Sam Berg has written about the unethical way that Constance Sisk handled the organising of a panel on feminist perspectives on pornography at the College of William & Mary, Virginia - read here, (also here, here, here, and here)

And just in case anyone missed it, the Thirteenth Carnival of the Radical Feminists is over at fellow Brit southerner Anji’s blog, Shut Up Sit Down.

Censorship.

Allegedly the English Collective of Prostitutes are being censored. You could’ve fooled me, every time prostitution gets even the most vague mention in the media an ECP rep is there pushing their agenda.

Question - how is the ECP funded?

Question - how is their leadership elected?

Question - what percentage, if any, of their membership are or have been in prostitution?

Question - how do the ECP decide on their political agenda and group policies - is it after consultation with actual prostitute women or is it a policy decided thirty years ago by non prostitutes and stuck to mercilessly without further discussion?

I think it is both negligent and naive on the behalf of the government, socialist organisations, the media, and whoever else, that this group are presented as representative of prostitutes views and needs, when not even the most basic information about the ECP is known. Noone is asking for members names - but if the group is to be believed and trusted then they should need to do more than simply name themselves the spokespeople for prostitutes in England.

As for censorship - the Socialist Unity blog censored my comments and questions regarding their position on prostitution and the ECP, after they themselves had put a post up claiming that the activists who organised the International Women’s Day demonstration in London had censored a Trade Union speaker who was allegedly there to represent “sex workers”. So there you have it folks, Trade Union reps should be allowed to talk for women in prostitution, it is just a job after all! but those of us with some experience of it who dont consider it a job and name it as abuse and exploitation had best shut the fuck up.

 Behind this car in traffic today, thought i’d take a shot so I could AAAAAAARGH here amongst good company.

Then before this idiot had even got out of view, there was this bus. You can see the other caron the right of this shot.

Believe it or not, there was actually ANOTHER bus with a similar ad on the back of it, but I wasn’t fast enough to get a photo of that one. It was a picture of a youngish blonde woman, from the waist up, naked and covering her nipples with her hands. I didnt catch what she was advertising, presumably the same sort of thing.

It’s like there is no escape. My kid looks at these pictures and I think, how do I explain this to her? How do I tell her some people will never see her as anything but flesh to be bought and used?

PS Im late making a note of it but dont forget to check out the Carnival Against Sexual Violence 31 at Abyss To Hope.

Anthony Barron, rapist of female children, has been given a life sentence after being found guilty of a total of 89 offences, including rape and attempted rape, of at least ten girls, who were as young as 3. He made video and photographs of some of these assaults.

The mother of a four-year-old who was one of his victims said: “He came across as really nice, genuine, charming. A really nice person, is the only way to put it.

“[He appeared] caring and interested in how the children were doing, in some ways my welfare as well, after my husband and I separated.”

We are accustomed to hearing how children are ‘groomed’ by sexual predators, but it is rarely discussed how adults are also ‘groomed’.  Grooming is the emotional manipulation of minors for sexual purpose. But men who rape children very often have to gain the trust of adult parents before they are able to access our children, and to do this they apply the same manipulation tactics. Not coincidentally these same tactics are very often used by men who rape adult women, in fact these tactics are condoned as authentic seduction methods when used on adult women.  Seduction is the emotional manipulation of another person for sexual purpose.  A mans success with this manipulation marks him as a ‘proper’ man, a real ‘ladykiller’. Adult women in a vulnerable emotional state, after a break up for example, are seen as ‘fair game’ and desirable targets for male manipulation/seduction.

Robert Greene’s book, The Art Of Seduction, contains the following chapers (quotes are from the website):

Choose The Right Victim

“Study your prey thoroughly.. The right victims are those for whom you can fill a void.. They are often isolated or unhappy, or can be easily made so.”

Create a False Sense Of Security - Approach Indirectly

“If you are too direct too early on, you risk stirring up a resistance.. Haunt at the periphary of your target’s life - approach through a third party.. Lull the target into feeling secure, then strike.”

