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Alles über Geschlechtskrankheiten im einfachen Deutsch
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Liberal feminists believe that “empowerment” (as they call it) mostly comes, not from banding together to form a political movement which takes to the street and demands change, but from consuming products that radical feminists have been criticising since the 1960s, including make-up, high heels and even breast implants, along with other forms of plastic surgery. This liberal path to empowerment is not one which poorer women can follow, unless they go into debt or forego spending money on more important things (like food, rent and healthcare.)
Breast implants alone cost between 10,000 – 15,000 Australian dollars and that’s not even including the costs of regular checkups or any corrective surgeries which may be needed if the original surgery goes wrong. One could buy a new car with that amount of money or pay for half of a university degree (at least until Tony Abbot’s policies raise the price of tertiary education to multiple times its current cost) or buy between 200 and 300 copies of the latest radical feminist literature. Any of those options would be a better use of one’s money, yes, even the last one.
The economic cost of make-up and fancy clothes may seem trivial by comparison. However, since fashions are constantly changing and make-up is used regularly, the total cost of such prettification accumulates over time. Throughout their lives, most women will spend thousands of dollars on such methods of prettification. The only women that are actually empowered by such practices, and the viewpoints that justify their use, are those few who are part of the capitalist class and profit from the sale of these products. Most women do not gain more social or political power by consuming such products and thus are not truly empowered by them.
The type of “sexual liberation” and “sexual subversion” advocated by liberals can also be expensive. In my view, a genuinely subversive sexuality would be one which challenges the belief that sexiness consists of one person dominating another. Instead the liberal version of “sexual subversion” reinforces this belief through the use of whips, chains and nipple torture devices. Obviously, these objects are not naturally part of either male or female bodies. They must be manufactured and are thus a source of profit for businesses. If there ever was a time when BDSM was a threat to capitalism, it is long over. Now companies that sell BDSM equipment are generating additional profit due to the success of Fifty Shades of Grey and the growing popularity of BDSM practices.
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Within walking distance of my home, sits a BDSM sex shop named after an aristocrat (that tells me more than I need to know about which class the BDSM community admires). I will not reveal the actual name of the shop or the website I used to learn about its products lest I generate more publicity and hence income for it. I will tell you that a whip from that place will cost you 80 dollars (in US money.) A complete set of restraints costs 160 dollars. The “deluxe” set costs 245 dollars. Dressing up like a sexualised Hitler costs 450 dollars. Showing complete disrespect for survivors of the Holocaust and their families is probably priceless in the owners’ minds.
In case you think the Nazi costumes and the rib crushing corsets (which cost even more than the Hitler costume) are optional, BDSM events usually have dress codes which mandate that attendants turn up in BDSM-related outfits. One is not required to dress like a fascist, but turn up wearing ordinary clothes with two digit price tags and they will kick you out for being too “vanilla-looking.” They might as well stick a “no Jews or poor people allowed” sign above the doors to their events.
Liberal Feminist Tropes Debunked: Why Mainstream Feminism is Corporate Feminism
(via exgynocraticgrrl)
That means that sex shop was named after Sade, wasn’t it. I mean, that’s some great publicity, right. He was totally into SS&C, right. Totes didn’t rape and torture maids, prostitutes and beggar women. But who cares about those, huh? Certainly not libfems. Those “sex workers” were just not acting empowered enough.
