Re: nettime Sex Work and Consent at @transmediale
Dear Margaret and others, I have been following this thread with interest and feel, that despite some very insightful comments, something important is missing. Something that still makes this discussion very abstract and far from the real issues about sex work and consent. This is because we are working from a very reductive definition of what sex work actually is. I believe Dymitri's post on the importance of seeing sex work as labour started a more nuanced discussion but probably did not go far enough, leaving us to discuss the role of consent and violence on the body (and/or mind). There are many kinds of sex work and there are many kinds of sex workers with varied degrees of social status, power and agency: street prostitutes, escorts who work for exploitative agencies, webcam girls, people employed in various kinds of porn industries (from Hollywood to indie), self-employed dominas, educators, and many, many others. Let?s also not forget issues of race and gender and how certain bodies, for example marginalized trans bodies, complicate these distinctions. To lump all these labourers together is problematic because it erases the value that consent has for them and prevents us from finding effective solutions to labour exploitation, something that, as many have remarked, doesn?t only happen in sex work. I agree with Dima that consent may not be a productive starting point to fight capitalist exploitation but I also understand that for many of my friends, who are very passionate about their sex work and about the financial, social and political agency it affords them, to label them all victims is actually offensive. This is where Liad?s comment at Transmediale was coming from. I don?t think she was simply drawing on the legal argument used to legalise sex work. She was stating her own agency in life, not the fact that she was not being raped. She also, often reiterated, that she considered hers a ?normal? job. For some (unfortunately not all), sex work is a choice, an informed one. It is also a job that many really enjoy, for as strange as it may sound. So, the ?wear and tear? of the bodies that so much terrifies some people, if it even takes place, is just part and parcel of their job. Better than a CEO having a stroke at 40, some may say? It is important to recognize that there is non-consensual or less- consensual violence in some sex work. But it is also worth knowing that someone like me has the agency (and luxury) to consent to work in a safe and well paid dungeon over selling her soul to certain kinds of academic institutions, if I decide (or like Mollock said, to refuse to write inane papers). This is important because it acknowledges the autonomy of certain practices, and the autonomy of sex workers to fight for their own rights together with their allies. Many sex workers don't feel more oppressed than all of us and are very engaged in social justice activism. To go back to the issue of precarious labour conditions and capitalist exploitation, I feel it would be helpful to start including such nuances in our discussion both of labour and of consent itself. Someone already pointed out that we can see sex work as another form of affective labour, in the tradition of Italian autonomist feminists. This may help us find overlaps with other forms of exploitation, and shape alliances with other groups fighting for recognition and/or for safer and more equitable working conditions. I would go as far as finding possible points for alliances among sex workers and academics. In many cases, it may be the sex workers whose lives are already freer from exploitation to help others fight for justice. The notion of consent itself may help us expand this inquiry: ideally, consent is not just about a yes or no, but about degrees of freedom to negotiate something, to ask questions that shape informed choices, to understand one?s own boundaries, to say ?stop? or ?I changed my mind? if necessary and, especially, to create safe spaces within which consent can be given and respected. How does consent inform our unpaid daily sex lives? and our labour lives? Sex work is many kinds of real work and we have a long way to go... Be well, Alessandra On 15-Feb-12, at 2:54 AM, Margaret Morse wrote: Dear John, I agree that the mind and the body are flowing and intimately intertwined. I resist the notion that it means that there is no difference at any level and that everything just flows. When I distinguished writing inane academic papers from sex work or prostitution, I was thinking of the effects of daily physical effort that tests the body's endurance; even wealthy athletes are not spared the effects of such abuse. i grew up around people who were laborers; when I attend my highschool reunion, I can tell the laborers by how greatly they have aged compared to those with less arduous lives. It may be hard to erase the effects of poverty and malnutrition from burdensome labor; nonetheless, the corporeal marks
nettime 1967 GREECE ANOTHER COUP – ΕΛΛΆΔΑ ΑΛΛΟ ΠΡΑΞΙΚΟΠΗΜΑ 2012
News-Tableau on The Limping Messenger GDP statistic 1961-2009 and 2 coup d'état link = http://wp.me/pw0cu-1bA Tjebbe van Tijen Imaginary Museum Projects Dramatizing Historical Information http://imaginarymuseum.org web-blog: The Limping Messenger http://limpingmessenger.wordpress.com/ # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime Sex Work and Consent at @transmediale
