renegade evolution on allies.

please read.

i’m going to leave it at that, this is an incredible post.

press release: the PINK SCARE: of Ms. Palfrey and Sex Panic

the following is a press release from SWANK, SWOP-NYC, PONY, and the Desiree Alliance:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE (source)

PRESS STATEMENT
Dylan Wolfe – Sex Workers Action New York (SWANK), swank@riseup.net
Michael Bottoms – Sex Workers Outreach Project – New York City (SWOP-NYC), swop.nyc@gmail.com
Susan Blake – Prostitutes of New York (PONY), pony@panix.com
Desiree Alliance, info@DesireeAlliance.org

The Pink Scare: Of Ms. Palfrey and Sex Panic

New York, NY – The activists at Sex Workers Action New York (SWANK), Sex
Workers Outreach Project New York (SWOP-NYC), Prostitutes of New York
(PONY) and the nationally-based Desiree Alliance are saddened that Deborah
Jeane Palfrey, also known as the D.C. Madam, passed away on May 1st in an
apparent suicide. We – prostitutes, strippers, pro-dommes, porn stars, sex
experts, and allies – extend our sympathies to all of those hurt by this
most recent chapter of the “Pink Scare,” in which oppressive legislation
and social stigma partner to generate hysteria around what, for us, can
prove to be simply a decent way to make a living.

The circumstances surrounding Ms. Palfrey’s death suggest that Americans
reconsider the current state and federal policies that govern sex work, as
well as the stigmatization and sensational treatment of those who
participate in this industry. From New York to California, daily reports
of Pink Scare-fueled police busts, e-stings and raids, even at legal
venues like strip clubs and dungeons, have reached a fever pitch. These
oppressive patterns regularly marginalize and terrorize our communities,
with barely a headline to show for the mass arrests. In contrast, coverage
of high-profile cases include yellow journalism exposés published at the
expense of sex workers’ privacy, dignity and livelihood. In an interview
with Lori Price, it was Ms. Palfrey who said, “Without question in my
mind, escort and adult service businesses. . . are being used as the new
weapon of choice in American politics.” The public figures implicated in
this type of case often receive little more than a slap on the wrist and a
second chance from a forgiving public. Ironically, among the exposed we
regularly find the very same lawmakers and other insiders who claim to
protect people from vice through moralizing legislation. Former State
Department official Randall L. Tobias was a Palfrey patron, though he
implemented the abstinence earmark in programs such as the President’s
Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and, with it, the
“Anti-Prostitution Pledge” that has resulted in diminished funding for sex
worker-run organizations. Annually, our government spends millions in
taxpayer money to apprehend and prosecute participants in the sex trade,
while more effective policies like harm reduction-based approaches,
including the multiplication of living wage alternatives, are dramatically
under-utilized.

In both the highly-publicized scandals and under-documented daily
struggles, many sex workers now face financial ruin, emotional hardship
and social opprobrium at the hands of the Pink Scare simply because their
work, though it takes place between consenting adults, may be illegal and,
to some, may be offensive. In two instances associated with Palfrey’s
case, Ms. Palfrey and her former employee, Ms. Britton, oppressive laws
and stigma cost the implicated their very lives. Why did Ms. Palfrey die?
In response to this question, an activist with the International Union of
Sex Workers wrote, “Whether she died by her own hand or her suicide is a
cover for murder, she has been killed by the state.” Given the highly
political nature of these events, SWANK, SWOP-NYC, PONY and the Desiree
Alliance call for an independent investigation of the circumstances
surrounding Ms. Palfrey’s untimely death. Furthermore, we, as activists
and advocates, would like to stress in this instance that the
criminalization of sex workers and our labor only drives us further
underground, making us and our dependents more vulnerable to client and
police violence, and even death, as we are further isolated. The
unfortunate events of the D.C. scandal bring many of these broader issues
into sharper focus. It is high time that we challenge the morals and laws
that harm so many, so deeply, with so few gains and so many lives
destroyed.

via Bound, Not Gagged.

food for thought: germaine greer.

I found this article via 3quarksdaily. It is a commentary on the Miley Cyrus photograph, taken by Annie Liebotvitz, and I think provides relevant and critical analysis by a feminist icon.

“We Like Our Venuses Young” by Germaine Greer (excerpt)

“. . . . We train female children to be manipulative and to exploit their sex. From the time she is tiny, a girl in our society is taught to flirt. She is usually dressed like a mini-whore in pink and tinsel, short skirt, matching knickers, baby-doll pyjamas, long hair falling over her face. She learns to court attention and, when successful, to hide her face. If she’s lucky enough to get to be a big sister she might get over this sleazy conditioning, but very few daughters these days get to grow out of being “daddy’s girl”. When the time comes she is likely to reject approaching womanhood, desperate to keep her thighs skinny, and nearly as desperate to acquire hard, high breasts. The idea of growing into her own body is charmless, frightening. One thing we know about the Leibovitz photograph is that Cyrus saw nothing amiss in clutching a satin sheet to her apparently naked bosom, and looking at the camera over her shoulder. Girls are taught to look at the world in that sidelong fashion from the time they come to consciousness.