(via saintjustitude)
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the “lolita” covers
here’s a question: if vladimir nabokov’s “lolita” is truly the psychological portrait of a messed up dude and not the girl — let alone a sexualized little girl, as all of the sexualization happens inside humbert humbert’s head — then why do all the covers focus on a girl, and usually a sexy aspect of a girl, usually quite young, and none of them feature a portrait of humbert humbert?
here are nabokov’s original instructions for the book cover:
I want pure colors, melting clouds, accurately drawn details, a sunburst above a receding road with the light reflected in furrows and ruts, after rain. And no girls. … Who would be capable of creating a romantic, delicately drawn, non-Freudian and non-juvenile, picture for LOLITA (a dissolving remoteness, a soft American landscape, a nostalgic highway—that sort of thing)? There is one subject which I am emphatically opposed to: any kind of representation of a little girl.
and yet, the representations of the sexy little girl abound.
i became driven by curiousity. why did this happen? why is this happening?
i am not alone — there’s a book about this, with several essays and artists’ conceptions about the politics and problems of representation surrounding the covers of “lolita.” this new yorker article gives a summary of the book and its ideas, and interviews one of the editors:
Many of the covers guilty of misrepresenting Lolita as a teen seductress feature images from Hollywood movie adaptations of the book— Kubrick’s 1962 version, starring Sue Lyon, and Adrian Lyne’s 1997 one. Are those films primarily to blame for the sexualization of Lolita?
As is argued in several of the book’s essays, the promotional image of Sue Lyon in the heart-shaped sunglasses, taken by photographer Bert Stern, is easily the most significant culprit in this regard, much more so than the Kubrick film itself (significantly, neither the sunglasses nor the lollipop ever appears in the film), or the later film by Adrian Lyne. Once this image became associated with “Lolita”—and it’s important to remember that, in the film, Lolita is sixteen years old, not twelve—it really didn’t matter that it was a terribly inaccurate portrait. It became the image of Lolita, and it was ubiquitous. There are other factors that have contributed to the incorrect reading, from the book’s initial publication in Olympia Press’s Traveller’s Series (essentially, a collection of dirty books), to Kubrick’s startlingly unfaithful adaptation. At the heart of all of this seems to be the desire to make the sexual aspect of the novel more palatable.
here’s a couple of kubrick inspired covers:
which very well could have, after tremendous sales, have influenced the following covers:
…straying so far from the intention of nabokov that the phenomenon begins to look more like the symptom of something larger, something sicker.
after a lot of researching covers, it was here, in this sampling of concept covers for the book about the lolita covers, that i found an image that best represents the story to me:
[art by linn olofsdotter — and again, this is not an official cover]
but why aren’t all the covers like that? even the ones published by “legitimate” publishing companies, with full academic credentials, with no intended connection to the film; surely they must have read nabokov’s instructions for the cover. and yet, look at the top row of lolita covers: all legitimate publishing companies, not prone to smut. and yet.
my conclusion is that the lolita complex existed before “lolita” (and of course it did) — a patriarchal society is essentially operating with the same delusions of humbert humbert. nabokov did not produce the sexy girl covers of lolita, and kubrick had only the smallest hand in it. it was what people desired, requested and bought. the image of the sexy girl sells; intrigues; gets the hands on the books.
as elizabeth janeway said in her review in the new york review of books: “Humbert is every man who is driven by desire, wanting his Lolita so badly that it never occurs to him to consider her as a human being, or as anything but a dream-figment made flesh.”
isn’t that our media as a whole? our culture as a whole?
the whole lot of them/us — seeing the world through humbert-tinted glasses, seeing all others as Other and Object, as solipsistic dream-reality. as i scroll through the “lolita” covers i wonder: where’s the humanity in our humanity?
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women have more graduate degrees in neuroscience than men, but less than a third of faculty are made up of women
institutional bias against women in the sciences is SCIENTIFICALLY PROVEN
so is harassment and sexual assault
encouraging young girls to join the sciences is not going to solve this problem - this is an INSTITUTIONAL and CULTURAL PROBLEM in the sciences
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“Capitalist realism insists on treating mental health as if it were a natural fact, like weather (but, then again, weather is no longer a natural fact so much as a political-economic effect). In the 1960s and 1970s, radical theory and politics (Laing, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, etc.) coalesced around extreme mental conditions such as schizophrenia, arguing, for instance, that madness was not a natural, but a political, category. But what is needed now is a politicization of much more common disorders. Indeed, it is their very commonness which is the issue: in Britain, depression is now the condition that is most treated by the NHS. In his book The Selfish Capitalist, Oliver James has convincingly posited a correlation between rising rates of mental distress and the neoliberal mode of capitalism practiced in countries like Britain, the USA and Australia. In line with James’s claims, I want to argue that it is necessary to reframe the growing problem of stress (and distress) in capitalist societies. Instead of treating it as incumbent on individuals to resolve their own psychological distress, instead, that is, of accepting the vast privatization of stress that has taken place over the last thirty years, we need to ask: how has it become acceptable that so many people, and especially so many young people, are ill?”
― Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (via bobdylansgrandson)
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Porn Performer and Pornographer Confessions (and here)
{More quotes from pornographers can be found here}
To know more about Linda Boreman Marchiano's story/Linda Lovelace, click here. (gif below)
The Real Linda Lovelace
MORE PORN SURVIVORS:
{Visit AntiPornographyOrg for more details}
JESSIE ROGERS:
VANESSA BELMOND:
DANIELLE WILLIAMS:
JENNI CASE/ “VERONICA LAIN”:
SIERRA SINN:
APRIL GARRIS:
JENNA PRESLEY:
JAN VILLARUBIA:
FORMER PORN PRODUCER FOR PLAYBOY DONNY PAULING:
"Donny Pauling recruited 500 1st time porn actresses. He says most were college students." - (x)
Want to put a stop to this? Go to STOPPORNCULTURE for Information and Resources!
{StopPornCulture’s Tumblr Blog}
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James Baldwin, Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone
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The absurdity runs deep: America is using American military equipment to bomb other pieces of American military equipment halfway around the world. The reason the American military equipment got there in the first place was because, in 2003, the US had to use its military to rebuild the Iraqi army, which it just finished destroying with the American military. The American weapons the US gave the Iraqi army totally failed at making Iraq secure and have become tools of terror used by an offshoot of al-Qaeda to terrorize the Iraqis that the US supposedly liberated a decade ago. And so now the US has to use American weaponry to destroy the American weaponry it gave Iraqis to make Iraqis safer, in order to make Iraqis safer.
Max Fisher - The US bombing its own guns perfectly sums up America’s total failure in Iraq (via afloweroutofstone)
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Seventy percent of women in prostitution in San Francisco, California were raped (Silbert & Pines, 1982). A study in Portland, Oregon found that prostituted women were raped on average once a week (Hunter, 1994). Eighty-five percent of women in Minneapolis, Minnesota had been raped in prostitution (Parriott, 1994). Ninety-four percent of those in street prostitution experienced sexual assault and 75% were raped by one or more johns (Miller, 1995). In the Netherlands (where prostitution is legal) 60% of prostituted women suffered physical assaults, 70% experienced verbal threats of assault, 40% experienced sexual violence and 40% were forced into prostitution and/or sexual abuse by acquaintances (Vanwesenbeeck, et al. 1995, 1994)… The prevalence of PTSD among prostituted women from 5 countries was 67% (Farley et. al. 1998), which is the same range as that of combat veterans (Weathers et. al. 1993).
From Farley et. al. (2003) “Prostitution in Nine Countries” (x)
Prostitution is created and supported by an established culture of men’s perceived and socialized entitlement to sex. This is also reminds me of how many people on this website as well as offline tend to glorify sex work (of its various forms; street prostitution, massage brothels, escort services, outcall services, strip clubs, lapdancing, phone sex, adult and child pornography, video and internet pornography and prostitution tourism) by assuming that it financially empowers women without realizing that a) Sex must not be a commodity; its commodification in patriarchy targets women firstly and most violently, b) Re: Young female students and privatized education. Young female students taking up prostitution/pornography is often extolled by liberals and viewed as sexually/financially liberating whereas the question should not concern individual agency but the one that must be asked is completely forgotten: Why is she compelled to take up such a profession in the first place. And the answer directly leads you to understand how neoliberalism/the privatization of education hits young women in a very different and vicious manner and also that marketplaces are so cutthroat now that basic survival, without having to turn your body into a commodity, is virtually impossible in this era. This further reminds me of how often white, Western women will put a spin on prostitution and assert that if they enjoy it, everyone else does too. Which is false.
