Being Amber Rhea

It’s been almost a week since the untimely death of Deborah Jeane Palfrey. In my second post on the topic, written on Friday, I lamented the lack of coverage of this tragedy on big feminist blogs. Being an eternal optimist (often to a fault, I know), I gave Feministe and Feministing the benefit of the doubt, saying that hopefully they would post more about it soon - because as I well know, when you’re juggling a full-time job and other personal responsibilities along with blogging, it can be a challenge to find time to sit down and write a substantive post.

However, the weekend has come and gone, and this week is half over, and still… nothing new on Feministe. Feministing hardly ever loads for me anymore beyond the header, but a quick view of the source in IE (it won’t even show me the source in Firefox; it’s hung up on some script, apparently) shows nothing new.

I’ll briefly hop over to some other feminist-leaning blogs that I don’t frequent as often and see if they have anything…

Shakesville? Nothing but a link in a big link round-up post.

Pandagon? Not a peep.

Alas, A Blog? Nada.

And nothing on the feministblogs.org aggregator.

I’ve said before that I don’t like to get all accusatory about “why haven’t you blogged about [X]??” because frankly it pisses me off when people do that to me. But I also think 1) there’s a difference between a personal blog and/or a blog run by one person, and a group blog centered around a specific topic (e.g., feminism); and 2) sometimes, in the case of the latter type of blog, the silence on particular issues speaks waaaay louder than words.

Lately, the big feminist blogs seem all awash in white liberal guilt, trying to incorporate anything and everything under the umbrella term of “feminism,” to the point that the term is losing any meaning. I wholeheartedly agree with Apostate and Octogalore that Sean Bell is NOT a feminist issue. Would we expect to see posts about an issue affecting white women on an anti-racism blog? No, and I doubt anyone would call the bloggers sexist or anti-feminist for not including such a story. But if you say the same about a feminist blog and suggest that maybe, just maybe, they should focus on feminism, suddenly you don’t care about racism.

People have said Sean Bell is a feminist issue because police brutality affects women. Well, yes - police brutality is a feminist issue. But Sean Bell specifically is not a feminist issue, and if you read the posts about Sean Bell on feminist sites, they don’t talk about how police brutality affects women - they talk about Sean Bell.

OF COURSE feminism should be anti-racist! Just as the anti-racism movement should be feminist in its outlook - but you don’t hear nearly the pressure on the anti-racism movement to incorporate feminism. Feminism is about ALL women, so naturally that includes women of color - and yes, we should constantly be vigilant for racism within our own movement, but that doesn’t mean we take the focus off women - because hello, women of color are women! As are women with disabilities, queer women, trans women, etc… ALL women.

Or, as I put it in a comment I left at Octogalore’s (the part in italics is me quoting the original post):

Well, often poverty is gendered, very often it has to do with race. So as a responsible blogger, I need to talk about these things.

THAT is intersectional analysis to me. I don’t know where/how so many people seem to have created a new definition. Intersectional analysis is NOT “let’s talk about every issue under the sun.”

and then further on down the thread, I also said:

To me, this is just the same tired old dynamics being replicated yet again. Women are socialized to always put others first, not be assertive, downplay our own needs. To see this same thing happening within feminism is beyond disheartening.

I know it seems like I’m getting off on a tangent (not to mention rendering redundant much of my half-written post on “what makes a feminist issue?”), but it’s connected, I swear. Because, sex workers rights absolutely is a feminist issue. The majority of sex workers are women, and there’s all that lovely stuff with the sexual double standard, the virgin/whore dichotomy (because the worst thing a woman can be is a whore), issues of consent, fucked-up ideas about women as sexual gatekeepers, economic issues that burden women disproportionately… the list goes on and on and on.

And yet, whenever big feminist blogs* do write about sex work at all, 99 times out of 100 (and I’m being gracious there) it’s all about casting sex workers as victims, or conflating consensual sex work with trafficking (can we please stop that infernal BS??), or the blogger projecting their own discomfort and prejudices all over the place and not owning their shit, and/or talking about sex workers as if they’re not in the room (a.k.a., Othering, as in, “You know, those other women, the ones who aren’t here and can’t speak for themselves”). And you get self-proclaimed feminists declaring things like, “Women who choose sex work are fucked up” (because THAT doesn’t erase women’s agency at all, that’s not a patriarchal attitude, oh heavens no) and it’s not “real work” (!) and it’s all about men commodifying women’s bodies, and so on and so forth, just get me the Bingo card already (and a few shots of tequila).

So, yeah, I am pointing a finger at big feminist blogs that don’t dare touch sex workers’ rights, even though it is very much a feminist issue. Way to maintain that pink ghetto and reinforce the impression that feminism is for some women and not others. (Personally I don’t believe that about feminism, but I hate to see such an idea tacitly endorsed and reproduced in feminist spaces.) Karly Kirchner’s recent BNG post entitled Another Call for Feminst/Sex Worker Solidarity (Please, pretty please?) is excellent and should be required reading, but it saddens me that its very writing suggests that “feminist” and “sex worker” are mutually exclusive.

Among other things, Karly says:

Sexual stigma killed Debprah Jeane Palfrey. This seems like an issue that sex workers and feminists can agree on.

I think there’s this really complicated thing going on with feminist and sex worker perspectives on this. We all agree that we want to stop violence against women. But sex workers are still not treated as equals by many feminists. This is undermining both feminists and sex workers. The tragic death of Deborah Jeane Palfrey and the lack of response and demand for action from the feminist community is a reflection of this problem. Women really cannot be equal and free of oppression if some women tolerate the legal harassment of other women based on their perceived sexual behaviors.

What is so hard about the concept of, hey, it doesn’t matter what you personally think about sex work - if it squicks you out, makes you uncomfortable, whatever - just like how it doesn’t matter what you personally think about what gays and lesbians do in their bedrooms. That stuff has no bearing on whether or not they are people who deserve the basic rights so many of us take for granted: being able to contact law enforcement if we’re the victim of a crime; not having people assume we have a drug habit or were abused as a child, or ask extremely personal questions the minute we mention what we do for a living; not having to worry about what to write every time we fill out a form with a blank for “occupation;” you know, basic stuff like that?

Big feminist bloggers, if you’re afraid of every post about sex work turning into the same old infuriating argument over and over again, just take that hardline stance. You wouldn’t tolerate anti-queer sentiments, right? You subscribe to the idea of safe spaces, right? So why not put your foot down on this issue, and link to SexWork101.com for people who are honestly curious about some of the whys and wherefores of sex work? Silence is certainly not a preferable option.

* I hate that term, only slightly less than I hate “mainstream feminist blogs,” but I can’t think of any other way to convey what I mean quickly. “A-List,” maybe? I kind of hate that, too.