acknowledge that there are different kinds of bloggers, and some will never care about links and traffic and being quoted...that's not why they blog. But there's a whole group of women bloggers who are creative and expressive, but also ambitious and driven about their blogging.

How do we all increase our individual satisfaction within the group endeavor that is the blog community? That's what Bloghercon will explore.

Via email, Lisa told me that they hope to announce a time and place for this event very soon. On her site, she shares her views on the why:

I submit that women bloggers deserve Bloghercon, based on the events of the past month. I don't just mean reacting to what he said, what he wrote and the data behind what she's on about, important conversations all.

No, I'm talking about a conference that enables women bloggers to tesseract to proactive social and intellectual networking with each other. Women bloggers have much more enticing sashimi to gobble than Summers and Drum--politically, economically, socially and personally. For example, let's examine what she blogged about women on seven continents, her comments on a facet of family law, her syllabus of political bloggers, what she and she see coming in Elections 2006 and 2008, her red-alert about our rights as bloggers and what she said a television commentator called us.

She also links to other sites discussing Bloghercon. There are more listed in choconancy's del.icio.us page.

Subverting the dominant linking heirarchy, feminist edition

Meanwhile we keep reading and blogging. One of the pleasures for me always is discovering new voices ("new" in that they're new to my narrow experience of the blogiverse). Thanks to props by Genia V. Stevens (who is behind the new jane campaign; see her ad in the right column here), and following the lead of Ophelia of XX, I'm adding some new women to the blogroll, citing here some interesting posts:

Solotude on the Circle of Life (as opposed to "Culture" of Life)

coloredgirls.com with reviews on books, films and other stuff. (Site uses frames, so I can't bookmark a particular review.)

Black Looks on why nobody is asking "Where are the African bloggers?"

swirlspice on local Twin Cities yokels

rashundatramble offers her living will with snark

Lynne d Johnson on leading a talk with coco fusco at the Bronx Museum

Not Formica on identity blogging

sister outsider on how some people just don't change

This is some good stuff and I gain by adding these women to my blogreading experience.