( Read more...Collapse )

went to Switzerland for the weekend (as you do) and caught a Gondola up an Alp. Was pretty incredible. About 2500m up.
( Read more...Collapse )

 for those as wants them. Nothing special, and not interesting to anyone who doesn't know me, hence below the cut. I'd also like o issue a special warning to creativelies    - my poor photography will make you cry.

photos sideways, will fix later

In San Francisco now.

I don't think I really want to blogsomuch, I dont know why, I just feel very averse to travel-blogging. Too impersonal, or something? But I'll happily email anyone who emails me.

Oh, one thing though: I'm staying around the corner from Larry Flynt's Hustler Club. If America's draconian legal system didn't terrify me, plans would be afoot, that's all I'm saying. As it is I just grit my teeth and throw angry and disgusted looks at anyone I see coming out. I'll admit it's not a very effective approach, but it cheers me up a bit.

Sex is a mutual collaborative effort.

Prostitution isn't, it is one person renting another's body.

Prostitution, by definition, is sex with someone who does not want to have sex with you.

Therefore prostitution is not sex, it is rape.

(Pornography, of course, is just prostitution on camera)

It is not perhaps as harmful as some other forms of rape, but the basic feeling of wanting to have sex with someone who does not want to have sex with you is rape-thinking. It is a difference of degree, not kind.

Wanting to watch people have unwilling sex is rape-thinking. Wanting them to pretend they are enjoying it doesn't change much.

That is why I cannot be in a relationship with someone who uses prostitutes, either directly or by outsourcing it to pornographers. Because I cannot be in a relationship with someone who thinks like a rapist.

That sounds black and white, because frankly, it is.

I know that probably the majority of johns do not use prostitutes because they want rape. They want sex - and the fact that the prostitute doesn't want it doesn't deter them.

It seems to me that most porn-users either accept the fiction that she is enjoying it, or cease thinking about the prostitute as a real woman, and just see her as an image on a screen.

That is, they learn how to turn off their empathy and awareness, in order to be okay with - and be turned on by - rape. It is amoral rather than immoral - indifferent to women's suffering rather than cruelly enjoying it.

Close to a quarter of all Australian women have been raped, another quarter report escaping an attempted rape, and pretty much all of the rest of us have slept with someone we didn't want to because it was unexpected and we were confused and there was no time to think and we didn't really know how to say no, or realise we could, or we'd gone half-way and felt it was too late to stop, and it seemed easier to just to go along with it.
Indifference in the face of this is unacceptable.

And for me personally, a really strong sense of morality (true morality - a nuanced and rigourous principle of no harm - not something handed down by parents, gods or lawmakers) is incredibly attractive. A man who doesn't look at porn because he knows it bothers me is not enough. But the rare man who has his own morality which is actively opposed to all forms of rape-thinking, that is someone I can respect and trust and love and feel safe with. It is also very very sexy.

This is, I think, the third-last of all posts I will make about porn/prostitution. 

cross-posted to anti_porn 

UPDATED THOUGHT: the 'very very sexy' comment is not meant to be read as a message to men that you should become a feminist so you'll get laid. It was quite a personal comment, and was meant to express that this policy of mine - not dating johns - is not just a denying thing, not just the absence of misogyny, which is not really anything, it's a lack of a thing, but a positive, embracing thing - embracing people with this beautiful characteristic of ethical living

"Last week one of the main entrepreneurs Amsterdam's perfectly legal sex industry cashed in, selling his properties in the district. The buyer, for $35 million, was a not-for-profit organization backed by the city of Amsterdam. The plan is to convert the buildings in which prostitutes pose in the windows into apartments and more conventional commercial space. 

From a strictly entrepreneurial point of view, this is not a good investment. The buyers reckon that the value of the properties may fall by $21 million, a deficit that the municipality would have to fund. But for the city elders, that may be the price of transforming the old city center, which they say has become clogged with undesired and outright criminal activities. While prostitution is legal in the Netherlands, the city has found the trade is a magnet for female trafficking and money laundering." 

"The buyout will eliminate one-third of the prostitution rooms in the red-light district, and one fifth of those citywide.
Nor is this likely to be the last buyout." 

"And the authorities appear ready to accept the inevitable impact of the cleanup on tourism." 
 
Fuckin' A

(extract from an article by Shalom Auslander) (that cannot be his real name - "Peace, Foreigner" - nice though):

TRIGGER WARNING

Now listen: I have had bad days before. I have been fired from jobs, I have been dumped by girlfriends, I have totaled cars. I have had days where I have received three — count ‘em, three — tickets for speeding or moving violations between 9 a.m. and 9 p.m. 
But I have never had a day as bad as a woman named “Cloey” had the day they shot the video that appeared on that page [mainstream porn exchange forum] — that is to say, I have never had a day where someone wrote the word “Cockwhore” on my forehead with lipstick, tried to shove their entire fist down my throat and then “choke-fucked” me with their penis until I barfed on their testicles. Never, ever had a day like that. 
Nor have I ever had a day like the blonde woman in the movie that was pictured below it: I never had a day where someone hung a toilet seat around my neck, spit in my mouth and slapped my face as he tried to shove the head of his cock through the back of my skull.

