My roommate Melody Berger runs the feminist zine the F-Word, and the third issue just got released and is making its way to mailboxes and indie book sellers everywhere. I’m always thoroughly impressed by the caliber of people Melody gets interviews with: Gloria Steinem, Margaret Cho, and in the new issue, Howard Zinn. Howard Zinn’s monster book A People’s History of the United States: 1492 to Present has always had a lofty position on my book shelf.
In the interview that Melody does with Zinn, she asks him about labor issues and sex workers’ rights - she’s very much pro-sex worker rights but also critical of the industry, as her question to him reveals. But Zinn is not so enlightened:
Melody: Well, going on a feminist tangent in the union organizing question, there’s a lot of controversy in some feminist circles about sex worker formers unions and creating independent publications like $pread Magazine, etc. Because on the one hand you want to support sex workers, but on the other hand you don’t want to condone an industry that obviously sucks in a lot of ways.
Howard: But that’s always been a dilemma. People have always needed to organize people who are doing terrible work. So, what do you do? You ignore them because you want that to go away? You have to do both at once. You have to organize the sex workers and at the same time carry on a campaign to end their situation. Find other work for them, put pressure on the government to guarantee jobs so people won’t have to go become sex slaves. Very often you have a double job to do, and that is you have to do in the immediate to help people immediately, like organizing for better wages and better treatment. But at the same time you have to work to end the system that has given them such bad treatment. You have a short term job and a long term job at the same time.
I’m totally down with the idea of short term/long term jobs with respect to organizing around issues in the sex industry. Yes, indeed. And I see the conflicts around trying to choose or trying to do both by many people who do activist work about the sex industry. Decriminalization and destigmatization of work for all sex workers would great. Higher pay for jobs outside the sex industry so people (especially women and trans folks) who don’t want to do the work would be amazing. Until then, sex workers need a lot of support in the here and now - health, financial, emotional, spiritual - to do their work and be okay.
But casting sex work as “terrible work” and equating working in the sex industry with being a sex slave - oh, that’s a conflation I really didn’t think Zinn would make. But sadly, I was very wrong. Le sigh. Labor analysis gets kinda hairy when it comes to sex work, when you’ve got an aging white liberal dude at the helm.
Speaking of intellectual heroes of mine making me sad with analysis that essentially disregards slash totally refuses to engage with ideas I’ve worked so hard on for the bulk of my career: Noam Chomsky!
This one’s a doozy. This interview with Chomsky starts out with him talking about the fact that he’s never heard of Hustler magazine, and then he was shocked and appalled to learn that it was pornography. The horror! Oh wait, it is a horror to him - his tone reveals that he sees porn as an aspect of culture not really worth studying or thinking about. “Just take a look at the pictures” - oh, esteemed critic of culture, that’s a great analysis! I totally get it now!
I kind of want to pick this apart line by line - but for now I’ll just let it be, and maybe make my own YouTube response video. That sounds like a good weekend project.
12:26 pm
SUPER offensive. Love how he talks about sex workers as passive, too. “Find jobs for them,” etc… Way to respect their agency and autonomy.
2:17 pm
Ditto what Amber said.
More than the outright “you sex workers are in league with the patriarchy and therefor the enemy” stuff, I HATE the condescending “I totally support sex workers’ rights, but I also believe in making everything they do illegal so as to express my solidarity with them.”
Ugh, paternalism- it’s the sole motivator for too much of the left.
3:10 pm
Double dittoed.
I was flipping channels last night and caught another old white male, Larry King, doing an interview with a woman who’d escaped the Children of God cult. He asked her, “At what age were you first tampered with?”
Um, tampered? Really??? We’re now discussing sexual abuse with the same language applied to cracking the seal on a bottle of aspirin?
God, I sure hope my husband never finds out I was tampered with before our wedding night. *shudder*
2:08 pm
Well…I happen to BE a Libertarian Leftist who used to lionize and respect Noam Chomsky…until he got MacDworkinized.
Of course, it’s the same old tired paternalism of the White Puritan Left…say that you are all for liberating the dregs of the “working class” as long as they fit into their narrow ideological frame. And please, no sex allowed….that defers from “the revolution”.
Ahhh, Professors Chomsky and Zinn…how about letting working class people liberate themselves for themselves???
Ahhh…the elitism of the Left. Just like the elitism of the Right…but more Leftist.
Anthony
5:23 pm
On second thought, Dacia….having read Zinn’s comment, I do think that he could be given the benefit of the doubt if he was talking about getting rid of some of the most repressive and corrosive conditions within the sex industry. If that was the case, and he could still be moved to favor reforming the sex industry within a more democratic and more egalitarian framework, then I believe that he’s not quite so bad. Connecting him with a few progressive sex worker activists should do the trick.
Chomsky, on the other hand, is simply irreversible; he’s so deep in antipornradfem ideology that he can’t see the forest for the trees.
Anthony
4:17 am
The Larry King thing is disgusting. The Chomsky thing is just typical Chomsky. He’s a whacko who makes me ashamed to be on the radical left. And he can’t write to save his ass. Never could.
That’s peripheral. It’s *all* peripheral.
I’ll wear that because those guys are lefties like me and people are known by the company they keep. Having done this myself a few times, I’ll suggest that the question of whether they’re liberals or what is bad aim. It’s too diffuse and misses the target. If you say Alabamians are racists and homophobes, some of the gay folks and black folks here in Alabama are gonna get pissed off.
11:38 pm
It is indeed a sad commentary that both Zinn and Chomsky (who turns out to be most disappointing for me on this one important issue…he is brilliant on class, foreign & domestic policy issues though) think that women should not seek employment as a sex worker because it is akin to a system of slavery.
What a shame that they cannot see that some women view the sex industry as positive in many ways like: 1. being a lucrative job (and it should be given the level of potential physical danger and mentally it requires healthy-minded people to do it w/ a high level of integrity) 2. a needed profession (just as massage therapy & sex therapy are necessary for many people) and 3. it is a way to educate clients about feminism, positive sexual attitudes, and other matters of the heart… and for me I seek to throw my political and social justice views their way when i feel like it.
This industry has helped me in my own sexual liberation and to learn how to create boundries with men as well as learning more about them in a less threatening environment. It has really been a powerful classroom experience for me and I am not ashamed in the least bit about my involvement in the industry.