Christine Stark has been a role model of mine since 2004. That was the year she co-edited Not For Sale: Feminists Resisting Prostitution and Pornography, which immediately soared up my book chart and remains a Berg top five today.

Not For Sale contains my favorite essay on prostitution, but Stark’s direct confrontation with so-called ‘sex radicals’ in the essay “Girls to Boyz: Sex radical women promoting prostitution and pornography” has the most forthright chutzpah of the collection. My admiration for her anti-pornstitution work led me to take special note of her various creative works released through radical feminist and artistic media.

Nickels: A Tale of Dissociation is Stark’s debut novel and it’s a doozy. The freestyle narrative announces itself on the first page through two fairy tales as understood by a small child. Stark plays with linguistic forms to translate the thoughts in a child’s mind, and it’s a testament to her skill that the unconventional style comes off much more genuine than parlor tricky. The punctuation and odd sentence breaks lend a breathless air and the cadence is tricky to catch at first, but much like watching a Scottish film, the initial confusion of familiar words in an unfamiliar dialect soon resolves and you’re hooked into the storyteller’s groove.

The story follows Little Miss So and So from age four through twenty-six. Her stream of consciousness survival of incestuous rape makes the early pages rough reading, so don’t pack Nickels for the beach. Not that there isn’t an inherent entertainment in stories of terrified and tortured children — as the stratospheric popularity of Stephen King proves — it’s just that Nickels is a different kind of horror story.

My fear to face was being forced to remember the powerlessness of childhood. Great literature makes readers see the world through another person’s eyes in a way that connects to their soul. What I saw through Little Miss So and So’s eyes was my world as a child, my own fractured soul trying to make sense of the cowardly cruelty of child abusers. Little Miss So and So was five-years-old when the school nurses saw the bruises and filed a failed lawsuit to remove her from her abusive family. I was six when the same events happened to me. There’s even a scene involving a bite-size apple pie and tears of gratitude for a family member showing kindness that rather eerily echoes an apple pie anecdote from my past. I write a lot, often about violence against women, yet I don’t write about my childhood for reasons I’m still unpacking.

History kept interfering with my reading, a feeling exacerbated by starting the book right before the traditionally family-infected Thanksgiving holiday. I had to keep putting the book down the same way I frequently pause while reading Andrea Dworkin, because the gut-felt truths come fast and tap on spots so sensitive that pushing past the discomfort without consideration feels like a wasted opportunity.

The years in Nickels tick by in five year chunks of time, and in the process my intimate connection to Little Miss So and So faded enough that reading felt less like picking at scabs. Stark’s heroine becomes her own entity and less of the allegory the abstract name evokes. By the time she grows into a young woman I no longer recognized myself in her new pursuits but I liked her just the same. We could be friends, Little Miss So and So and me, though I don’t share her fervor for sports and I’m not a lesbian.

The last two lines of Chris’s biography in Not For Sale are,

“She is a member of the Minnesota Indian Women’s Sexual Assault Coalition and completing her MFA in Writing from Minnesota State University. Christine is a survivor of incest and a racist prostitution and pornography ring.”

Knowing some pieces of Stark’s past inadvertently made reading a puzzle in which I tried to sort the facts of her life from the fictions of the story. It’s a pointless game and a little unfair to writers who necessarily draw upon what they know to create stories of unreal people. Stark took a formless, nameless girl called Little Miss So and So and fused the tragedy of her lived facts into a useful fiction. Women who can do this, who can write the indescribable violations of girls in authentic words that resonate with survivors, are treasures to feminism and womenkind.

There are more books inside Ms. Christine Stark, more people’s stories to tell. I look forward to meeting them and the pieces of myself I’ll see in them.

A few days ago I wrote a comment at the Reclusive Leftist blog about misogynistic verbal abuse being unacceptable whether the target is a blogger or a prostitute and whether they are paid or not. Since then I’ve been fleshing out what it means to be paid for sexual abuse in the context of the internet.

Men call prostituted women a creative litany of slurs that women bloggers are only now learning. Radical feminists have long known the hate speech of pornography is itself sexual abuse that perpetuates further abuse against prostituted women and all women, and for our accurate assessment we have had that hate hurled at us faster and more aggressively.

Many women bloggers have shared complaints through the #mencallmethings Twitter hashtag, but few solutions have been offered by liberal feminists more worried about being perceived as pro-censorship than in stopping men’s verbal harassments.