For her photograph of the teenage celebrity, Leibovitz chose a palette strongly redolent of the dirty postcards of yesteryear, sepia embittered with black, a suggestion of eye-blue and lip-red, as if retouched by hand, with never – thank our stars – a hint of pink. The light is centred on the child’s sallow, unformed cheek. Her eyes are shadowed and puffy, her lips slightly set, as if she is waiting out the slow shutter-click of an obsolete camera. Nobody has run a comb through her disordered mass of dark hair, which seems greasy and damp, as if with sweat. As one of her now ex-fans shrieked in his blog, “She looked like she is freshly f**ked in these photos!” The subject of Leibovitz’s photo could be a child prostitute from Casablanca, vintage 1900, the camera in the hands of a sex tourist who is about to toss a few coins to the doorkeeper. It is Disney, after all, that is merchandising this child, and the suggestion of pimping will cling to it. Leibovitz may be cynical, is obviously cynical. She is also, as usual, justified.

Now Disney accuses Vanity Fair of drumming up controversy and deliberately manipulating a 15-year-old in order to sell magazines, as if its own motives were not identical. The photo shoot for Vanity Fair was probably carried out weeks ago but the brouhaha has been timed for the very day the magazine appeared on the newsstands. Disney could have refused to make its star available for a shoot with Vanity Fair, or, if what it wanted was to protect its brand image, it could have demanded the right to vet the pictures. Cyrus was not undefended in the clutches of Leibovitz; her parents and minders were present and apparently saw nothing amiss in the offending photograph, which, in its original state, probably looked less like a dirty postcard than it does on the pages of Vanity Fair.

Before Leibovitz, Cyrus was regularly photographed on red carpets dressed as a 35-year-old in sequins and chiffon with heavy makeup, hair extensions, fuck-me shoes, and occasionally a segment of baby breast escaping at an ill-cut armhole. Otherwise she dresses as a schoolgirl in long socks, very short skirts and the same hanks of rather gluey-looking hair. These publicity shots are far cheaper and far nastier in implication than the Leibovitz image, which has class. Meanwhile, in a series of candid snapshots apparently of Cyrus that have found their way on to the internet, Cyrus the professional virgin is apparently happy to show herself nipples akimbo in jersey underwear, pulling down a vest to display a green bra, and disporting a bare belly on a bed with a boyfriend. All tacky, all in circulation, and all displaying the usual knowingness. . .”

Read the entire article at the guardian, here.

food for thought – hannah wilke.

“Visual prejudice has caused world wars, mutilation, hostility, and alienation generated by fear of ‘the other.’ Self-hatred is an economic necessity, a capitalistic, totalitarian, religious invention used to control the masses through the denial of the importance of a body language, which is replaced by a work ethic devised to establish a slavery of the mind burdened by that awful albatross – the body . . . . The pride, power and pleasure of one’s own sexual being threatens cultural achievement, unless it can be made into a commodity that has economic and social utility.” (emphasis added)

-Hannah Wilke

In the 1970s and early ’80s, Hannah Wilke produced performance tapes that examine sex and sexuality, feminism and femininity, the body and its representation. Wilke explores gesture in relation to gender and power, using her own image to confront the erotic representation of the female body in art history and popular culture. (source)

food for thought: camille paglia.

Excerpted from Sex, Art, and American Culture by Camille Paglia, 1992, pgs. 50-53. Emphasis added.

In our cities, on our campuses far from home, young women are vulnerable and defenseless. Feminism has not prepared them for this. Feminism keeps saying the sexes are the same. It keeps telling women they can do anything, go anywhere, say anything, wear anything. No, they can’t. Women will always be in sexual danger.

yes, PLEASE!

Kansas University recently decided to change it’s “women’s studies” major to the more inclusive “women, gender and sexuality studies”. In the article found onLJWorld.com, those involved express both happiness at the more inclusive and perhaps more relevant title, but the program director is also worried that the core of women’s history and feminist influence may be lost in a new program:

“Even though the program is changing, [program director ] Cudd said she wants to hold onto its historical ties. ‘We loathe to lose the women as well because we have this revolutionary beginning with the February Sisters,’ she said. ‘We want to keep that kind of link to our beginning as well.’” (source)

Yet the new program title is a response to the relevance of the term “women’s” studies:

“’The title that’s proposed kind of reflects the diversity of the classes and the diversity of the faculty and the work that they do,’ said Ryan Weaver, a graduate teaching assistant in the program. ‘The work being done in the department isn’t just focused on women and women’s oppression.’” (source)

See, the thing here is that the work being done by the faculty isn’t focused solely on women’s oppression anymore because FEMINISM is not only focused on women’s oppression. I have to applaud the decision (which must have been very difficult) of the university professors to ultimately change what I believe to be a very outdated title.

As a graduate student in a program called “Applied Women’s Studies”, I have severe reservations about writing the title of the program on my own CV. I just don’t agree with an exclusionary “women’s studies” program anymore. Women’s studies has evolved and changed in the same ways that feminism has – with time and with the gradual incorporation of certain liberties and reforms and revelations that have been made in the past few decades. With the genre of “women’s studies” come lesbian and gay studies, comes gender studies, comes sexuality studies, comes MASCULINE studies  – and it seems all but impossible to consider one without any influence from the other. This multiplicitous identity – this myriad of standpoints and possibilities – will enable future feminists and scholars to revolutionize stagnant thought patterns that can be persistent when one is committed to *only* learning about women’s oppression, without one foot in the future, without the foresight to recognize that feminism has multiplied and evolved and reached much further than the simple argument of woman’s oppression.

Of course, the one caveat here, that I believe the program director has already addressed – is the absolute importance of learning women’s history as a core, as a base  – as a supplement to the omissive history we all learned in high school. Learning about first and second wave feminism is integral and vital to the formation of a critical and thoughtful feminist. It really is my hope that these students will be able to learn the basics of feminism, and that their experience might be more enriched by the inclusion of the basics of lesbian/gay history, or trans history, of the history of sexuality, as well as philosophies, theory, and application.