Self-Organizing Man

My post on Susie Bright and Aura Bogado generated some great comments.

I struggle with the issues of sex work and pornography as a feminist.  So when Me (that’s the commenter’s name) offered her comments to my piece, I found myself learning new things.  These new things brought some fresh perspectives and more complexity.

Me writes:

Much of the most ground-breaking work done to legalise sex-work and organise sex-workers has been done by non-anglo and third-world women… Yet there seems to be a lot of stuff around at the moment implying the opposite. I think it reflects a real ignorance and prejudice on the part of the left and feminist movements about this issue.

I responded:

I once heard Riki Ann Wilchens say that social movements in the u.s. are started by the underclasses, funded by the upper classes and managed by the middle classes.

Stonewall happened through the efforts of black and Latino gay men and drag queens. As a transsexual man, I find myself disgusted with some white gays and lesbians who yell, "Stonewall! Stonewall!" who neither want trans people in "their" movement nor particularly understand the priviledges that accrue to them as people with white skin.

I think too often we white people forget that omission functions as part of prejudice. We think prejudice must always be active, like participating in KKK rallies or something similar.

Yet much racist behavior today functions in passive ways. Perhaps well-meaning strikes closer to what I want to describe.

Sadly, we do not understand how such passive racism hurts us all and ourselves most of all. We cannot make connections with non-anglo and third world women where we ought to. Then we work against our own best interests out of ignorance and prejudice.

Me then directed me to the political work of Siobhan Brooks and Gloria Lockett, both African-American sex workers involved in addressing racism among sex work organizers.

Siobahn Brooks, I found, had much to say about racism among the white feminists organizing the sex work industries. 

Gloria Lockett, former co-director of COYOTE [Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics - an organization founded by Margo St. James, a white woman, to decriminalize sex work] and (former?) Executive Director of CAL-PEP (Prostitute Education Project) brought her experience to bear in an interview I found:

After the trail (trial) I became more involved with COYOTE. I knew that, for the most part, the people working the streets were Black and other women of color. So I had a real problem with the fact that COYOTE was so white. The people were real nice, it was just too white. But I wanted to be involved with COYOTE to let my people know that prostitution was not an all-white issue.

Prostitution is not an all-white issue.  You’d think I would have known this to be true, especially with my trans organizing efforts with women of color in Chicago, many of whom used to turn tricks. 

Yet I think my white privilege and my own ambivalence about sex work, and pornography, too, cloud what probably should have been obvious. 

But debates about sex work, and until recently, how I understood them, have been driven by a middle-class white model of feminism, particularly the work of Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin.

Now, let me state for the record, I am not bashing Catherine and Andrea.  Their contributions to feminism stand, however much I may not agree with some of the theoretical underpinnings of their works.

What I simply want to do is to bring a level of complexity to the theoretical discussions of sex work that already exist in real time.

Me concurred with Gloria and Siobhan’s experiences and also found debates here in the U.S. frustrating:

I am a sex-worker (mexican-american but living in Australia) and have been finding these debates very frustrating because a lot of the work done by non anglo middle-class Americans has just been ignored by both sides…. There is a lot of racism in the industry and it is very noticable at work. Particularly in who certain clients will pick and how they behave towards them.

Me concludes one comment by offering a potential solution to the gridlock we in the U.S. left now find ourselves as we attempt to discuss sex work, and also pornography.

I think tho, that it would be good if the left could instead of polemisizeing against sex-work, try to make more links with these sections of the sex-worker groups. Help empower people instead of trying to save them (I know that’s a generalization and it’s a complex issue etc…). I don’t know all that much about the US left - but I have begun trying to raise these issues with groups here in Australia and so far there seems to be a good response.

What happens with our theoretical discussions of patriarchy fly in the face of the experience of real women’s lives?  How do we empower sex workers when other feminists - of all colors, remember Aura Bogado is a woman of color - believe sex work a prime manifestation of patriarchy?

I don’t know.  But dialoguing is a good place to begin, dialoguing from a place of humility, from a place of kindness and a root of knowledge that admits an understanding that knowing is only ever partial at best.

Tomorrow I will offer more links from Me and a counter opinion from a new commenter.