In the name of harm reduction, I propose the Internet Swear Jar.

Sex workers are paid to be called misogynistic names and people consider it a fair transaction. Most high-profile feminist bloggers – ones who ask for donations to support their feminism – agree with that status quo situation. By the usual rationales for accepting prostitution and pornography, why shouldn’t men be allowed to pay any woman willing to take money in exchange for having some control over the verbal abuse she must endure?

Bloggers could post a menu of prices, and of course they would have the final choice on whether or not to accept twenty dollars to be publicly called a cocksucking cunt, but if your political ethic encompasses Yes Means Yes and Sex Work Is Work beliefs then men should be able to ask you ‘yes or no’ sex work questions. People who reject prostitution as employment wouldn’t participate, but there’s no reason for pro-sexwork bloggers to reject hearing out sincere “sass for cash” offers they would expect other women to accept. The sex work declared so rife with diversity that “not a monolith!” has become its mantra can’t be considered 100% monolithically terrible when the question becomes one of pro-sex work women considering freelance job offers.

Men are going to threaten and call women bloggers horrifically violent names anyway. Like the common belief in prostitution’s inevitability, it can’t be stopped. However, the extra harm reduction money can make blogging a little easier for women who have to deal with verbal sexism.

Grievances taken through the legal system commonly result in financial compensation. A system of direct payment would be a less time-consuming and economical way of achieving an already established form of justice.

Maybe disabled men with no other emotional outlet than anonymously spitting invective at women bloggers need that catharthic emoting to be healthy, and the conscientious women who consent to provide that service should be financially compensated.

By now I hope you’ve figured out I’m speaking hypothetically. There is no logical and humane answer to the question, “When is it all right to call a woman a flea-bitten whore who deserves to be raped?” that kicks off the start of payment negotiations.

But pro-sex work bloggers are not being philosophically cheeky about women arranging their own sexualized abuse in exchange for money. They really support the status quo of prostitution that permits payment for sexist humiliation. A key difference is that bloggers aren’t physically assaulted after getting called dehumanizing names, whereas no one in the world is more raped than prostituted women.

With credit to Stephen Roberts for amending his famous quote about atheism, “I contend that we are both abolitionists. I just believe in fewer sex workers than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all sex work jobs for yourself, you will understand why I dismiss all sex work jobs for women.”

I arrived at Jamison Park on a rainy Sunday afternoon with concern that interviewable women might be hiding from the weather in their tents, but there were some milling about.

The first woman I spoke with was part of a man and woman team organizing an open mic poetry session. She didn’t know much but expressed disappointment that it was mostly men doing the speaking while men and women were sharing duties on practical matters like food preparation and providing information.

As if to prove the point, then I came across the info desk being staffed by a woman and we talked. Her perspective is that the inter-gender problems she’s seen have involved people bringing their personal problems to camp. “What used to be kept behind walls comes through tents,” she told me before suggesting I inquire at the med tent.

To get to the med tent I had to cross the street, and on the corner waiting with me for the light to change were two policewomen. I asked if they knew anything about the known sexual assault or other gendered violence, and one of them rather unhelpfully told me to go to the city website for information about “assaults against women and MEN.” The other policewoman repeated the suggestion that I ask at the med tent and pointed it out to me, and just in case I missed it the first time around First Cop reminded me that I can get information there about “crimes against women and MEN.”

At the med tent a man with a long and bushy white beard told me the camp is much calmer now than three weeks ago. Portland’s mild weather and abundance of social services has garnered it a larger than average homeless population, and some of the more mentally ill and alcoholic homeless men were being disruptive. Local soup kitchen Sisters of the Road will not serve noticeably drunk patrons so they were going to Occupy Portland’s kitchen and causing a ruckus. He explained that there are still a fair number of homeless people at the camp but the scary, violent ones had since been ejected.

Someone had donated mace and loud horns that the medical tent handed out to women who said they felt unsafe.

Santa Cause also said there was an incident about a week ago with a pregnant homeless woman getting beaten up by the baby’s father. The abuser was seen kicking the woman in the stomach and her face was scratched up. She is still at the camp but he hasn’t been seen for a week, and word had gotten out that he was a known perpetrator and would be ejected if seen again.

There is a tent designated with a sign as the “Sexual Assault Response Team” but when I inquired about it he didn’t have much information.  All he knew was that the one woman whose effort it seemed to be was barely there. On a small dry erase board was the woman’s name and a request for sexual assault volunteers, but there has been no response to my email four days later. I get the sense that a few people are trying to form an organized response but they haven’t had much support.