Bad days I have had. But not that bad.




Full article here, 

Note on the full article:

His nostalgic romanticism for 70s (I'm assuming) porn is kind of, well - spend five minutes at HustlingTheLeft (trigger/NSFW warning: it has images of sexist/racist/anti-semitic rape, taken from Hustler magazine).

I'm trying to work out quite how I feel about what he's saying there. Take Deep Throat as an example - it almost certainly shows Linda Boreman ("Lovelace") being raped, and yet the storyline - here is the question: is the ridiculous male fantasy (that giving head happens to be the only thing that can make her orgasm) better than the frightening male fantasy that a woman is suffering while she gives head? It seems to me like it must be, but then they are both examples of pure objectification - that is, the male projecting his desires onto the woman and not treating her like a subject with her own desires. Is making a woman smile as she suffers adding insult to injury? At least the latter is more honest.

Possibly the question is unnecessary - like asking if you'd rather be shot or stabbed.

anti_porn

Step One: Think

Seriously, though, it seems like hardly anybody really stands for anything - people think they do, but they don't actually.

For example, as you would know, I am morally opposed to pornography (but not sex in art, or public nudity). What that means is I have thought a lot about porn, I have seen some of it, I have watched interviews with former porn-stars, I have listened to the people who make porn, I have read accounts of porn-users, and people who marry porn-users, I have read essays from people who are against pornography and people who are in favour of it, I have read studies that attempted to evaluate the effects of porn on users, and people who study the crime rates in towns with more or less porn use, or brothels, and not least, I have been a woman in a world where most men use porn, and I have dated men who use it (but I won't do so again - that part of the experiment is over).

Every piece of evidence that I have seen shows that pornography, particularly the increasing misogyny and availability of internet porn, is harmful to users, harmful to people who want to have relationships with users, and especially harmful to the women who are prostituted to make it.

(I am getting to a point.) I have a stance against pornography. Which puts me in a very small minority.

The point I am making is: if you have done some portion of the above research, and weighed things up, and consider yourself to still be in favour of pornography, then a) I don't like you, but b) at least you stand for something.

The majority of of people who would describe themselves as pro-porn do NOT stand for anything. They have never tried to think about it from any other angle than their own. They are simply protecting their own use.* They have not actually thought about the issue. They are reactionary**. This is not a stand. Stand for something.

Likewise, many people who might think they have a political stance, because they are a Liberal voter, or a Labor voter, Republican or Democrat - a lot of them don't actually stand for something. They haven't weighed up the issues. They've just picked a team. Picking a team, and wanting your team to win, is not having an opinion. Have an opinion.

Just about every Christian I've met could not reasonably be called Christian. If you haven't read the bible (and you're not an anti-biblical Christian) then you don't even know what you're supposed to believe. You've just picked a team. I have not yet met a Christian who acted as though God was real. If you are rich, you are not a Christian. If you profess to any kind of religion, find out what it is you are subscribing to, and examine each aspect of the belief system, and decide how you really feel about it. Then we can talk.

Expressing an opinion that you think you are meant to hold is not having an opinion. So many people I know have no idea how they feel about, eg. Australia's treatment of refugees, because they've never actually thought about it. They'll say it's bad, and they think they think it's bad, but they're not actually thinking at all. If you've never really, actually thought about Australia's treatment of refugees, then you don't have an opinion on it. Think about it, or at least admit (even if it's only to yourself) that you haven't really thought about it. It's okay to not yet have an opinion on something. There are a lot of things in the world to think about it. You can't do it all at once.

Holding a deliberately 'extreme' opinion (for example, "the Holocaust wasn't as bad as people make out") for the sake of shocking people is not having an opinion. If you do it only to be transgressive, then it isn't what you really think. You probably don't even know what you really think. You just like to think of yourself as being controversial. It's cowardly, too, because you haven't put your real self out there - if any one criticises you, your ego is safe. It wasn't really what you believed anyway.

You can't have an opinion on everything, but let there be something, at least one real, true thing, that you have thought about, that you believe in, that you care about, that you think is important, that really matters to you.


*Or in the case of many women, they do not want to know how they are seen by the majority of men. Which I completely understand, because it is fucking terrifying. But an opinion that can only be held as long as you turn your head away is not an opinion.

** A good test is this: if the issue at hand didn't apply to you personally, would your opinion change? Obviously my pro-choice stance rests partly on the fact that the idea of being forced to give birth scares me, but even if I was infertile, I would still want that right for other women. If I ceased caring when I became infertile, clearly that wouldn't be a real opinion I held, just a reactionary protection of my own interests.

Apologies for the rambling self-indulgence, but is that not the purpose of a blog?

Second thought: I don't mean your stances should be set in stone. It makes sense that most people's opinions would be works in progress. This post is just inviting itself to be wildly misinterpreted, but I'm just gonna leave it. Again, is that not the point of a blog, that it needn't be perfect?