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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The Harms of Gay Male Pornography: A Sexual Equality Perspective

off our backs, July/August 2005

A report on Christopher Kendall’s presentation at the 2005 CaptiveDaughters conference on pornography and international sex trafficking. Kendall is a professor of law at Murdoch University in Perth, Australia, and author of the book Gay Male Pornography: An issue of sex discrimination

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Memorial for civil rights leader Andrea Dworkin

The Portland Alliance, July 2005, also at the Andrea Dworkin Memorial Website

Many years ago a Spanish man told me Cervantes’ medieval tome Don Quixote was everyone’s favorite novel they haven’t read. The phrase comes back to me when I think of recently deceased feminist Andrea Dworkin, a top contender for everyone’s least favorite writer they haven’t read.

The experience of first encountering Dworkin’s passionate writing varies by reader, but most agree it is peculiarly affecting and rouses deep emotions. After my initial shot of Dworkin, an essay on prostitution, I had a revolution in radical thought that shocked my worldview in a way that altered me forever, and not just about gendered power. On that day I learned to read first the writers that pundits and popular culture most warn me away from, and my education has been richer for it.

Whether you agree with her or disagree, and with thirteen books there is undoubtedly much of both whatever your opinions, the power to provoke feeling is a skill artists of all kinds aspire to and by this yardstick Dworkin is one of the greatest American wordsmiths of all time.

Praising Dworkin’s verbal ability is easy and pointing to where she shines brightest easier (the collection Life and Death can satisfy naysayers to her acumen), but there is more to why more than forty people came to her memorial at Liberty Hall on the hot Sunday afternoon of June 19. The people paying tribute came because Andrea gave them the words to finish the open-mouthed scream they started and didn’t know how to finish. She put form to the swirling, dark feelings of living constantly with sexism and surviving sexual violations in and out of the commercial sex industry. In their own words, here is why they came:

• “The first thing I think of to say about Andrea Dworkin is what so, so, so many women say about her and that’s that she saved my life. I owe her everything.” — Amy Lynn

• “Andrea is the reason that I don’t feel like shit, as a human being, as a psychiatric survivor, as a prostituted woman, as a woman.” — Paddy

• “She gave me the courage to do the work I do today.” — Robyn Shanti, host of KBOO’s Dharma Wheel.

• “She is the stone of my life, the pond of my life, she is the stone that had an important impact and sent out ripples in all directions.” — Peter Qualliotine, co-founder of Sexual Exploitation Education Project.

• “Her support and her criticism affected my thinking about myself, my relationships, the world and my work for twenty years.” — Melissa Farley, Director of Prostitution Research and Education in San Francisco.

Eulogies of another recently deceased feminist who wrote about pornography, Susan Sontag, praised her high intellect and contributions to philosophy, but none I saw credited Sontag for profoundly changing their life. No tales of finding one of her books in the library and reading it nonstop sitting cross-legged in the stacks, or accolades from people crediting her with lighting the spark of their life’s activism in numbers rivaled only by Ralph Nader.

Tess Wiseheart, former Executive Director of the Portland Women’s Crisis Line, spoke of asking new volunteers why they came and having 60 to 70 percent respond that Andrea Dworkin was the reason they volunteered, “Everything we do emanates from people who very much identify by Andrea Dworkin.”

When the personal testimonies concluded the memorial service was moved outside for the release of two doves. Prayers were spoken and the doves, representing hope and peace, were released into the evening sky. The air had the metallic taste of impending rain and as the people dispersed a display unlike any I had seen before began. Two vivid rainbows were draped over Southeast Portland and occasional bolts of crackling lightening flickered across the colored arches. The talk of the town for hours afterwards and top story on the local news, Mother Nature’s mesmerizing light show seemed perfectly timed to honor the memory of Andrea’s illuminating life and fierce determination to strike pointedly at injustice.

Andrea Dworkin is mistakenly thought to have tilted at windmills, but if that’s all you remember of Don Quixote then you missed why it is still popular, if little read, five hundred years later. Don Quixote inspired people to see the best in themselves and others, and to make real an honorable world where peasant girls and poor farmers have the dignity of noblewomen and squires. It is the radicals among us who necessarily push at the status quo’s edges and expand what we as a people reconsider imaginable. Society needs this rare and brave type of citizen and Andrea Dworkin was one of the rarest and bravest.

Giving the marginalized the tools to speak their voices

The Portland Alliance, April 2005

I am a privileged writer. From being encouraged to write as a child through state college and with the current support of family and friends, I’ve easily adopted the moniker “writer” as a part of my identity. Even so, it has only been in the past two years I’ve answered the question, “What do you do?” with “writer” instead of my day job.
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Sex trafficking strikes closer to home than thought

The Portland Alliance, November 2004

A bed, a teddy bear, and a roll of paper towels are the only contents of a closet-sized room where a trafficked 13-year-old girl was sold for sex by pimps to 20-30 men a day.

On Nov. 5, 2003, a woman taken from the Lloyd Center shopping mall was found to have been drugged awake for three straight days of sexual slavery by traffickers in Vancouver, Canada.

Traffickers forced three dozen Mexican men and boys recruited in Arizona to work 60 hours a week on farms near Buffalo, N.Y. for $30 a week.