Next I headed for the Food Not Bombs tent to drop off the sack of apples I’d brought and to speak with the two women running that show. The talkative one said she stumbled across a meeting of women some days ago and thought they might have been having regular meetings, but didn’t know more than that. By day’s end I couldn’t find any postings or announcements about such a group, and I really, really looked. She also expressed disappointment that while other radical media outlets in Portland had an Occupy presence, local women’s bookstore In Other Words was MIA along with the city’s Radical Women socialist group.

My final noteworthy interviews were with two young women hanging out behind the makeshift kitchen. One of them had been there that early day when the rape was reported, and her impression was that the community response was surprisingly quick. “Dealing with that was prioritized at a chaotic time when a lot of construction was going on,” was her take on it. She had just been in Oakland and said that both there and in Portland far more men are taking the public megaphone than women.

Our interview was interrupted by a young woman who had been cleaning the kitchen for the past ten minutes. She came over and calmly said with an air of exhaustion, “There’s a lot of vegetables over there that need to be turned into something.” The less talkative of the pair reacted with a completely unnecessary and haughty, “I don’t react well to being ordered. It’s oppressive, and personally I just don’t respond well to that. If you want to ask me to do something I’ll consider it, but don’t order me around.”

The weary worker asked in a conciliatory tone, “Did you feel that I was ordering you?”

“Yes I did.”

“Well I’m just saying there’s vegetables over there. I mean, I don’t care because I cleaned and now I’m done but anyway…”

Ah, the familiar smell of horizontal hostility. Awkwardness aside, to their credit the two of them de-comforted from their chairs and we said our goodbyes as they headed to the kitchen.

Samantha Berg is National Coordinator for the feminist organization Stop
Porn Culture and founder of http://www.Genderberg.com, an anti-prostitution
activist community since 2005. Her newest website is www.Johnstompers.com

“THRILL SEEKING FEMALES UNITE”

The SCUM conference announcement dared me.

Sold and sold! I was ready to go. Then I saw it.

“Perth, Western Australia”

Damn.

So I left a wistful comment wishing them the best of luck then prayed to gods I don’t believe in for the miracle it would take to get me there. The miracle turned out to be feminist sisterhood.

The organizers met my tossed off hope of attending with hundreds of dollars for airfare, a place to stay, and a spot discussing my radical activism. Once these two generous women gave form to my sojourn, women’s donations filled in the gaps and built a matriarchal microcosm of gift-giving economy.

SCUM came on the heels of Amazon Mancrusher  and Allecto’s success organizing a shadow conference to the tragic Feminist Futures conference (details here and worth reading if this is new news to you.)

That ad hoc radical feminist meeting exceeded expectations, and thus began a thirst to see just how far they could take the radfem resurgence they had stoked.

A core of thirty women spent three radfemtastic days in Perth, a city infamous for its relative isolation from civilization. About five of the women were under 35 and at least ten were over 60, making for quite a multi-generational meeting if you disregard that no teens attended. Younger women were prominently dressed in black and the elders were a living homage to varying shades of purple.

The community hall Allecto and Amazon Mancrusher (I could happily type that name a hundred times) selected was perfect beyond expectation. The pink adobe-like venue sat cheerfully among permaculture gardens and hosted environmentalist enclave standards like a solar powered fountain and art made from recycled materials. Inside was a well supplied kitchen, a bathroom with a shower, and a meeting room for fifty people scented with what I’m almost sure was a jasmine tree near the front entrance.

For the three nights of conference I could choose to either sleep in a proper bed back at the house or at the hippie paradise of the Earthwise center with other overnighters, which wasn’t so much a choice as a gift from goddesses I don’t believe in. I would have slept on what turned out to be a very comfortable mat just for the jasmine, but the assembled women were as charming and hilarious a sleepover crew as ever did play Balderdash.

We began the first morning’s business by listening to Nyungah elder Doolan Leisha Eatts speak about Indigenous Australia’s infamous stolen children. Families ripped apart by racism isn’t a new story, but what shook me was how recent and raw the crimes felt when sharing the air with a woman telling breathless truths. Carbon footprint guilt aside, sacrifices were made to bring me to the other side of the planet and I had considered Skype as an alternative, but there really is something magical about women gathering in a space together.