Thanks to Alessandra for a far more nuanced and recently informed post. I realize that my responses were from someone with armor. Words like disrespect and stigma in connection with prostitution reflect my experience of the suffering of someone with great dignity and grace whom I adored. My instinct is to defend the rights of sex workers to social legitimacy and choice. I don't consider sex workers helpless victims; they may not need me on offense. I also identify strongly with a different but related issue--ending human trafficking and modern slavery. This is again a matter of choice and autonomy--which may mean something more fluid here, but it is hard for me to imagine how. However, I doubt if armor is the best way of going about discussing these things with others who might be persuaded to engage with these issues where they can make a difference. Best wishes MM On Feb 15, 2012, at 4:22 PM, Alessandra Renzi wrote: Dear Margaret and others, I have been following this thread with interest and feel, that despite some very insightful comments, something important is missing. Something that still makes this discussion very abstract and far from the real issues about sex work and consent. This is because we are working from a very reductive definition of what sex work actually is. I believe Dymitri's post on the importance of seeing sex work as labour started a more nuanced discussion but probably did not go far enough, leaving us to discuss the role of consent and violence on the body (and/or mind). Margaret Morse Professor of Film and Digital Media University of California Santa Cruz memo...@comcast.net mo...@ucsc.edu 1230 Colusa Ave. Berkeley, CA 94707 ph/fax 510 280 5774 Cell 510 316 1865 # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime Sex Work and Consent at @transmediale
The main missing topic of sex work is marriage. No other institution promotes as fiercely and mercilessly -- and religiously blesses by god -- the subjugation of women to men for work in sex, house, reproduction, child care, health, education, second job for less pay, name change, financial dependency, social stigma of the unmarried and unchilded, forebearance of adultery, prostitution and disease inheritance, workplace and taxation bias, the list is easily extended and has been by feminists to little avail against male (wife-stroked) conceit as seen here. Focusing on paid sex work has always diverted attention from marital exploitation, even to the extent of persuading women that marriage provides safety from bugaboo prostitution. What goes on inside officially legalized households, dominated by males as if a birthright (and a singular responsibility), with societal affirmation of domestication of women is despicable despite worldwide abuse typically sanctified by male-dominated institutions -- philosophy, theology, language, education, military, government, medical, charitable -- across the gamut of societies in which the physically strong reign by male-privilege inheritance, by hook and crook of male favoritism and perquisites, by physical assault and femicide and by ingrained contempt for the male-flattering weaker sex except for sado-masochism bought and paid for in every case of marriage. Love and marriage go together like horse and carriage. So young women are force-fed from the beginning to dress, to speak, to behave, to attend charm school and college for marriage solicitation, to consume beautification products, to develop an alluring vocabulary and mindset, to pretend men are heroic and brilliant, to dream of princesses and princes, to masturbate in loneliness or with a similarly abandoned neighbor while the stud has to be allowed freedom to fornicate, how else to survive and raise kids (wanted or not, loved or not, her own or not). Fortunately the hatchet, the poison, the fire, the garrot, the cancer, the heart attack awaits. And the nubile youngsters delivery groceries, mowing the lawn, singing the choir, how they offer delicious solace from the intumescent bulls demanding sodomy, prowling for pedophilic targets in all the dominant institutions. At 07:22 PM 2/15/2012 -0500, you wrote: Dear Margaret and others, I have been following this thread with interest and feel, that despite some very insightful comments, something important is missing. Something that still makes this discussion very abstract and far from the real issues about sex work and consent. This is because we are working from a very reductive definition of what sex work actually is. I believe Dymitri's post on the importance of seeing sex work as labour started a more nuanced discussion but probably did not go far enough, leaving us to discuss the role of consent and violence on the body (and/or mind). # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime [Fwd] A Spit in the Ocean (or the limits of social network paranoia)
Ultimately liberism has won the masses to socialism by constructing the dream (American) and means (Capitalism) for an open society purely based on quantitative, axiomatic relationships. Capitalism has been so far a viable system of governance because has been able to embed this dicotomy while still providing a rationality to its existance. I agree that the challenge now should be to imagine new forms for open societies rather than regressimg to the idea of walled gardens. Still it holds true that the instinct of planning a walled garden and to share the information on how to do it can be the pre-condition for the creation of new territories, the experimentation of new rationalities. In so far there are no open spaces that offer such conditions (nor it looks like the industrial reconfiguration of culture will facilitate their creation and existance), but I love your indefatigable attempts to imagine them. Speaking of quantitative and axiomatic relationships, I thought nettime might want to have a look at Facebook's Securities and Exchange Commission document. Zuckerberg's registration statement is particularly interesting. You can read it here: http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000119312512034517/d287954ds1.htm#toc287954_10 Besides highlighting the ways FB hopes/boasts to change how people relate to their governments and social institutions, I find this particular gem to be interesting: At Facebook, we’re inspired by technologies that have revolutionized how people spread and consume information. We often talk about inventions like the printing press and the television — by simply making communication more efficient, they led to a complete transformation of many important parts of society. They gave more people a voice. They encouraged progress. They changed the way society was organized. They brought us closer together. So, I guess it is no surprise that he sees FB more like the old centralized technologies and less like the telephone or even the internet. That's the imaginary future we can look forward to - straight out of the middle ages and early 20th century. What