These are a small sampling of stories relayed Oct. 4 during an educational forum on human trafficking convened by The Department of Health and Human Services [HHS] and The Protection Project of the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. About 70 local social service, healthcare, law enforcement, and human rights professionals attended the daylong conference at the Benson Hotel to launch the new HHS Rescue and Restore anti-trafficking program.

The Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 [TVPA] was the first comprehensive federal U.S. law addressing human trafficking with a plan for ending what is often referred to as modem slavery. Part of TVPA charged federal health service providers with finding victims and offering them benefits provided by the new law, but despite their outreach efforts it’s estimated less than one percent of victims came forward for assistance.

In 2003, TVPA was reauthorized with more extensive amendments, and the Rescue and Restore program was created to increase public awareness about the horrors of human trafficking, a factor which posed a serious barrier to successfully identifying and assisting victims. With CIA estimates that 500,000 victims of trafficking are brought into the United States and the United Nations claiming 4 million people are trafficked worldwide annually, most of us have likely encountered a trafficked person at some point and not known it.

So where are these women, men and children who have been forced to endure slave-like conditions and where can we find them in Portland? Despite 33 percent of the opening anecdotes being about men and boys trafficked for labor, only 20 percent of trafficking is of males and less than half of all trafficking is for labor. Considering 75 percent of female victims are trafficked for commercial sexual exploitation, a boom industry in Portland, it was rightly stated by speaker Mohamed Y. Mattar that, “too many people in this country do not understand the link between prostitution and crime, between prostitution and AIDS, between prostitution and trafficking.”

Mattar is an Adjunct Professor of Law and Co-Director of The Protection Project of the Foreign Policy Institute at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and he is quick to implicate sexually oriented businesses in the multiple human rights offenses that surround human trafficking. “In fact, in most cases women are trafficked in this country to work in strip clubs, massage parlors and other sexually oriented establishments that are used as fronts for prostitution and rely on public misconceptions that such activities are harmless expressions of adult sexuality.”

When Mattar recounted that Portland’s Broadway Massage was closed for sexual exploitation and prostitution, Officer Greg Duvic of the Portland Police Vice Division offered, “Every escort agency, every massage business we have ever investigated has turned out to be a front for prostitution.” Duvie assisted with an undercover effort to expose the so-called “escort” ads in the back of Portland’s alternative weekly papers for the illegal prostitution they obviously are. The sting operation definitively identified at least 80 perccnt of escort ads were for prostitution, and as Duvic, a seven-year veteran of the vice division, added, “The other 20 percent just took the money and left.”

He mentioned what it took to dislodge his own misconceptions about the harmlessness of sexual capitalism, “When I first started as a cop many years ago I thought prostitution was not a big deal, that the girls were making good money and chose to be there. Now I know it’s an evil, horrible crime, the worst destruction that can happen to a person.” Duvic estimates there are at least 2,000 adult women currently being prostituted in Portland, a destination stop on an organized crime circuit that moves women and children up and down the west coast.

The prevalence of interstate trafficking as evidenced by large networks of organized crime underscores that the term trafficking does not only apply to foreign citizens coerced, forced or frauded into prostitution but also to U.S. citizens similarly exploited.

Most U.S. state prostitution laws treat prostituted people as criminals. They are arrested more often than the pimps and johns who demand sexual servitude from these vulnerable populations, despite the Department of Justice’s 2003 finding that the average age of entry into the U.S. sex industry is thirteen. New amendments in the reauthorized TVPA reclassify prostituted people as victims of sexual exploitation and provide an outline for administering assistance, but meeting the conditions for assistance can still let many sexually brutalized victims fall through the cracks.

Brian Willis of ECPAT-USA (Ending Child Prostitution, Child Pornography, and Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes-USA) gave the following example of how the best laws against sexual slavery are inadequate if public perception of prostitution doesn’t change. A brothel in Queens could be raided and a 10-year-old prostituted child from Honduras can be given federal assistance while a 10-year-old prostituted child from Brooklyn is sent to jail.

It sounds too unbelievable to be true, but as New York Times writer Leslie Kaufman revealed in a Sept. 15 article, a 12-year-old prostituted child was sentenced to a secure juvenile detention center by a Bronx Family Court judge who said she needed to get “proper moral principles.”

Well-intentioned laws are not enough, and changing pervasive public myths that maintain prostitution is a choice and is driven by willing sex workers is crucial to ending the abuses of sex trafficking. The sex industry deliberately hides the truth that the true cause of sex trafficking is not the free choice of prostitutes but men’s demand for and sense of entitlement to prostituted bodies, usually those of young girls and women.

Says Willis, “Decreasing men’s demand for bodies to sexually abuse needs to become a larger part of the Rescue and Restore strategy.”

Focusing on demand reduction is a position Patricia Barrera feels adamant about. An advocate for prostituted people for more than a decade and Director of Community Education for the Lola Greene Baldwin Foundation, a Portland nonprofit organization assisting survivors of the sex industry, Barrera attended the conference and couldn’t agree more.

“For far too long, men have gotten away with believing they could buy women and children with impunity. Those days must come to a close. We need incarceration, certainly, and we also need intensive and extensive diversion programs and treatment programs for this population of sex offenders. And we better do it quick, because people are literally dying from their behavior.”
S.M. Berg is an activist, bicyclist, and freelance writist.