Later, Iranian-born activist Noushin Aref-Adib gave a solemn lecture about women’s especial vulnerabilities in war and in refugee situations. Sadly, Ms. Aref-Adib was crunched for time and skipped out of work to barely attend her own session before bolting back to her responsibilities.

Lyn Ariel dipped into feminism’s plentiful herstory with a recap of the bumper stickers, buttons, and protest signs that consolidated the conscience of the women’s liberation movement. We talked about the original meanings of phrases like “the personal is political” and “sisterhood is powerful” while contemplating how interpretations have changed. Then Betty McLellan upped the ante a few notches by focusing on the biggest one word feminist motto of all, “revolution.”

The first of several lively debates and the one I’ve been cheeky about calling “Betty’s revolution workshop,” the old activist bugaboo ‘reform or rebirth’ was re-examined. We questioned goals and how to achieve them while looking at possible roadblocks. Listening to young radfems, including those at SCUM, I get the notion that 80’s baby girls are getting over being told to get over men’s terracidal behaviors. Gail Dines did an Australian tour this summer and what she said at the Wheeler Center is worth interrupting this article for 1 minute and 8 seconds.

For the audio-incapable, the takeaway quote is, “I can tell you after teaching women for twenty odd years, if I go in and teach liberal feminism I get looked at blank ‘eh, interesting.’ I go in and teach radical feminism, bang, the room explodes.”

For a full picture of my Friday night I take you briefly back to September 22 and my first day in Perth. Thursday was planned as the first day so I could be attend the Western Australia Parliament House launch of Big Porn Inc, by venerable feminist bookmakers Spinifex Press. Editor Melinda Tankard Reist is an antiporn movement unto her Bionic Woman self with enough successes under her belt to require a much sturdier belt. Her organization Collective Shout – unhindered by the maligned and manipulated US Constitution’s first amendment – is a constant challenge to porn profiteers, and she asked me to speak with the emerging Collective Shout Perth group.

I jumped right from the end of SCUM’s Friday program into a taxi full of radical women headed for the oceanfront restaurant where Collective Shout met. As a full time bicyclist, months can elapse without me getting in a car, so on a good day car rides only make me feel trapped in a knocked-over phone booth being shaken by an angry demigod. Coming but one day after a 25-hour airplane flight, the taxi ride to the beach was the catalyst for a bout of jet lag that turned my brain to jelly and my appetite to zilch. I mustered through a short presentation mostly on the adrenaline rush that doing anarchist activism brings to this admitted stress junkie.

Saturday morning greeted us with impromptu art projects coordinated by Georgi Stone. Tools and utensils were piled on a table with instructions to choose one that represents feminism, a ripe opportunity for ribald jokes even without the obvious hatchet and nutcracker. When it came time to make art I couldn’t catch a creative groove but soon found my place gathering flowers, sticks, and leaves from the garden for other women. Sculpting isn’t my thing and I’m a bit cynical about, well, everything because I’m a radfem but also art, however the end results included some impressive explanations for the offered objets d’art.

Spider Redgold is a vivid woman with provoking thoughts on sacredness. In elementary school I read mythology books like nobody’s business and I emerged from that phase confused enough to be confident my puny mortal self was agnostic; atheism always seemed like the purview of presumptuous asses. I mention this because Spider veers off the usual charts of religion and also from what would be called spirituality, though truth be told some of the divinity-touching experiences she speaks of could be classified as ghost stories. Belying surface judgments, her sense of the sacred isn’t located in the spacey woo of stereotype but sits grounded in psychology, biology, social anthropology and the female experience.

Next up was Valerie Solanas. Okay not really her because she’s dead, but the SCUM gathering revolved on an axis of honoring our accomplished sister and all Saturday afternoon we did just that. Amazon Mancrusher and Chris Sitka took us through Valarie’s biography and publications respectively, and Susan Hawthorne set the 1968 SCUM Manifesto into its historical place among other famous manifestos. Together we mourned the lost art of manifesto writing and I got fired up about filling in the blanks of an anti-pornstitution document tentatively titled, “The End Of John.”

I don’t do talent shows. For nine years my dayjob’s annual conference has held them, and for nine years I have avoided the stage. The SCUM women made me so comfortable that I broke that long non-performance record twice in one night. My nonfiction writing is as solid as the facts about prostitution’s harms, but creative efforts are squishy with subjectivity and make me feel vulnerable. Like my ego’s own fairy godmother, Amazon Mancrusher swooped in an hour before the show and asked if I would display my best talent– concisely countering prostitution apologists. We wound up riffing a mock back and forth that covered the standards, and since then I’ve been trying to reconcile how messed up it is that I would very much rather debate prostitution with belligerent blowhards than read one of my poems out loud.