If you read Prostitution, Liberalism, and Slavery, you will learn: “Only a tiny percentage of all women in prostitution are there because they freely choose it. For most, prostitution is not a real choice because physical safety, equal power with buyers, and real alternatives don’t exist. These are the conditions that would permit genuine consent. Most of the 1% who choose prostitution are privileged because of their ethnicity and class and they have escape options. Poor women and women of color don’t have these options.” Again, as I’ve said before, liberal individual agency becomes an abstract concept in this debate of empowerment because it fails to account for the material conditions of the majority of prostitutes, which is not a pleasant picture as liberal Western women would have you think. Ask the average prostitute in Pakistan or Ukraine or Nigeria about the empowerment of her work and she will think you’re insane.
I would urge everyone to watch Farley’s lecture why it is wrong to pay for sex.
"If we ignore the evidence for the structural inequalities of sex, race, and class in prostitution and if we ignore the clear statements of women who tell us that they want to escape prostitution, then we end up in a postmodern neverland where liberal theory unanchored to material reality frames prostitution as a problem of sexual choice, workers’ rights or sex trafficking as an immigration problem. Prostitution is the international business of sexual exploitation. Describing the strategic focus on sex buyers, a Swedish detective said, “trafficking is a business, we try to destroy the market.” Yes." [x]
So, it’s a lot uglier and horrifying than we think it is.
(via vul-va)
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The last words said by Black youth before they were murdered by vigilantes/Policemen . Rest in peace.
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We the undersigned Palestinian individuals and groups express our solidarity with the family of Michael Brown, a young unarmed black man gunned down by police on August 9th in Ferguson, Missouri. We wish to express our support and solidarity with the people of Ferguson who have taken their struggle to the street, facing a militarized police occupation.
From our families bleeding in streets of Gaza, Hebron, Jenin, Jerusalem; from the Zionist prisons overflowing with our political prisoners; from our endless refugee camps, ghettos and Bantustans; from our indigenous people living as second-class citizens in what became “Israel” in 1948, and our dislocated diaspora: We send you our commitment to stand with you in your hour of pain and time of struggle against the oppression that continues to target our black brothers and sisters in nearly every aspect of their lives.
We understand your moral outrage. We understand your hurt and anger. We understand your impulse to burn the infrastructure of a racist capitalist system that systematically pushes you to the margins of humanity; we support your right to rebel in the face of injustice.
And we stand with you.
The disregard and disrespect for black bodies and black life is endemic to the white supremacist system that rules the land. Your struggles through the ages have been an inspiration to us as we fight daily for the most basic human dignities in our own homeland against the racist Zionist regime that considers us less human. As we navigate our own struggle against colonialism, ethnoreligious supremacy, capitalism and tyranny, we find inspiration and strength from your struggles and your revolutionary leaders, like Malcolm X, Huey Newton, Kwame Ture, Angela Davis, Fred Hampton, Bobby Seale and others.
We honor the life of Michael Brown, cut short less than a week before he was due to begin university. And we honor the far too many black lives who were killed in similar circumstances, motivated by racism and contempt for black life: John Crawford, Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, Tarika Wilson, Malcolm Ferguson, Renisha McBride, Amadou Diallo, Yvette Smith, Oscar Grant, Sean Bell, Kathryn Johnston, Rekia Boyd and too many others to count.
With a Black Power fist in the air, we salute the people of Ferguson and join in your demands for justice.
