Pornography, Prostitution & Sex Trafficking: How Do You Tell the Difference?

One of three reports written for the feminist newsjournal off our backs covering the Pornography and Pop Culture: Reframing Theory, Rethinking Activism conference held at Wheelock College in March 2007.
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Hey, progressives! Cathouse got your tongue?

The Portland Alliance, July 2006

“I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is, I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.”

-Rebecca West, 1913

The above quote by Rebecca West has recently been debated among quote collectors and feminists. It seems many people have been passing along a version that cuts off the last three words, “or a prostitute,” mostly without knowing the full quotation ever contained them. Such Orwellian rewritings of a historic quotation concern me, and as an activist working with prostituted women I can tell you there’s nothing they consider more disrespectful than when academic eggheads elide the ugly, violent truths about their lives.

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Portland at crossroads of human trafficking

The Portland Alliance, April 2006

In a city famous for its politicized public citizenry, the nonprofit civic organization City Club of Portland stands out as a respected forum for community education. Its Friday Forums series was established to bring pressing civic issues to concerned citizens, and on Feb. 17 the topic of pressing social concern discussed was human trafficking.
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“It’s up to you”: Prostitution, Censorship and Sweden

Self-published at Portland Indymedia, this essay serves as the front page of a website I created specifically as a standing feminist action, www.spreademism.com.

spread’emism (spread-them-ism), n. 1. the misleading idea that women can fuck and get fucked into political, academic and social equality with men via prostitution and pornography.

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Female Chauvinist Liz: Third wave feminism through the songs of Liz Phair

Popmatters.com, October 31, 2005

It was a splendid time for a teen girl to become a feminist. The Year of the Woman, 1992, saw a record number of American women elected to public office, the riot grrl scene was in full swing, and Bill Clinton was feeling our pain years before he would feel up his intern. Influenced heavily by Madonna’s merging of sexual display with money and prestige in the 1980s, I embraced a nascent form of feminism claiming women could fuck their way to equality with men if we were just sexy enough. Young women like me were hanging our sexual self-definition on the fashionable hook of whore chic and called ourselves “third wave” feminists in ideological opposition to second wave women’s liberationists of the 1970s who rejected sexual objectification and opposed pornography. It seemed like a good idea at the time.
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