feminist blogs

[Note: Despite what follows, I’m still generally on hiatus. I didn’t want to publish this post, drafted a few weeks ago and obliquely referred to here, until the definition I’d submitted to Urban Dictionary was actually available on their site, which, now, it is.)
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Let me first say that I mean no slight to the individual whom I’m about to quote. Really, I don’t. And frankly, I feel personally indebted to him for the phrase ad feminem, which he happened to drop in a recent message to the WMST-L listerv. (And yes, I did submit the term, with proper attribution*, to the folks at Urban Dictionary. And why not? They have published other terms I’ve contributed - which, of course, is not to say that I coined them! - such as bligot, wife in law, and prostituted women.)

Still, this single sentence - composed, it would seem, in utter seriousness, and posted as part of a biographical statement on the homepage for Dr. Michael J. Murphy of the Women and Gender Studies Program at Washington University - made me howl with laughter:

My dissertation research investigated the historical role of white linen undergarments in the socio-cultural production of the normative male body in America.

Seriously, if Martians landed on Earth tomorrow, and one were asked to explain the field of Women’s Studies to our extraterrestrial guests, how could one (even the most pomo among us) possibly explain that?

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* Note, however, that the example sentence at the UD definition is mine - crafted primarily to annoy and/or provoke certain individuals whom I have often seen engaging in these ad feminem attacks (which is not to say the same behavior isn’t committed by constituents of every feminist faction).

Yesterday as we were in post-Christmas-lounging-about-mode at my in-laws’ place in Williamsburg, I caught up on the local paper for that area, the Daily Press, and was awestruck to read this item in the Letters to the Editor section, by some ignorant soul named Don McMonigal:

Graduation etiquette

I recently attended the graduation of a fine young man from one of Virginia’s prestigious colleges. The hooting, cat calling, whistle blowing and boorish conduct among some of the audience members so distracted from what should have been a dignified affair that I found myself both appalled and disgusted.

I departed said ceremony wondering to myself whether this is the price we must pay for making a higher education available to the lower class. What can be done to restore a sense of pride and dignity to America? [emphasis added]

All afternoon I stewed over this, losing count in my head of how many things were wrong with this letter. Off the top of my head, here are the ones I do remember. (Feel free to add your own in the comments.)

1. Precisely how do you know that any of the graduates concerned, and/or those attending the ceremony, were of this “lower class”? If it’s the graduates whom you’re labeling in this manner, is there some secret knowledge you have concerning their economic status? Given that, presumably, one could not even make such assumptions based on the manner of their dress, as all the graduates were probably wearing the same cap-and-gown type of getup. (Or, perhaps, did these allegedly “lower class” graduates and/or guests betray their economic status by possessing some non-white skin color? Most likely, you’d never write a letter to the editor complaining about education being open to, say, black folks, as that would be prohibitively specific, overtly racist as well as classist.)
2. What, exactly, do you mean by “the” lower class? Is there only one? Are class distinctions that static in your mind - with a “them”- the lower class - vs. an “us” - whatever you are? Which is, I must wonder, what, exactly? As both middle- and upper-class people tend to assume their own economic status in society is not only the “norm,” but some mysteriously “fixed” thing. What is, of course, more the “norm” in America is living one paycheck away from homelessness. One wave of corporate layoffs or one natural disaster, of course, can send a whole region into an economically depressed status.
3. Even if we assumed that your category of “the lower class” here made any sense whatsoever, precisely how would depriving the persons allegedly comprising same begin to “restore a sense of pride and dignity to America?” Was there more of a sense of “pride and dignity to America” before Brown vs. Board of Education? Before financial aid made education whatsoever possible for some (but by no means, all) poor people?
4. Are you not aware that federal student aid programs have been mercilessly slashed over the last several years of Republican rule? According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the average amount of federal student loan debt upon graduation has increased from $7,650 in 1992-1993 to $17,400 in 2003-2004. Or is that progress as far as you’re concerned?