Rinad Abdulla, professor, Birzeit University
Susan Abulhawa, novelist & activist
Linah Alsaafin
Rana Baker
Budour Hassan (via shiseido-red)
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The last capitalist we hang shall be the one who sold us the rope.
Karl Marx (via lawa7di)
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If we replace “Does porn cause rape?” with more nuanced questions that ask how porn messages shape our reality and our culture, we avoid falling into the images-lead-to-rape discussion. […] By placing porn use within its cultural context, we can begin to see how powerful it really is. […]
To say that the way that users look at a porn image is, in large part, defined by the culture that they grew up in is to say that the context within which images are consumed shapes the way the meaning is produced.
One way to understand this is to compare sexist images to racist ones. This is not to say that sexism and racism are the same, just that images that legitimise different types of oppression can work in similar ways. One particularly racist image was that of Stepin Fetchit, an image developed by Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew Perry that was popular with (white) moviegoers in the 1930s. With his slow mannerisms and his constant refrain of “Yes, massa”, Perry constructed an image of black men as ingratiating half-wits. African Americans protested these images as they viewed them as having very real effects on the way whites thought about blacks. I doubt that African Americans would have been persuaded by the argument that these images were mere comedic entertainment, and hence they could separate blacks in the media (half-wits), from real blacks (their neighbours and coworkers.)
Now, no media theorist would argue that such images alone would make a nonracist white take out a lifetime membership with the KKK; nor would they have an immediate or powerful affect in a society where blacks and whites were already treated as full and equal citizens. However, put these images in a society with a long history of racism, where the dominant ideology is that blacks are lazy, shiftless, violence-prone freeloaders, and you begin to see how the Stepin Fetchit images didn’t change the views of the average white person so much as they delivered to the white population ideas that were floating around in the culture in a form that was compelling, easy to understand - and even easier to get away with.
After all, it was supposedly just entertainment.
-Gail Dines on sexist and racist imagery in the media and its relationship to real life
Quote from Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality
(via mildly-angry)
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Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman’s sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison
Mary Wollstonecraft (via thedesiradical)
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Lifestyle feminism ushered in the notion that there could be as many versions of feminism as there were women. Suddenly the politics was being slowly removed from feminism. And the assumption prevailed that no matter what a woman’s politics, be she conservative or liberal, she too could fit feminism into her existing lifestyle. Obviously this way of thinking has made feminism more acceptable because its underlying assumption is that women can be feminists without fundamentally challenging and changing themselves or the culture.
bell hooks, Feminism is for Everybody (via staininyourbrain)
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But what is she consenting to? She’s consenting to the money, not the actual sex. If you say to any prostitute: “You have two options: either you can take the money and just leave or you can take the money and also stay for the sex,” how many do you think are going to stay for the sex? Not even a die-hard defender of prostitution will claim that most will to stay for the sex. Most of them are going to take the money and leave — which goes to show they don’t actually want the sex — they want the money.
So if you’re so sexually radical or sexually liberal, why don’t you see this situation for what it is? Sex wherein one person doesn’t want sex? How can that not bother you? This is what makes prostitution different from all other types of sexual situations. If you have two people that want it, no one pays and if nobody wants it then obviously there’s no sex at all.
Being and Being Bought: An interview with Kajsa Ekis Ekman (via thedesiradical)
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Academics have developed complicated theories and obscure jargon in an effort to describe what is now referred to as structural racism, yet the concept is fairly straightforward. One theorist, Iris Marion Young, relying on a famous “birdcage” metaphor, explains it this way: If one thinks about racism by examining only one wire of the cage, or one form of disadvantage, it is difficult to understand how and why the bird is trapped. Only a large number of wires arranged in a specific way, and connected with one another, serve to enclose the bird and ensure it cannot escape.
What is particularly important to keep in mind is that any given wire of the cage may or may not be specifically developed for the purpose of trapping the bird, yet it still operates (together with other wires) to restrict its freedom.
Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow (via staininyourbrain)
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