The last news that must be relayed about the talent show was the surprise appearance by lesbian heroine Superdyke. She flew in with a sparkly cape and left her electric labrys glowing green throughout the night for those of us sleeping at the venue.

Sunday morning began with a heavier topic than Saturday’s fun art project as we discussed conflicts in feminist groups. Rain Lewis did an admirable job providing an overview of formative conflicts between girls in childhood, but I’ll admit to expecting a more practical, activist-oriented session. If we had three hours to hash out the subject instead of one I’m sure we would have gotten there, but a grenade of a topic like that requires skillful moderation and ample time to pull off productively.

Finally, my session arrived. Titled “Radical Activist Strategies: Zero risk through high risk acts of resistance and reclamation,” I like to think it delivered. Usually my presentations are Pornstitution 101 with as much radfem theory as can be crammed into the allotted time. For this crowd I expanded into the exciting realm of anarcha-feminism with greater detail than has ever been possible in the Western Hemisphere. Short moments of subterfuge have snuck into talks because they’re an integral part of my politics, but never as detailed as what I let rip in Perth. I was exhilarated and then exhausted in the usual post-gig way.

Doctoral student Ryl Harrison took the floor when I finished and her testimonies of porn culture infecting pre-teen girls was expectedly horrific. Pornography intrudes into kid’s lives and the adult response has been embarrassed silence and dogmatic refusals to provide honest sexual education. I wouldn’t believe that a modern sex ed program for 16 to 24 year-olds could make no mention of pornography if I haven’t personally witnessed men getting evasive and angry at being asked to provide titles of the porn they use.

There’s not much point in detailing Allecto’s workshop on women’s spaces because she has provided it in full to Radfem Hub readers. Her summation of the group response is worth repeating, “discussion was especially passionate.”

The group then broke into informal sessions about using the internet and plotting various insurgencies. By that time I was emotionally wrung and instead of joining in I used the time to say goodbyes to women on their way out.

Australia is the first country in all my life’s wanderlusty travels that brought the phrase, “I could live here” frequently to mind. Maybe not bike lane deficient Perth, but there’s a can-do pioneer optimism in Australian culture that the born and raised New Yorker in me found refreshing. I don’t know what combination of factors left me with that impression – and it’s not like I spend a lot of time in multigenerational, women-only, radfem spaces to compare – but I liked the feeling so I’m going to roll with it.

They’re saying Melbourne 2012. See you there.

I tried to avoid writing an essay on SlutWalks. I’ve left pieces around the never-ending party that is the internet, but I’d rather be stomping out johns than criticizing essentially well-intentioned women.

The initial trigger shot off when Sunsara Taylor wrote an essay for Revolution titled, “The Thing About Slutwalks… and a World Without Rape” and requested my opinion. My respect for her diligence has only grown since we got to know each other at the Stop Porn Culture event in July and she deserves a thorough response.

The anecdotes she offers of women gathering and speaking with each other are potent, and I believe when she says it was an overall inspiring occasion for the women involved. What I question is if that’s enough to mitigate all the other stuff. Anti-woman traditions are often ameliorated with “Well at least women are befriending each other.” For example, polyamorists focus on what good friends multiple wives become and women point out the friendships of the Sex & the City gals when confronted with the show’s misogyny. Personal connections are good, but are they good enough to exact necessary political change?

While I accept Sunsara’s recounting of how crucial camaraderie and baby step introductions to feminism are, I have to deny that SlutWalk represents a new surge of feminist energy. In 2004 I reported on the March For Women’s Lives for The Portland Alliance newspaper, and since then I’ve not just participated but planned other public actions. Thanks to Facebook, I know of half a dozen feminist protest marches this summer. A few, like Take Back the Night and Reclaim the Night, are annual events on some campuses around the world. Others dwelling in my Events folder are the Freedom Walk, Walk a Mile in Her Shoes (men walk in women’s shoes), and the Zero Tolerance for Domestic Violence Walk in honor of Maria Aguilar.

None of these, and more I’ll never hear about, will be covered by the mainstream media with a droplet of the fervor given to SlutWalks and we all know why.