Create a Need - Stir Anxiety & Discontent

“Tension and disharmony must be instilled in your target’s minds. Stir within them feelings of discontent.. The feelings of inadequacy that you create will give you space to insinuate yourself.. Pain and anxiety are the proper precursors to pleasure. “

Use the Demonic Power of Words to Sow Confusion

“The trick to making them listen is to say what they want to hear, to fill their ears with whatever is pleasant to them. This is the essence of seductive language.”

Isolate the Victim

“An isolated person is weak.. Give them the sense of being marginalized.. Lure the seduced into your lair where nothing is familiar.”

Take a look round the huge number of mens dating and seduction guides and you’ll see the same language over and over, the language of warfare and hunting. Male sexuality is overwhelmingly defined in popular culture as predatory. How can we as women trust any men when we know this, who can we trust when over and over men we thought were nice, genuine, and charming, are exposed as rapists and child molesters?

Christine Barron, the ex wife of the above child rapist, said:

I’m finding it terribly difficult to equate it with the man I knew. He loved children and children loved him. He wasn’t that kind of man as far as I knew. My family are shocked, I’m shocked.

Everybody thought they could trust him. He could be so charming, but obviously there was more to it than that.

This is a group of people who describe themselves as socialist feminists and who are organising a conference in a London University later this year.

I dont trust them, I dont think we have much in common, or that most of what they talk about represents my interests as a working class woman. I don’t accept that the ideas they present are necessarily socialist or feminist, and my opinion on that is not completely based on the perspectives that they do present, but is just as much based on the ideas that they do not. As an example - I mean sure i’m for access to abortion, but what about those of us who want to go ahead and have children? I’m not seeing these mostly (all?) young, white, educated women showing any real interest in maternity care or the various issues that are specific to mothers, its like for them the whole struggle ends at the right to abortion (or to sell sexual services from some nice flat in a nice part of town). Likewise they don’t seem to realise there are women who are over the age of 25, or who are physically disabled, have mental illnesses, are elderly, are poor, are drug addicts, are homeless.. They say they’re ‘diverse’ but they arent, not really, not in any way that i can tell.

Probably my very negative opinion wont do them any damage whatsoever seeing as everything I believe in is dismissed often enough as a repressed middle class sort of feminism. The irony of this makes me so fucking angry.

I think the women at the leading end of this group and campaign are more concerned with their own ‘names’ and their own future careers than they are in their politics. They deliberately misrepresent other feminist perspectives, particularly radical feminist perspectives. At last years feminist fightback conference they managed to have talks on both queer and transgender issues yet they had nothing specific to lesbians. They didnt even touch the issue of violence against women, I think the closest they got was some sort of talk on traffiking, which was dealt with as an immigration issue rather than as an issue of violence and slavery. They had a few different talks on sex work, presenting several pro industry speakers, but no-one of an opposing viewpoint, and no-one from any of the many groups who provide feminist support to prostitutes (for example, The Poppy Project, who provide direct support to prostitutes as well as lobbying on their behalf). They invited Object, a UK anti-pornography group, to share a platform with pro-pornography campaigners, and slandered Object when they, in my opinion rightly, refused.

Off topic - The thing about conferences on sex work, is that they are always overwhelmingly going to represent the pro side, because it’s very fucking difficult to get the great majority of us who are anti because of our own experiences in prostitution to want to go public about it.

But back to the Feminist Fightback people. Last year they also found the space to provide a platform to Backlash, who are an openly anti feminist group. But then they arent the only feminist platform who are spending resources promoting openly anti feminist spokespeople. Seems a bit fucked up to me but there you go. Don’t anti feminists have enough spaces to talk from and in? Feminists work and fight for the space to talk, then we give it to anti feminists? Why?

I wont be going to Feminist Fightback and I wouldnt even if money and time wasnt an issue. Their focus is too narrow for me, they represent the interests of too narrow a group and it doesn’t include me, in any way.