Return!

[Edited (07/09/2008)= Sorry, just to clarify: At the time I wrote this post I had no knowledge of this. I have now removed Kyle Payne ("the road less traveled") from my blogroll. I am truly shocked and sickened! -- M.H.]

This post is only a little "warm-up" return post for me. . .

It's been a long time since the last time I have blogged and now that I'm returning to the blogosphere I don't know if I'll get any readers this time but. . . after all. . . I blog primarily to express my rage about the harms of pornography & prostitution.

Now that I'm back, I'm just expressing some random thoughts as a warm-up before I start making more serious posts again very soon.

Few things I've noticed that are important to mention:

-- When I was away, Debs' Burning Times blog has disappeared and there will be no more Carnival against pornography and prostitution. What a shame; :(

-- Rebecca has written a wonderful piece on the arguments of "choice"; here is an excerpt that stays in my mind:

I felt I “chose” prostitution. I believed I was in control. I wanted to think I had power.

I cut off any connection to child abuse.

I shut down memories of hard-core porn.

I pretended I did not hate myself.

I would of yell from the roof-tops how wonderful being a prostitute was.

If I could believe that, then all my pain, humiliation and grief would vanish.

I say this because I have found that the worse thing of exiting prostitution is seeing the real reasons I became a prostitute.

Seeing it could of never been a choice.

It was just a way to self-destruct.

This kinda makes me think about the comment this woman left a couple of days ago on my blog here:

I was a stripper for three years and I learned really quickly how anti-woman the sex industry is. I saw and experienced physical and verbal abuse. Many of the dancers were drug abusers and were suffering from mental illnesses. I thought I was being an empowered feminist but I was really only acting out my early childhood abuse.

These important stories on real prostitution experiences, among other things, add up to what I'd read in the research on prostituted women I'd made. Former prostituted woman Rebecca had once said to me, during a phone conversation, something similar to this: seeing a prostitute or stripper smile does not necessarily mean that she is happy . She might believe that she is happy while being shielded in a form of protective denial with the purpose to protect herself from the painful reality she lives in: the ongoing abuse which occurs in the sex trade. A comment which had inspired me when I'd written this post here;

-- Lately, my dear friend Sam Berg wrote an excellent article: Paradigm shifts and paying for sex. This made me think about how much most folks are reactionary in focusing all the issue of the "sex" (slavery) industry on prostituted women. When the hell is the conversation going to shift toward the prostitute-using men, the ones who have got the REAL choice in all this? These men do not make any difference between trafficked victims and the few women who "chose" prostitution, after all. . . So, when will people stop talking the same old shit like a broken record? Focusing all the attention on the women and not the johns that feed the demand for their exploitation is counter-productive. Few prostituted women genuinely choose prostitution while the johns, for sure, choose prostitution 100% of the time. People need to learn that it is the ones who pay who are in power in the prostitution world. Demand for prostitution & pornography have to keep on being challenged as these are demands for the degradation of women. . . Excellent article and kudos to Sam;

-- A pro-feminist male wrote a post about my first post on patriarchy I'd written in April. Also, it is great that my post on patriarchy got eventually appreciated for what it was, if it couldn't be appreciated at the time I posted it. Interestingly, a woman called Judy Best left an interesting anti-porn comment on it at the end of May. Thanks, Judy;

-- Buggle has been writing new posts (!) about subjects I really like: abortion (that should be on demand), Religion being stupid, patriarchal beauty standards, etc. I gotta check her little blog out at some point, along with other rad fem blogs;

-- and the Archive of the Biting Beaver has gotten bigger, thanks to a couple of women who contacted me and then One Angry Girl. It's great to be able to read BB's writings again.

I seriously need to get back to the rad fem blogosphere soon and leave comments and post more on my blog during the summer 'cause it all feels so much like HOME and I've been missing the rad fem community A LOT when I was being overwhelmingly busy. . .

And I've got to go back to writing about that awful degradation and mass-mediated crime against women that is called pornography!

Rad fem bloggers, your sister Maggie is back online :)