Declarations of supposedly watershed moments in women’s liberation are frequent, and they usually revolve around women acting more publicly sexual. How many times have we been told that the public presence of libertines like Mae West, Marilyn Monroe, Raquel Welch, Madonna, Lil Kim, Britney Spears, Jenna Jameson, “Samantha Jones” and the entirety of fuckme feminism’s twenty year rule would usher in less sexual oppression for women? The theory has not become reality because men have women where they want them and not Mae nor Marilyn nor Madonna have managed to change that despite delusions of pussy power grandeur.

I have seen the word ‘slut’ so many times in the past few months that despite my overt rejection it has seeped into my brain. When I think and write, the word interjects. I recognize the effect from researching pornography, though porn’s images intrude far more aggressively than news-safe pictures of SW.

One day the word jumped out of my head deployed as an ‘ironic’ adjective to achieve sarcasm, possibly the purest form of Freudian slip. A linguist, I know something of how language works, and I know people can’t look at a word without reading it and recalling its dense social content instantaneously. I can’t see ‘slut’ frequently put before me without unconsciously referring to everything I’ve learned about it, and neither can you.

When feminists hold signs declaring “sluts say yes” and “call me a slut too” signs, they are making a public statement for womankind. Unfortunately, men are not taking up the sign-holding women’s offers with only the sign-holders. SlutWalkers tell men it’s okay to call me a slut and to call my sisters sluts from now until they bore of it, and men desensitize to desiring harsher words quickly. The explosion of porn-inspired words made to hurt women is a lesson in never underestimating men’s creativity when it comes to destruction, and women had better learn the lesson because Future Sam will not write about why I can’t support CumguzzlerWalks or CocksocketWalks.

In 2008 frat pledges at Yale held signs declaring “We Love Yale Sluts” in front of the campus Women’s Center and in 2010 another frat’s pledges chanted, “No means yes. Yes means anal!” Young pornfed men have been giving women proof long before Slutwalks that positively sexy feminist tactics aren’t working. “Yes Means Yes” is a useless strategy for stopping men who are turned on by the thought of violating a woman’s ‘no’. Such men view women enthusiastically wanting sex as a challenge to find something more degrading than they believe merely poking a woman vaginally already is (in this case anal sex is the next level) and will never be happy with hordes of lovely ladies begging for it. Like the global appeal of sex with virgins, the whole point is to break something irreplaceable.

The final incident spurring me to write was encountering a young survivor of prostitution who was not beaten into The Life by a pimp or forced by her impoverished family. The most common of reasons compelled her, the need for money, and she met a woman who told her about the big bucks to be made in pornstitution. She said she was a feminist.

I have heard this tale before, and if you speak with enough prostitution survivors you’ll hear it too. If you’re able to read about porn-caused trauma, I recommend radfem blogger Lost Clown’s testimony:

“Desperate for money (for food) and sold down the river by women I trusted. Now I’m not saying that I am a moron and do whatever someone tells me to do, what I am saying is that women who I respected, who were older then me, more experienced then me, and in every way I could see amazing feminists sold me on the idea that it was an ok thing to do for money.”

Being recruited—maliciously or not—by other women into professional sluthood is how most of the prostituted women I personally know were coaxed in the door.

Tied into SlutWalk is the confusion of sex-focused feminists telling men they can use women as prostitutes in an “I’m rubber and you’re glue” way that bounces off the not-for-saleable proclaimers and, once again, sticks to me and my sisters. They could be telling men about a revolution sweeping the world from Scandinavia since 1999, a woman-centered movement the mainstream media has actually given a huge amount of attention to under the generalized name of trafficking. However, the Nordic feminist revolution has been declared not just unsexy by these sexiest of feminists, but worthy of active resistance and called a menace to sexual freedom.

The organizer-acknowledged truth of SlutWalks is the same tragic “make feminism sexy” edict that has failed us since that ship set sail. I certainly don’t lay all the blame for labiaplasty, ass-to-mouth porn, and the growing use of the phrase “child sex worker” on misguided feminists, not in this male supremacist world. Right now I’m looking at the contemporary phenomena of Slutwalks and taking in the positives of women organizing under a ‘slut’ banner while keeping an eye on relevant negatives.

