Monthly Archives: February 2008

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Brazen Sex-Positivity (aka “Not Being an Asshole”)

I’ve always hated dividing and subdividing political opinions and personalities and labeling everything to death as a kind of shorthand quick-reference way of understanding individuals and arguments (even though, having read my Lakoff, I know how natural it is…it’s still frustrating). As such, I haven’t really bothered to think of myself as “sex positive” or “anti-porn” or “third wave” or “post-wave” or whatever other intra-feminist label we want to work with. And as usual, this is really just kind of naive wishful thinking on my part.

I’m way late on writing this post, but as I mentioned, both me and my computer were in for repairs this week. But here’s the little corner of the “sex-pos” debate I came across last weekend, via Natalia Anatova:

  • Renegade Evolution, a blogger who does sex work, wrote about a particularly aggressive incident of harassment that took place while she was stripping
  • People can’t stop talking about it, and several “feminists” among them seem to want Ren Ev to basically admit that she deserved it and the whole thing is the fault of watered down Spice Girls sex-positive faux-feminism
  • People I tend to read and respect (being newly extra-arrogant, I’ll just refer to them, for the sake of categorization, as “not assholes”) jumped in to say “whoa, this is some crazy-ass victim-blaming going on here”

So now what I’m doing is jumping in to say “Whoa, this is some crazy-ass victim-blaming going on here”.

And if that were the only anti-sex-work bullshit I had seen in recent days, maybe the little part of me that had died would have stayed smallish, but then there was this other story, right here in Hamilton, about a 25-year-old man accused of raping several sex trade workers.

This guy wants us all to know that he’s really a good person. Nothing like this will ever happen to him (yes, to him) again. Things happen…this was just totally out of his control. The whole problem was that he trusted that kind of person. If he had just managed to avoid ending up in a car with a crazy drugged-out prostitute (six times), none of this would be happening.

Hell, presumably if they had just managed to not be crazy drugged-out prostitutes in the first place, nobody would ever get raped at all.

it is one thing to be assaulted in the daily course of an ordinary life–and here I mean even a life that a guy would count as ordinary

Oh, except that it was the feminist who said that last part. The feminist who said that there’s a difference between one kind of rape and another, or rather, one kind of victim and another. Because why should we listen to that kind of person? Brazen. If by “brazen” we mean “A woman who thinks it’s her right to define exactly how sexual she is willing to be, with whom, and in what context”.

I found myself wondering which man Dana was going to enlist in order to define that ordinary life. Based on his soft-spoken interview with the Spec, I’m fairly sure Mr. Khairzad would have a certain viewpoint on the subject. Is it fair to pick the most heinous example I happen across in order to make this point? Not really, I guess. But again, in all my naiveté, I can’t fathom how someone can fail to recognize that making these arguments–that some women just “deserve” rape more, or sympathy less, or should expect to be assaulted, or are somehow complicit in their own assault by making sexuality a part of their every day lives–is on a continuum with saying “Poor me, I’m being accused of raping people who aren’t really people in the first place”, and at cross-purposes with anything, you know, empowering.

If this makes me a twittery sex-pos moron, well, hook me up. Hearing echoes of the words of rapists from the mouths of self-identified feminists is not on my list of ways to have a good time.

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Quick Note: Canadian F-Word Blog Awards

I’m making a mental note never to let my body and my laptop get sick at the same time again. I’ve been pretty miserable all week, but I’ll be trying to drain my brain of the posts that have been swirling within it very, very shortly.

Meantime, I gots nominated for a Canadian F-Word blog award. *blushes*. Now, preliminary elimination finishes today, so I’m figuring that won’t be true by tomorrow, but it’s nice to have my little moment. Also, that the nomination came from someone I respect rather a lot means something, so–thanks matttbastard!

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Canada on the US (and vice versa)

A recent poll has determined that 15% of respondents would give up their ballot in the next Canadian federal election in order to be able to cast one in the American presidential race. There have been a couple of commenters blaming that on the overwhelming media coverage of the race, and I’ve heard a few people shaking their heads and calling it some kind of crisis of national pride. Which is why I tend to appreciate this comment, by a guy identified only as Nathan from Alberta:

I’m rather bemused by some of the posts here. We all know how much Canadians (in general) despise Americans. We’re SO much better than they are. In fact, if asked to describe what it means to be a Canadian, most Canadians choose to contrast themselves to Americans….I hear so often about “arrogant Americans,” but my observation, both in this forum and elsewhere, is that we are “self-righteous and superior Canadians.”

The poll also determined that a large percentage (over half) of Canadians think that the US is a negative force in the world, and I suspect this commenter is fuming over that when he refers to our despising of Americans. But I do think he’s got a point in looking at how we keep thinking that bigger and more public must necessarily have a bigger impact on our lives. And obviously, the results of the US election will make a far greater difference to a far larger number of lives than anything that could ever happen in Canada. But you know…think globally, act locally and all that. There is something of an arrogance to wanting to be a small fish in a big pond, partially because I’m assuming it has at least something to do with assuming that eventually you’ll be a big fish. To paraphrase Stephen Colbert, maybe we can fix America!

And what’s the thing the Americans are mentioning about us these days? Well, it’s a week old, but apparently “Canadian” is the latest racist euphemism. I’ve seen a couple of hypotheses as to why, including one that attributes it to the name of a river in Texas that sounds quite similar to “Canada”, but what’s left of my linguist brain tends to assume that it takes too many steps backwards to make that one work (not least because at some point, even if you are thinking initially of the river, you have to make the leap to referring to people with the same derivation that we use for actual Canadians). That residual linguist brain is pinging a little more strongly with a point made in the National Post article, which hypothesizes that it’s based on a sense of Canadians as the “other”.

I’d go a step further and suggest that it’s actually based on a sense of Canadians as completely and totally innocuous and irrelevant. Nobody can be offended to be called “Canadian”, because it’s kind of like calling you a stuffed animal. It will go absolutely unnoticed to be speaking in negative terms about anyone using the term “Canadian”, because what could be wrong with Canadians? I think in order to “other” a group, one actually has to care that the group exists, develop some characteristics that must be attributed to/projected onto that group, a bunch of features that one can describe the self as “not”. For all the blather in the NP and whatever other Canadian media outlets have noticed this story, the word has absolutely nothing to do with Canadians.

This is one seriously messed up codependent relationship we’ve got going on, here.