I just read the Sex worker: What’s in a name? post at Feministing. In the post, Jessica takes issue with the fact that

The State Department’s office combating human trafficking issued a directive Friday to US agencies urging them to avoid using terms “sex worker” or “child sex worker” and even advised governments not to use them. [via]

One commenter responded thusly:

Jessica, regarding “Who the fuck is this guy to decide the preferred nomenclature? Because the thing is, he clearly has a definite view that most, if not all, of prostitution is forced.” I don’t know this guy, so I can’t say with any degree of certainty, but my impression upon reading the article is that he’s only interested in talking about forced prostitution when he talks about “women used in prostitution” because that was his job- combating human trafficking… I agree that it’s a problem if he’s trying to use terms like that for everyone, but if his focus is on the people forced into those positions (which I suspect it is), then I’m not sure I see a problem with that.

This brought to mind an experience from July of 2000, when I did a workshop for a conference of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence. The workshop was titled Engendering Justice: Program Development for Battered Women Who Are Prostituted.

The idea was that battered women who are also involved in the sex industry (most commonly, their batterer is also their pimp) have unique safety planning and other needs that tend to go unmet within the context of battered women’s service agencies. (Whereas, to the extent that there even are agencies tailored to meet the needs of women in the industry, they rarely specifically address violence, or provide very concrete forms of assistance such as confidentially located shelters/safe houses. An overflowing jar of free condoms in the lobby of a drop-in “health education” center, incidentally, is not an adequate substitute for competent services for battered women involved in prostitution.)

So there I was, strategizing with other conference attendees about what the battered women’s movement can do to materially assist women whose abuse is directly connected to their being in the sex industry (whether they entered said industry by choice, coercion, or some murky combination thereof… etc.)

And in doing this, I’m specifically inviting my sister advocates to thoughtfully engage this work, regardless of whether they speak from “abolitionist,” “sex workers’ rights movement,” or “harm reductionist” perspectives with regard to the prostitution issue per se.

And then these two cheeky college girls interrupt everything. They had read Sex Work: Writings by Women in the Sex Industry for a class, so they know better than the rest of us what direction this workshop should take.

The capsule version of this truly ridiculous sabotage attempt:

“We just, like, want to say that, you know, lots of women (not us, of course) find sex work to be, like, totally liberating, transgressing against the socially constructed paradigms of gender… “

And what was most amazing to me about these two women was not that they had no idea what they were talking about (much less, who they were talking to); rather, it was the fact that they had apparently not even read the title of the workshop, much less its description.

Because it was right there! In the title!

…Program Development for Battered Women Who Are Prostituted…

(Notice the sequential order of the terms “battered” and “prostituted.” This actually was deliberate!)

…As in: We accept that women who seek services specifically from battered women’s service agencies are most likely battered!

And that we are talking, here, about a specific subset of battered women: those with current or previous involvement in prostitution, where that involvement has a direct link with their self-identified abuse.

We were not, in other words, there to define prostitution, or to analyze the experiences of some allegedly empowered “sex workers.”

Could a population of truly empowered sex workers actually exist somewhere out there? Perhaps, but what the fuck do I care (in this specific context)?

I’m there to discuss the needs of the women who would be calling domestic and sexual violence hotlines, specifically asking for help to get out - as in, away from their abusers, whether their abusers are husbands, boyfriends, girlfriends, madams, pimps, or combinations thereof.

(Correct me if I’m wrong, but battered women’s service agencies do not, typically, make it their mission to pontificate about the life situations of women who are not battered, and who are not, therefore, contacting them through hotlines and such, right?)

In designing the workshop this way, I thought I’d circumvented the whole problem of whether one must regard prostitution as systematized violence against women and youth - because the matter of how I, or you, or anyone else defines prostitution is not the issue; rather, the issue is what specific forms of help do self-identifying battered women involved in prostitution actually need in order to be safe?