Feminists who pressure women into accepting themselves as sluts and prostitution as a beneficial form of work have the good intention to lessen the damages these two nasty manifestations of sexism inflict. This particular road to Hell is not a paved path but the roof of a tall building with young, questioning girls ringing the edges and Full Frontal Feminists standing behind them. They look over the side scared and wondering if they should take the plunge when from behind a trusted voice chirps, “You can fly, sexy bitch!” So like Lost Clown they try, and they drop, but it’s too far down for the Rosie WeCanDoIts to hear the wet thuds on the street from the center of the roof.

The pornographic pushback of recent years is the expected response of misogynistic men to women hitting their stride. Less expected was liberal feminists accepting men’s abusive insults on faulty premises of reclamation. Radical feminists will continue to have our unsexy marches against sexual violence and they will continue to be mostly ignored. Young women on the edges will still be vulnerable, but if they scream “I’m a slut!” and jump off our roof, we have a rope of bedsheets tied together and a team of radfems ready to pull her up.

Samantha Berg is National Coordinator for the feminist organization Stop Porn Culture and founder of www.Genderberg.com, an anti-prostitution activist community and resource center since 2005.

The world is debating prostitution. In the past fifteen years, sex trafficking has emerged as a critical human rights issue as the problem has become a planet-wide catastrophe in that time. There’s no need to go into details here about how globalization, armed conflicts, sexism and racism teamed up to create the modern sex slave trade because I want to talk about solutions.

Most people’s favorite example country for legalization, The Netherlands, has seen foreign women and children’s bodies flood De Wallen, Amsterdam’s largest red light district (aka prostitution neighborhood) since legalization in 1999.

The prostitution industry’s favorite example country for legalization, New Zealand,  has seen a quadrupling of illegal prostitution in Auckland, their largest city, since country-wide regulations were instituted in 2003.

Led by Sweden’s example in 1999, the countries of Norway and Iceland have changed their laws to acknowledge that prostitution is male violence against women and children. Finland’s legislators proposed a similar law change in 2006 but settled for making it criminal to hire coerced prostitutes, and England followed their half-step one month ago in April 2010.

As usual, the United States hogs more press coverage for several rural counties in a desert state (prostitution is illegal in Las Vegas) than gets accorded to the entire legalized countries of Mexico, Greece, Guatemala, Ethiopia, and every country in South America except Guyana and Suriname.

I live in Portland, Oregon, which readers of the New York Times and other news fit to print know is the US city with the most strip clubs as well as home of the theater that first projected images of Linda Lovelace getting raped in Deep Throat. Libertarians know our state constitution allows for entertainment businesses to have prostitution occur in them as paid acts of free expression. The Hooters at Mall 205 closed after a few months because it couldn’t compete with the topless sports bar across the street.

Way out in the Oregon desert where there’s nothing around for miles but sage and jackrabbits, there’s a place named “Whorehouse Meadow.” Tourist guides and historical plaques make frequent mention of  how ‘colorful’ the wild, wild west was with saloons and brothels. Men moved the necessary livestock West with them building cattle ranches for the beef and rape rooms for the meat.

For the past eight years I have worked against prostitution in Oregon, but only in the past two years have I seen commitments to make improvements. People didn’t just suddenly discover sex trafficking, prostitution went up as the economy went down and we were forced to confront the problem literally brought to our doorsteps by pimps and johns. I live in the worst prostitution neighborhood in one of the worst US cities for sex trafficking, and my neighbors are Portland’s famously tolerant, progressive citizens. But johns are soliciting children on the way home from school, pimps are beating their slaves on the sidewalks, and there are so many used condoms and needles in the community park that before ball games parents must do a sweep of the field.

We’ve just begun to get serious political weight behind the issue. Portland has no shelter for prostitution survivors, leaving only piecemeal outpatient services available. New laws to provide for victims and target traffickers have been proposed, but so far none of the Prostitution Task Force’s recommendations to reduce men’s demands for prostitutes have been put into action. Instead of  addressing that porn-exacerbated problem, a few weeks ago stickers with a trafficking hotline phone number were mailed to every liquor-selling establishment in Oregon. To respect the free speech of liquor license holders, posting the sticker is optional.

Last week, the Scottish Parliament rejected the Swedish model decriminalizing prostitutes and criminalizing punters; pimping is already criminal. Scotland, you prickly thistle, your obstinance has you staying the muddy path of male supremacy. There’s no better time than now to start fixing your cities the right way, and that means the radical way digging up the roots of sexual inequality. Please don’t wait for the situation to get as unbearable as it has gotten here. Ignoring the damage being done by invasive weeds in the spring only makes for more backbreaking work in the heat of summer.