As the woman who put the berg in Genderberg, it’s time I said a few words publicly about the recent fracas.
Everyone gets harassed online, which doesn’t make it right, just common. It’s in vogue this week to kvetch about the gobs of sexist harassment encountered online and pretty much anything I could say on that subject has already been said.
However, vitriol towards anti-pornography and anti-prostitution feminists has been screeching at a fever pitch since the 70s when the first serious challenges to male sexual entitlement were made. There are death-threateningly good reasons MacKinnon and other anti-pornography feminists are protective about their personal information.
Genderberg is one teensy e-space where anti-pornstitution activists of all stripes, shapes and colors don’t have to face opposition to their viewpoints. It’s a place for prostituted women to find others steaming mad about the way they were abused and exploited, for activists to refuel during and after a tough debate, and for the very small but robust community of radical feminists to meet for tip swapping and talent sharing as we do the soul-rending work that is seeking to stop the rapes of the world’s most raped women.
To all who thought it was okay to repost a private opinion from a place you know strives for privacy because it deals with the deeply personal subject of sexual violence, I have only one question: How could you repost what you knew to be a violation of sexually-abused women’s safe space without even asking to know the name of the person who wrote it? Of course the snitch knew Pony wrote that RenEv was a paid tool of the porniarchy. Not a one of you harpies hovering over radfem blogs and licking your chops for something meaty to pounce on insisted your supposedly anonymous source (I don’t believe none of you knows who did it) reveal the author of the post.
With glee you told people I wrote those words and even since Pony claimed them I have seen others refer to it as “What Genderberg is about” though Pony was but one member; she left the forum. For that I will not forgive a one of you unethical bloggers who reposted what was written in confidence at a private place that I’m responsible for making as safe for prostitution survivors as possible. Organizing sexually traumatized people is like herding cats that have been put in sacks and beaten with sticks and I don’t care what any of you think of Pony, I value the way she wears her heart on her sleeve and will miss her contributions.
What’s that you say? You didn’t mean to violate the feeling of trust I and the other 100+ members of Genderberg worked hard to build at our forum, didn’t mean pull the rug out from under women who have had a lifetime of rugs being pulled out from under them? Like hell you didn’t. Everyday I can hear you smacking your lips in anticipation of a radfem slip up you can make an exaggerated stink about. The gotcha joy you felt before running off half-cocked to say/insinuate I wrote those words was what the snitch was counting on. You know as well as I do that if Pony’s name was on it from the beginning it would’ve been easily dismissed. Smearing the whole of Genderberg and all its antiporn members was the point of the no-name leak as that goofy new blog affirmed and your re-snitching of an anonymous post achieved.
Libel is publicly lying about someone, which Pony never did because her opinion was written privately. The person who stole from Genderberg did something illegal. I have little faith in the legal system to stand up for my rights since the she-pimps at $pread Magazine broke the law by stealing my writing, changing key points, and removing my name after I explicitly denied them permission to publish a letter not written to them. For all the hot air about defending women’s choices, pornstitution’s defenders seem to have a hard time respecting the choices women make when they feel they have a “right” to steal what isn’t theirs. The law and ethics are on our side.
The majority of Genderberg’s forums are readable by anyone. Contrary to some paranoiac ramblings, women in pornstitution are not the focus of the private forums nearly as much as members sharing actions, articles, and anti-demand strategies. We vary in opinions but one constant is we don’t like prostituting men and seek to hold them accountable for what they do. It’s easy to get caught up in political battles and personal fighting, and when diversions are intended to draw people away from prostituting men and towards the exceptionally small number of women who support them we can lose sight of who really provides the reasons feminists have to fight against sexual capitalism. I would rather debate tricking men than any woman who puts herself between me and sexual exploiters, but in case you haven’t noticed there are no spokesjohns among the almost unanimous liberal men who roundly show support in all lefty media for “a woman’s right” to suck their dicks for cash.
When you constantly attack radfems as individuals and maliciously penetrate our badly-needed privacy instead of addressing the astonishingly solid arguments against pornstitution and men’s right to sex on demand you show your pro-john, pro-capitalism position to be as weak as we say it is. If you want to poke holes in our arguments then take your best shots, but stop poking holes in our fragile community because you lack the evidence and ability to argue that sustaining men’s right to demand sex from women is a feminist act.
