Not For Sale

It's great to see this site up - early days yet, but a crucial forum for those of us who are reeling with the escalating violence against women in our societies at many levels and on different fronts. I look forward to reading the ensuing discussions - and my thanks to De Clarke for making it happen.

I am interested in finding where I can get a sopy of the book inWollongong. I am the coordinator of Darcy HOuse, a small drop in centre for street sex workers in Port Kembla. I also am not very computer literate, so please feel free to assist me or advise me what to do if I can't get through properly. My concern is experienced on real life experiences of the women I see daily who don't even bother to try to report crime perpetrated upon them mostly because of response they receive from the police and community in general. Empowerment is not an easy concept when a person is a street sex worker, drug dependant, homeless, sometimes with various mental illness (untreated of course) and often indigenous woman. I look forward to reading this book.

As a woman who has had pornography showed to her in the street by strangers, and by colleagues in the workplace (a joke of course), I am fed up with the idea that pornography is funny and harmless, and that this idea is so embedded in everyday discourse. I caught my 7 year old nephew the other day doing a 'stripper' dance, which he found hilarious. I asked him if he knew what it meant, and he said he didn't, but that a male relative had done it so it must be okay.
Since reading Not for Sale I've cautiously broached the subject of pornography with some people (mostly women), and most often the response is something along the lines of - if some women want to do it that's fine, but it's degrading to the rest of us. They speak with scorn of the women who feature in pornography. They also can't see the connection drawn so well in NFS -that the reduction of women in pornography to objects of sexual desire is part of the same system that subjugates women in everyday life. And yes, part of the reason is that liberal pro-sex feminists have made pornography acceptable, and to object is to be sexually repressed, to have historic morals.
But I certainly think it is worth chipping away at, and I'm going to talk about it till I'm blue in the face and my friends are sick of hearing about it, until they start to think about it for themselves.

I’d be interested in talking to other readers about how they feel they can ‘practice’ the politics of NFS in everyday life.

There are some new articles in the Archive.

Professor Chyng Sun of NYU dared (uppity female!) to criticise the US porn industry in a brief article appearing in Alternet (then subsequently in Commondreams and Counterpunch). The predictable response from porn lobbyist/spindoc Nina Hartley appeared almost instantly in Counterpunch. Sun broke some new ground in describing the porn manufacturers' convention in Las Vegas; Hartley merely repeated the same old libertarian bromides that have been used to silence feminist critiques of the industry for the last couple of decades. Stay tuned...

I was overwhelmed by reading Not for sale; I was reluctant because of simply not wanting to deal with the anger and disgust that humiliation of women brings up in me. Also I feel so powerless in the face of the staggering success of the porn industry both in monetary terms and in terms of its takeover of common culture. I feel shamed by what I see even on television in front of my sons and subtly degraded by it. I have always been a feminist but feel that that women should have been able to attain equality without having to give up their dignity, that sexuality needed to be freed from its repression but not like this. It doesn't feel like freedom. How can we as Western women, for instance, hold up our heads as representing women's rights to cultures that traditionally oppress women when they can point to the pornography industry as the logical result of women's autonomy? Rather a hijab and beaten by one man, they could legitimately say, than naked and violated by many before being dumped as human trash when one's sexual attractiveness has faded. I was grateful for Not for sale's clarity on a subject which has had me totally confused.

Like Mary Crean, I also felt overwhelmed by the information, analyses and first person accounts in Not For Sale. At the same time, I feel gratitude toward the women who are bold enough to speak out publicly about their experiences in the industry, and gratitude toward the contributors who spend so much of their lives opposing an exploitation that is so deep and vast that it is difficult to even look at.

I am glad that men's strong feminist perspectives were included in the book. Even after many years of involvement in feminism, I learned a lot from their essays exposing male supremacist culture, from the "inside." For many years, especially during my twenties, I argued with women friends about the larger meaning and patterns of the sexism I (and they) would experience. So many were married to denial. They'd argue: the problems were mostly in my head, or the men didn't mean it, they didn't realize what they were doing, they are innocent because it's what they are taught by society (with no real agent or agenda), or that there was just something about me that brought such behavior out of these guys.

