You Read This Because I’m Too Lazy To Write

9 Responses

1. 1

   Shannon 6.15.2005 at 10:20 pm | Permalink

   Ah, but what if we are also too lazy to read?

2. 2

   Ryan 6.15.2005 at 11:12 pm | Permalink

   I think you missed one. ;)

3. 3

   Alley Rat 6.15.2005 at 11:18 pm | Permalink

   great links as always. thanks again.

   but…is there something funky with the Big Brass blog link, or is it me?

4. 4

   Kyle Hasselbacher 6.16.2005 at 12:19 am | Permalink

   Yes, the big brass blog link is broken. Try this one instead.

5. 5

   AndiF 6.16.2005 at 8:35 am | Permalink

   No there is something wrong with the link. This is the correct link.

   Mandatory Pregnancy

   However, things are not quite as described. If you would like to know more about this, go to this post on Alas, a blog and look for the comments by “noodles” who lives in Italy: A reframing I’d like to see

6. 6

   Alley Rat 6.16.2005 at 10:39 am | Permalink

   thanks, AndiF. very interesting…

7. 7

   Thalia 6.16.2005 at 11:56 am | Permalink

   I guess I’m missing Holly Combe’s point. Is she proud the commercial sex industry as a whole exploits girls and women of color in greater numbers than lad mags would indicate?

   Where I live the strip clubs are filled with busty blonde white women but the majority of prostitutes working outside the strip clubs are minority women. Men leave the strip clubs and buy blow jobs from the poor African American women right in the strip club parking lots. This is most decidedly not an achievment for diversity and the thought a woman thinks this typical racist stratification is good confuses me.

   She also ignores the way race and anything else that could potentially be seen in the light of diversity work as fetishes in hardcore porn not by challenging racist stereotypes but by feeding into the most dehumanizing aspects of them (“jungle monkey bitches with booty”, “ebony ho animal sex”, etc.)

   A co-colleague of mine, Samantha Smart, wrote the following in a book review published this week. Sorry I don’t have a link but it was sent to me by email.

   “Prostitution is the colonization of women.” This passage of Melissa Farley and Jacqueline Lynne’s essay, “Prostitution in Vancouver: Pimping Women and the Colonization of First Nations,” part of the brand new anthology “Not For Sale: Feminists Resisting Prostitution and Pornography,” is stunning in its stark simple truth. Conquest of any sort is predicated on the objectification of all that stands in the way of ownership, so that the slaughter can begin with rationalization greasing the wheels.

   When European male conquerors came to these shores and asked to speak to the leaders, they had no frame of reference to make sense of the elder women who stepped forth. In their minds (bred of millennia of male supremacist rule), women could not possibly exert political power, so they kept asking and insisting that it was the men they wanted to deal with. Remember that colonial invasions occurred concurrently with the Witch Hunts, in which up to nine million women were tortured and murdered by the dictate of the Church and the State. In many ways, the genocide of women, and the resulting state accumulation of wealth, was integrally linked to the genocide of First Nations. Women and indigenous peoples have had to be destroyed in order for the ruling elites to continually consolidate more and more wealth, in the form of slaves, land, natural resources, money, workers and power in its most oppressive forms.

   According to “Not For Sale: Feminists Resisting Prostitution and Pornography,” newly released and edited by Christine Stark and Rebecca Whisnant, more than two million women and children are sold, tricked or forced into sexual slavery every year. Prostitution destroys the lives of millions of women. Pornography is a multi-billion dollar global industry that extends its insidious reach to every computer and magazine rack. Incest and child abuse are intimately related to women’s entry into these forms of terrorism.

   Right here in Minneapolis, thousands of people pick up their free copy of a local weekly paper that is loaded with ads for escort services, strip clubs, “masseuses,” pornography sites, and thumb through it without even registering the pain and suffering of women and girls, and even boys, that we blindly and passively condone by our mere association.

   It is impossible to separate the sexism of prostitution and pornography from racism/white supremacy. The Farley and Lynne essay mentioned above, and a scathing analysis by Vednita Carter of the links between slavery of Africans and prostitution, along with many other essays in “Not for Sale,” deliver with piercing gravity the truth that women of color are victimized at far greater rates than “white” women.

   As a perpetual researcher into women’s movements, I recently conducted some internet research on women in the Philippines. To my astonishment, the majority of Googled results, and those at the top of the list, the “sponsored” listings, led to pornographic and “picture” or mail-order bride sites. The “exoticism” of women of color, the predominance of women of color trafficked as sex slaves, the astronomical rates of rape and abuse of women of color, all lead back to the colonization of women globally.

8. 8

   holly 6.16.2005 at 12:31 pm | Permalink

   “Reports say the 28-year-old woman was raped when she was alone at home in Charthawal, in the norther Indian state of Uttar Pradesh.”

   I would venture to say that it’s impossible to be raped while one is alone.

9. 9

   Mizzkyttie's Mind 6.16.2005 at 4:28 pm | Permalink

   Short Attention Span Blogging

   I’ve got about 10 different items up here on my web browser, and though I’d like to write a lengthy bit about each of them, I’m quite frankly feeling fairly uninspired and sleepy.

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