But these class-privileged little shits, high on Foucault or whatever, didn’t care about these women - they only cared for their precious sex workers’ rights party line (crafted as it has been, largely, by women who in various ways pimp out other women, all the while disingenuously describing themselves as sex workers, whores, etc.).
Perhaps, then, it is not a coincidence that this was the last time I ever gave that workshop, or anything like it. It was all just too tiresome. (And I had kids to raise. And lots of other reasons for dropping out of that whole scene. But that’s another subject for another day.)

I did, however, come up with a creative way to address the sabotage attempt. (I did not, in other words, icily offer that they should sell their own asses for awhile and then see whether they still felt it was all so fabulously empowering.)

Rather, I calmly acknowledged that while there were the “abolitionist,” “sex workers’ rights movement,” and “harm reductionist” approaches to the issue of defining prostitution, that I understood perfectly well that their view - of “sex work” as “empowering” - was far more dominant and popular than the other two within academic feminist circles, but that this was hardly relevant to my workshop’s purpose. Then I repeated the whole bit about how it didn’t matter how I, or they, or anyone else “defined prostitution,” but rather, what mattered was addressing the survival needs of battered women, period.

This, of course, both infuriated and confused them.

Infuriated, because people who go about pretending to be persecuted (especially vicariously persecuted) hate being called out on actually having rather dominant views.

And confused, because of course, the women in prostitution had always been inherently invisible to them; they were not, to these students, actual women (much less “empowered” women); rather, they were issues to be hotly debated with other class-privileged college students.

In one month, I’ll be in Seattle, staying with one ex and pondering the wisdom of whether or not to attempt to squeeze in visits with two other exes.

I don’t anticipate that staying with ex #1 (Ethan) will be in any way weird. Interesting, yes, but not weird. Let’s just say: we have an understanding.

But I’m not sure how it will (or would) be with the other two. My histories with both women are nothing if not pivotal and volatile. (As it has also been with E., but we’ve “processed” that and effectively moved on.) All parties, in any case, are aware that my marriage to Jeff is a rock-solid, immovable one, and there should be no confusion as to the authenticity of my loyalties, a central element of which is monogamy. Sex and its resonances are not at issue here. But I’ll be damned if I can explain, with any lucidity, what is at issue.

“Loves easily, but never lightly” - line from an old bio, as apt today as it ever was.

Anyway. I have unfinished business to attend to in those parts, and precious little of that has specifically to do with former lovers. (Funny, that “exes” are the only subject that feels even marginally safe to engage, here.) The more palpable resonances have to do with blood family, as well as the education I was forced to abandon, for reasons of economics as well as personal safety, in my fourth year at Evergreen (though not before I’d racked up $20,000 in student loan debt).

I’ve missed the Northwest like I can’t begin to describe. In psychic terms, it has been at least as much of a “home” to me as any other place I’ve lived.

I suppose I’ll bring along some Thomas Wolfe for re-reading on the plane, for the sake of rootedness within irony. (You Can’t Go Home Again, and all that.)

Really, what better place is there for contemplating one’s divergent root systems - sometimes experienced as a lack of rootedness altogether (recalling, here, Salman Rushdie’s Imaginary Homelands), than when one is literally in mid-air, suspended above one’s country, one’s own history?

Too, it may be fruitful to recall Adrienne Rich’s question, from her poem, Sources:

From where does your strength come, you Southern Jew/ split at the root, raised in a castle of air?

In terms of my history, culture, sexuality, geography, education, economic class, and damn near everything else that might conjure a human being’s identity: I am also nothing if not split at each of my obvious roots.

For me, “groundedness” is a necessarily ephemeral thing, more readily summoned through experiences of flight than via any other means.

And, hopefully, by the time I come home (and yes, Richmond really is my home), that renewed sense of groundedness will be substantive enough that I’ll be able to explain, meaningfully and precisely, what I mean by each sentence found immediately above.