Radical Vixen asks a rhetorical question

Wayne Ryczak, a 56-year-old surveyor from St. Catharines [in Ontario, Canada], pleaded guilty to manslaughter in May and was sentenced to one day of jail after being given 30 months credit for 14 months of pretrial custody.

The controversial sentence sparked a public outcry and eventually an appeal launched by the Ministry of the Attorney General in June. “

Pop quiz! If the victim was a 56 year old man and the murderer was a prostitute do you think the sentence would be the same? Extra points for those who detected my sarcasm immediately.

Read the quote in context here.

Rhetorical because, of course, the answer is obvious: no, if instead a prostitute had strangled a 56 year old man and dumped him in a snowbank, with his pants left pulled down and his shirt left pulled up she’d have gotten a sentence far more severe than a day plus time incarcerated. Nor would the judge have ruled the sentence was appropriate since since there was nobody (or nobody left alive) who could contradict her claim of self-defense. Nor is it likely that the court would have been mollified by the prostitute’s protestations that the levels of cocaine in his body would have been lethal anyway so what’s the big rip? Nor would it have mattered that the prostitute said she only strangled him the second time she tried choking him, not the first.

Nope. Because as we’re regularly informed by prostitution opponents anti-feminist and feminist alike, it’s natural for prostitutes to be hapless, will-less, soul-less, helpless, agencyless, dehumanized victims for whom murder and dumping is just the natural order of things for prostitutes and so it’s just hard . Meanwhile, perhaps because there’s so much antipathy towards the idea, a prostitute who shows sufficient initiative to kill a customer, that of course a judge would throw the book at her.

$(#*~@!!!

Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon concludes a thoughtful, nuanced review of Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and A World Without Rape by Jaclyn Friedman and Jessica Valenti with a wonderfully positive point (emphasis mine.)

What’s really great about this book is that it’s so readable, and so it’s a perfect book to hand off to someone who wants to know more about feminist thinking about the rape culture, but who is easily spooked by radical feminists who’ve been thoroughly demonized, like Andrea Dworkin. You can’t condemn this book as being “anti-sex” when it’s anti-rape, which is a common tactic for rape apologists. In reality, as this book demonstrates beautifully, our rape-coddling culture is the one that’s anti-sex. Radically reinventing sex so that it’s a collaboration instead of a conquest isn’t bad for sex. You don’t really know how good it can be until you’ve had it in circumstances where everyone involved feels safe and free.

Read the quote in context here.

Maybe it’s just because I’m an old ex-hippie, who started discovering sex about the same time women in my parent’s church started discovering what was then un-ironically called “women’s liberation” but however many missteps or stumbles I’ve taken since then I’ve always had that basic intuition, and Amanda’s sentence sums it up.

“You don’t really know how good it can be until you’ve had it in circumstances where everyone involved feels safe and free.”

That nicely summarizes why a male sex blogger might be so enthusiastic about feminism.

Cool point about gendered thinking from Laura Agustín of Border Thinking on Migration, Culture, Economy and Sex

Protocols attached to the UN Convention on Transnational Organised Crime attempt to distinguish between trafficking and smuggling of people. The trafficking protocol explicitly mentions women, children, coercion and prostitution: absent is any mention of the will to migrate. The smuggling protocol, in contrast, discusses men as migrants and does not speak of sex or prostitution. This gender bias has several negative, confusing effects.

• Women are positioned as sexually vulnerable above all
• Women are lumped with children as though we were children
• Women are not seen as capable of initiating migrations
• Women are not seen as capable of preferring to sell sex over other options
• Men are not seen as capable of being trafficked in the worst sense Men are not seen as capable of preferring to sell sex over other options
• Men are associated with dodgy behaviour such as paying someone to help them get around the rules

Read the quote in context here.

Y’know how MRAs are always saying stuff with the template “But men can be {insert whatever} too?” And how there are, like, 1,000 institutionalized yeah-but rebuttals? Yeah, me too. That’s why I’m not going to say “but men can be trafficked too.”

How ‘bout I say instead that women can know what they’re doing too? That women can independently recognize they don’t want a dead-end life in a 2nd- or 3rd- world or rust-belt village. That women can aspire to more than a life of borscht stirring or water-jug toting. That women can initiate the same steps to get the heck out? That, as Agustín delicately reminds us, that women aren’t children?

I mean… c’mon!

It’s not that women or children can’t be exploited for sex (um, not at all.) Nor that women, any more than men, can wind up in bad situations or worse when they undertake to seek uncertain fortunes in the world rather than rot in certain poverty and oppression (um, not at all.)

It’s that failing to recognize the possibility in 1st-world, world-class aid agencies that women are people says much about their attitudes and the attitudes of their funding bodies.

I mention this in no small part because, while I don’t know about the rest of the world, or even the rest of the United States, there are noticeable numbers of women from, especially, the 2nd world (the former Soviet Union, Romania, Bulgaria, and urban Africa) in clerical, retail, technology, restaurant, and other trades positions. In what conversations I’ve had with them they weren’t “brought” here by husbands or fathers or brothers, they came here.

And yes, for the most part they’re here legally. (I say “most” because, for instance, I’m pretty sure none of the three young Russians, one a woman, who came door-to-door asking if we wanted our house painted a few years ago weren’t here legally.) But that’s not the point. According to the UN Convention on Transnational Organised Crime’s checklist they don’t exist at all!

In other words this post isn’t about what smugglers and traffickers think of migrant women, it’s what we think of them. It’s not about their attitudes about the fates, or roles, or natures of women it’s about ours.

And it’s relevant not because some… too many if there are any... women are bought and sold. It’s that by imagining all women migrate involuntarily, or even only reluctantly, whereas only men migrate freely or even enthusiastically we mask rather than distinguish those who really do get in over their heads.

Photo by Flickr user synaethesia. Used under a Creative Commons license.

The sentence “I want your body.”

Compare it to either “my body wants your body” or “I want you.”

The first is a expression of desire from an autonomous entity — an “I” — for so many kilos or cubic feet of skin, muscle, and bone — a body. The second two are personal in the sense that they communicate level to level.

This popped into my head while I was waiting in line for coffee and thinking about ways to more briefly state concerns I raised about “bodying” people in Prostitution and Shared Objectification and institutional (but pretty clearly not actual) resistance to the idea that men can also be objects of desire for women in Uncovering Covers.

Anyway, I’m not necessarily saying objectification by itself is wrong or bad. Though it could explain why it’s not always well received.