The Feminists Are Saving Women, Again

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.  And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.  —  Neitzxche

 

The principles of so-called “feminism” are on my radar this week; its ideological stick hitting hard and swift in its certainty.

The “feminists” are outraged by Amnesty International’s call to decriminalize sex work.  It’s patriarchal.  It’s exploitative.  It’s dehumanizing.

To read my Facebook feed, Amnesty now enshrines patriarchy’s every evil.

These evils that Amnesty presumably unleashes on the world boggle my weary mind; especially given that Amnesty’s trying to disentangle sex work from trafficking, a distinction lost in the collective understanding, and they are trying to protect society’s most vulnerable, those who have no personal or systemic protection from predators.

There’s a reason that serial killers target prostitutes, and it’s not because the workers “have it coming.”

Sex work isn’t trafficking.  It’s a right.  To use one’s body as one sees fit, and to earn a living is a right, with safety and without stigma.  This holds true for men as well as women.

Just like cleaning toilets, changing diapers, garbage collecting, or whatever other job that people may consider “dehumanizing.”  Decriminalization is a means of giving workers their power, little by little, and toppling the pimps who control women caught in illegal work.

It’s not the work that’s dehumanizing, it’s the attitude.  The privilege of those who have never faced homelessness, or provided the most severe service work strikes me as ludicrous, especially when one of the most strident, vitriolic, professorial voices in my feed pronounced this past week, “I’d like to see how privileged elites would feel doing the work, and then let them agree with Amensty [sic].”

Funny, I thought similar about her.  White published female professor, speaking on behalf of the victimized sex workers  Has she ever been a house cleaner, a waitress, a live in baby sitter for brats, a retail clerk?  A sex worker?

Trust me, a lot of sex work is better than other domestic work, if one makes it volitional.   I didn’t know it was shame based work in my early days; it was rent.  It doesn’t mean that it’s not some of the toughest work imaginable.  It is.  All the more reason to protect the workers, who deserve to ask for equitable wages.

There’s an important universal truth that these strident voices forget: to label someone a victim is to make them a victim twice.

The policy orientation and its rhetoric serve no one but the haves, by keeping victims, i.e., society’s most vulnerable, victims.

I won’t entertain protracted debates on ethics, waste my precious life minutes wrangling on social media, or take too much policy to task in expository writing, at least not now: the real work of change begins within.  For I believe that the better we manage our ego, which loves to hold itself victim, the better we are for ourselves.  Only then can we serve others.  Erasing the victim narrative proves crucial to moving on.  This seems the most important message, the inherent dignity of every being, no matter their work, race, gender, belief, or species.  For those of us who have actually lived through mental illness, fought homelessness, and performed grossly underpaid service work, we deserve protection and rights.  Rendering us victims and keeping us from rights perpetuates slavery and shame, all because the enlightened “feminists” know best.

The feminists who cry loud about the evils of Amnesty save no one, they work from an outdated way of seeing the world.  Their ideas of shame and economics are entrenched in patriarchy, purity and pollution motifs that keep the most vulnerable marginalized; ironically, these feminists appropriate their ideas of dirt and power from patriarchy, not a different way of viewing the world.   They’ve looked into the ideological abyss so long, that they cannot revise their idea of rights: trapped in a stranglehold, they’ve become the monster they’ve sought to slay.

Over a decade ago, while I was befriending transgenders, dealing with the isolation born of race issues, talking to those with closeted homoerotic desires, helping those brutalized by patriarchy’s rage against ‘male’ identity, these “feminists” cared more about terminating an unwanted pregnancy than they cared about my rights to earn a living, and my right to help another, stigma free and in safety.

This they did while arguing that a woman’s body is hers to do with as she will, while reverting to the victim narrative when talking about something as fundamental as sex worker’s rights; much less problematic to this writer, than the murkier philosophical-scientific debate about how to define when life begins.

The liberal policing feminists are saving no one.

They’re exposing their self-righteous privilege, in which good intentions crown victimhood’s reign.

At Night

 

I sleep on the porch;

a breeze blows through the screens,

I look up at the stars as I stretch

under the Big Dipper.  An old sleeping bag on

worn floor boards, and I lose myself

to the evening’s music.  Until the winter

cold drives me to mattress and comforter,

the porch holds my dreams: night serenades me

under constellations, in orchestras of crickets,

the frogs’ rejoinders, and

the trees’ rustling cantatas.

 

Two-thirty a.m., I wake; stillness

would overwhelm reverie, if not for the river’s

rushing, an irrepressible surge rising from wooded earth and

turbulent water, an overflow streaming through me

in darkness: night carries me

beyond myself without

hesitation.