exactly did television make more efficient is what I am wondering to myself. Users continue to lend their eyeballs and attention to centralized systems like gmail, g+, and FB even though there are existing technical alternatives such as irc, email, and a plethora of social networking initiatives in varying degrees of technical stability. Some of these technologies pre-date FB by decades. Why do users do that? I'm sure it has to do with a number of non-quantitative reasons related to the details of the technology itself (e.g. text-only email doesn't have images inline and tagged with your friends contact info), the convenience of having everything in once place with little visual clutter and unified interfaces, but also with social mechanics and economics that make those centralized services arguably more sustainable at larger scales. What's worse is that there really isn't a technical way to opt-out of these central services. Declining to be part of G+ or gmail doesn't preclude your being a part of their system. If a non-gmail users communicates with a gmail user via email, their email address, a somewhat unique identifier, and the content of their communication are also entered into google's private algorithmic system of actuarial surveillance. The same holds if friends upload and tag photos of you. This public email forum and my post are also trackable in a similar vein. I'm personally less worried about the surveillance, but am more worried about the ways these centralized systems expose users to cultural persuasion and manipulation (based on the surveillance). So far, this mostly happens through more-or-less traditional advertisement, which many users simply accept and even welcome (Finally, it knows exactly what I want to buy). Other users have good adblock software or are perceptually immune to the ads after years of tele-visual bombardment. This exposure is technically unnecessary even though it sometimes appears as if it is desired by a large portion of users. So, what's the real alternative if any? The alternative, I think, is perhaps too difficult to even imagine. The technical problems of building an open, stable, and user-run communication space are minuscule compared to the massive amounts of economic pressure from the larger macro-structures of our social machinery. The cause and effects of this pressure seem to be created and adapt faster than anyone can study or analyze them. The only thing I can really see from my lay-man's perspective is that a certain x% of the population has their finger on the algorithms that generate and sustain certain economic behaviours, policies, and expectations. Another (x-30)% percent seem to be thankful and eager to support the system that creates the x%, in hopes of moving up the hierarchy. My somewhat naive suggestion for the
Re: nettime Sex Work and Consent at @transmediale
Margaret, I googled a bit about the Ehrenreich book and I will check it out in more detail. But from my brief scan: I think the impulse of the postwar male to escape the capitalist nuclear family, with its burden of breadwinning, physical domination of the loved ones, and strict conformity, is a smart instinct. Western women had a foothold in autonomy with their war labour, and the roots that feminism laid in the previous 100 years were able to flower. So if men started feeling trapped in an outdated fascist structure, which women were also starting to abandon, and so decided to live out their mid-life crises by abandoning familial responsibility for an impossible fantasy, that's a mixed result. (John's post about marriage as prostitution, especially back then, rings true to me). Not every shake of the tree loosens up ripe fruit, but in this case I'd argue it might have. (Of course, the mid-life male's economic status allowed him to purchase some of this fantasy from women with less options - on the street corner, strip club or magazine rack - but not every male would consider this worth doing) I don't have any illusion that Playboy was all good for everyone, but I think the conservative side of the sexual revolution was really disruptive, and a lot of progress continues to be made as a result. Playboy has consistently sided with free speech and sexual freedom of all kinds. Their solid core is founded on capitalist patriarchy, but it just means that liberal aspects of their propaganda have been injected right into the heart of conservatism. Both the wildly-libertarian right and the socially-liberal / fiscally-conservative centre-right can (with their lowered gender/class consciousness) enjoy the sexual exploitation of women, in plain defiance of the Moral Majority, who in matters like this sound dangerously close to radical feminism, at least to those barely listening to drive-time radio. The rise of pseudo-feminist outposts like Suicide Girls serve to further confuse the issue. Does a user-generated network that pays women to undress to their personal comfort level mean an increase in sexual freedom and feminine autonomy, or less? I think it's less, because women's roles are once again reduced to the object, and the real power lies with the middlemen, as always. But it's also reflected in the rise of Burlesque as a locus of pseudo-empowerment, with loud salutes to the women of the frontier (seen as liberated by the wild lawlessness of the Klondike or or the Wild West). It's all in stark contrast to the opposite pseudo-feminism of Sarah Palin or Barbara Bachman, who might be seen as better female role models because of their real political power, but whose stern finger-wagging holds little appeal to girls who just want to have fun. I've never understood the Marxist view of sexual exploitation, because the means of production of value in sexual exploitation belongs to the exploited themselves. That's a confusing aspect of the whole philosophy that I suppose i should study closer. Most of what I've read on the subject has been philosophical pretzels that I couldn't untangle (i.e. biopolitics). -- * WHERE'S MY ARTICLE, WORLD? http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Flick_Harrison * FLICK's WEBSITE BLOG: http://www.flickharrison.com # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