In more public forums, when women take men to task for the behavior, and connect the dots, making social and political meaning of what they see and experience, they are silenced with the label of "manhater."

Rus Ervin Funk and John Stoltenberg's essays were especially useful to me as a "reality check." I wish I had had these essays in my twenties to point out: no, it is not my imagination. It is so much worse than even I thought.

It is also amazing to me, on the other hand, that so many men refuse to expose this harmful male culture, even though men really do care about and love women. The problem seems to be that they consider maintaining their class power a higher priority. At least for now.

I suppose I'm coming over here so I can comment on this subject without being dogpiled by industry apologists. The most disconcerting thing about this whole issue, apart from the most obvious, is the incredibly vitriolic and irrational reaction ANY criticism of porn elicits.

I posted one reply to that screed Nina Hartley wrote to attack Chyng Sun, and continue to get mostly hostile and demagogic reactions.

As I shared with De in an email, this tells me that the subject gets on a pretty raw nerve, and at the risk of committing a non sequitur, I think this indicates how important the subject is.

Tiresome as debating with most of these people, it has been useful. We pretty much have their whole playbook now. It's pretty limited. Anyone who's interested and hasn't eaten in a couple of hours (I seem to suffer from acid reflux when I go over it), drop in at http://stangoff.com/index.php?p=2 and view the comments.

Also posted Bob Jensen's piece at http://stangoff.com/index.php?p=41. He and I, as sex-race traitors, will soon be given the John Brown treatment and declared insane. (-:

I hope this debate gets itself taken back out into the world. It gets to the very roots of gender as a system of social power... which is what I understand "radical" means.

For the contributors to the anthology:

First of all, incredible work. Secondly, are any of you available to speak on Democracy Now? DN is being really cagey about working hand-in-hand with the sex industry, and I'd like to suggest programming to them that would feature any or all of you as speakers/panelists (WITHOUT any pro-prostitution panelists-- I think it's only fair, since they routinely feature all-pro-prostitution panels without any of the good gals on the show!).

Thanks a bazillion.

Haven't seen NFS yet in London but will do my best to promote it and see this important book is not censored from potential outlets. I look forward to attempting to get it stocked in 'feminist bookstore' Silver Moon...
Meanwhile here in London there seems to be a bit of an anti porn resurgence with emergence of groups like Object and London Feminist Network and a conference and Reclaim the Night march in the offing. I'm not as active on this issue as I was in the 80s and 90s (more doing climate change stuff these days!) but still motivated to fight porn. Ultimately--as has already been said--trashing the planet and trashing the women are deeply connected. And ultimately people's shortsighted selfishness around both things (fossil fuel addiction and quick fix sex drugs) lead them towards a hysterically guilt-based anger towards those of us who are challenging destructive behaviours and trying to see beyond...
Thanks Christine Stark Spinifex and all for your fantastic work. And I look forward to actually obtaining the book!
Elizabeth

This is to all who have posted on this site, I am Chong Kim, one of the contributing writers of the book, NFS (Not For Sale), since the book released, I've done public speaking worldwide, advocated for victims in the sex-industry and human trafficking. I would like to invite all of you to visit my website for update information and so forth, if you would like me to speak on the topic of Prostitution/Human Trafficking you can e-mail me at: ckim@endslavery.org Until then, thank you all for reading the book!

Always,
From one survivor to another . . .

Was browsing Google and found your site. The site is awesome.

I find out about this book through Stan Goff's web site, where De Clarke's essay was mentioned. I recieved a copy of it a few days ago. This book is impressive and wide-ranging, and refreshingly grounded in the international, real-life political economy of porn and prostitution as opposed to the esoteric world of academic jargon about sexual representation. Perhaps out of selfishness, I am particularly interested in the critiques of male leftist silence on porn and prostitution in the Clarke and Sere essays, as they provide clues as to how this sort of blindness on the part of men like myself and friends might be exposed and challenged. I wish I had time to post a better response, but kudos to all the contributers, and I hope the book will do force everyone who reads it to reconsider their strategies and their tolerance of the anti-female messages all around us.

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