On cliques and other assorted bullshit

I’ve been doing some thinking about radfems recently, mostly spurred by some recent encounters with the Internet variety, and frankly, the more I see the less I like them.
Let’s start with this little gem that someone wrote at Genderberg and that was reposted on Renegade Evolution. Note that we do not know whether Sam herself wrote this or whether it was a commenter. The reason we do not know this is that Genderberg has an inner sanctum accessible only to the chosen few. Apparently the rest of us are a corrupting influence or something. As rude and thoroughly unhelpful as it is to regard other feminists as corrupting influences, it beats the hell out of pretending they don’t exist. Take a gander at this if you haven’t already seen it…

"I believe Ren Ev is porn marketing. There are many ways to market. What she's doing is called astro turfing. I wrote about it in that other thread. This type of marketing gets those people who don't like ads, but don't get that ads can take many forms, and one of the most successful is to make the AD seem like a program, or an article, or a blog. She's a front, something like BitchPhD is. That's another type of advertising. Ren Ev's being paid to popularize porn. No marketing initiative would ignore that type of marketing and the big porn market is now being managed by Time Warner and it's peers with all their marketing engine. This astro turfing is far the most effective nowadays, when people are sick of ads, marketers can still use methods like this to slide by. All those people who are drawn to REs blog, daily grow more and more accustomed to seeing her as just another performer. She's popularizing it. Taking the sting ot of it. Apparently she wrote about ass to mouth recently. No problem. Just use listerine. And they listen to her. She's marketing. She's archived by google. She comes up on searches for words and subject matter used in everyday searches. And that's the point of her blog."


Don your tinfoil hats! Now, there are all kinds of problems with this starting with the fact that just because you disagree with a person doesn’t mean that you get to pretend she doesn’t exist or that the big bad evil business types are making her do it. Hey, I’m a socialist and very much disinclined to trust big business, and even I think you people are way off base on this one.

Both Renegade Evolution and Bitch PhD are real women with real opinions. You can disagree with them, you can even dislike them, but dismissing them as sock puppets of the big bad porn biz is pretty damn stupid. Where is your proof? How do you know that RenEv is being paid to market porn via her blog? Are you aware that Bitch PhD was around for a long time before she hooked up with SG, and that she still doesn’t really write about porn very much? I’m having a hard time seeing how endless discussions of the latest cute thing PK did are a super-secret way to get people to buy porn.

Now I don’t like the Suicide Girls organization. I think they really are guilty of false advertising. I think they take advantage of the gullibility and wish to be liked of young women who mostly felt like freaks and rejects in high school, and who are still young enough for that to really sting. Specifically, they take advantage of their employees by grossly underpaying them and tying them into contracts which I’m willing to bet most people in the mainstream porn biz would never be foolish enough to sign. The whole thing’s a crock of shit, if you want my honest opinion. Smoke and mirrors designed to assuage the guilty consciences of a bunch of leftist-leaning alterna-guys and provide a cheap thrill for guys who kind of dig the alterna look but know very well that in real life they have no hope in hell of getting actual alterna girls to give them the time of day.
So, do I think that Bitch PhD is perhaps a little misguided in her belief that she can do some good by working with SG? Maybe. Even if that were the case, does that mean that everything she’s done in the past is invalid and she never was anything but a front for the porn biz?

Um, no, it doesn’t. The fact that Ren Ev actually DOES work in the sex biz doesn’t make her a front either. And if her site is supposed to be advertising for the porn biz then her site is doing a crappy job, because it hasn’t changed my opinion of the sex trade one bit. I don’t think it’s really intended to, either.

In fact, you want to know what I really think? I don’t think porn is an important issue. I think that the aspects of the sex trade that involve women who were trafficked, women who want out, are absolutely important feminist issues BUT I don’t think that conflating those women with women who work in that business of their own free will is helpful in any way. Personally, I would never under any circumstances want to work in the sex trade. I would be miserable and hate every second of it. But, unlike some other people, I have a clear enough sense of boundaries to realize that I am not every woman and it is not in fact all in me, no matter what the song might say. To assume that I know how other women feel about that industry just because we share the same kind of genitalia is both foolish and patronizing, especially when some of those women are actually SAYING that they feel differently.

Rule number one of feminism, folks – listen to what other women say about their own subjective experiences and believe them. When did we forget that?

Now, at some point the anti-porn stance seems to have become part of the standard feminist position in the same way that support for abortion is standard, or at least SUCH IS ASSUMED TO BE THE CASE BY MOST RADICAL FEMINISTS. The problem is, on this particular issue there is no real consensus, no matter how often certain radfems scream “yes there is a consensus and all REAL feminist agree with me, the rest of you are imposters!”.
The rest of us are not imposters. We are people who do not agree with you. Learning to deal with people who one does not agree with is one of those things that separate adults from children. It’s a basic life skill.
The funny thing is that, despite what the anti-porn contingent seems to assume, many of those who disagree with them are not actually big fans of porn. I’m not. I just don’t think it’s an important enough issue to deserve so much focus. I also don’t think that it’s OK to sideline any feminist who isn’t willing to fall into step with the anti-porn camp. To be perfectly honest I used to be a lot more anti-porn than I am now, and a great deal of my move away from that stance was prompted by the fact that I stopped and listened to a lot of what comes out of the anti-porn camp and came to the conclusion that most of it is disingenuous nonsense.

See, I’m a linguistics geek. I pay attention to language. And the language that the anti-porn people use…well, that language is very telling. Sam’s comments about pro-porn women only caring about their own “wet pussies”, Twisty referring to men’s dicks as “funk-filled bratwurst”…

Well, honestly, after a while it’s hard not to wonder if the problem those people have is really with porn, or if it’s actually a problem with sex. A dislike of all things fleshy, if you will.

I happen to rather like both dicks and pussies. I don’t much care for seeing either described in “ew, icky” terms. I do not see how such descriptions are helpful to the feminist cause overall. I do not see how a disdain for all things fleshy is going to advance the status of women as a whole. In fact, given how often in the past women’s supposedly fleshy nature has been used against us, I rather suspect that such disdain is likely to do far more harm than good.

So, since the radfems are so enthusiastic about practicing armchair psychology on the rest of us, how about we turn that around for a while?

Here’s the subjective impression of where a lot of the stuff that seems to be standard opinion on the radfem side comes from. A lot of radfems seem to be fundamentally ascetic people. They don’t seem to like bodily things very much. They seem to be suspicious of most pleasures of the flesh. They seem to believe that such things are unimportant and that those to whom they are important are shallow, debased individuals. Many radfems seem to be of the temperament that, in ages past and in some cultures even today, would be best suited to a monastic environment. Twisty is a perfect example. If someone could find her a mountaintop to meditate on she’d probably be quite happy as long as regular taco delivery could be arranged.

And there’s nothing wrong with that. Some people are just wired that way. The problem comes when people who are wired that way start to assume that their way is the only right way and that those who are wired differently are, as said before, shallow and debased and etc.

The problem with that is that by that definition, about 95% of the human race is shallow and debased. Most people are not ascetics, even when those people are women. Most of us are quite happy being fleshy beings, and some of us even revel in it.

So, what do the radfems propose to do about that? Are they even aware just how tiny of a minority they actually are? Of how fundamentally different most of the human race is, and of the fact that most people wouldn’t want to be ascetics even if they could be?