Where is the invisible line drawn?
Meghan Murphy detects some incoherence in the libertarian feminist approach to “sex work.”
Surprise! Gaming is a sexist industry that pornifies women. Through a particularly hypocritical post, even for Jezebel, it has come to light that Microsoft hired women in sexualized Catholic schoolgirl outfits to dance at an afterparty hosted by Xbox in San Francisco during last week’s Game Developer Conference.
Welcome to the industry, laydeez.
One woman who attended the party, named Kamina Vincent, a producer at an Australian games studio, told Jezebel that she spoke to one of the “dancers,” who told her “they had been hired to speak with attendees and encourage them to the dance floor.” Vincent correctly pointed out, “Decisions like these reinforce that women are decoration instead of a part of the industry.” You know, just like the video games themselves do, and just like pornography itself does: position women as decorative things for men to look at, use, and abuse, but never to view as full, equal human beings.
Brianna Wu, a video game developer who has been subjected to ongoing harassment by the man-children of Gamergate, told Jezebel:
“The problem is not the women. I am a sex-positive feminist and so are most women in the game industry… They are just trying to make a living. The issue is, this is wildly inappropriate at a professional networking event.”
Indeed. And so with that, we are left to wonder what, exactly, is an appropriate space for women to be paid to sexualize teen girls for the titillation of men? Both Wu and Jezebel, as a whole, are supporters of the sex industry — they advocate to legalize prostitution and treat pornography as something empowered women “choose.”
So they’re trying to have it both ways, are they? Saying it’s cool in general to position women as decorative things for men to look at and fuck but not cool to do that at a tech afterparty? If it’s cool in general why isn’t it cool at a tech afterparty?
Murphy shares some tweets by Brianna Wu saying how great sex work and Playboy are, and how sex-positive and pro-sex work and pro sexual empowerment she is.
The analysis doesn’t fly. As I wrote earlier this month, you can’t have both objectification and liberation. You can’t say that turning women into sexualized objects for male pleasure contributes to inequality and excludes women from participation in traditionally male-dominated spaces (i.e. life) but then say it’s totally acceptable in other spaces and, more generally, in society-at-large. Where is the invisible line drawn?
As Wu’s colleague, Anita Sarkeesian, points out, objectification dehumanizes women — not just some women, but all women. Treating women as things that exist for men normalizes male entitlement, which, in turn, creates rape culture and, more generally, a misogynist society.
How’s that worked out so far?
I think the position is that it’s cool for individual women to position themselves at decorative things for men to looks at and fuck, but not cool for men (or even women?) to do that to women. Like it’s OK for you to make fun of yourself and be humble about your own achievements, in a way that it’s not OK for others to do to you. Punching yourself is OK, punching down is not.
Not that I agree with that position. I agree with Sarkeesian (and you) that if a woman behaves in a way that furthers the objectification of women as a class, then that is necessarily an anti-feminist act, no matter how liberated or empowered that particular act makes that particular woman feel.
If we lived in a society where the mass objectification of women were not a thing, and they were recognised for their competencies and achievements on a par with men, then sure, some women objectifying or prostituting themselves would be just as fine as some men doing so. But we don’t, so it isn’t.
#1 Karellen,
Precisely.
Well, it’s pretty appalling.
More to the point, it’s unprofessional.
I don’t know whether you can draw the invisible line or not, but if there is to be a line, it absolutely has to be drawn outside the workplace. And the higher up the food chain you go, the more important this becomes. An organization the size and profile of Microsoft absolutely should understand this. I’ve seen other organizations do this, and I’m always left wondering: do they not understand, or do they just not care?
Long ago and far away I worked at small firms with testosterone-fueled 20-something males, and sometimes there were outings to strip clubs, but it was always off-premises and after-hours. Even we understood that.
Karellen & Cressida: Long ago I used to think that legalization of sex-work was the bestest thing ever for women, because I knew the prohibition system was mainly being used to punish the women trapped in sex-work by economic circumstances–it’s easy to think that legalization is an easy solution to that. Then I actually read the studies of legalization in Europe, and how it’s been a nightmare that has actually increased trafficking, abuse and poverty among sex workers. I was extremely disappointed when I realized that all the libertarian, ‘rational’ writers I’d been listening to wouldn’t even consider this evidence as pertinent to the discussion, because it meant they weren’t interested in actually improving the lives of those women–they just wanted their glibertarian ideological talking points to remain intact.