The kids are not ok
Julie Bindel had a very horrible time at York University last week.
It was a sign of the times that the group that invited me to give a talk on feminism at York was the university’s Free Speech Society. It was scheduled for February but trouble immediately materialised and both the feminist and the LGBTQ societies got it cancelled. But my hosts did not back down and, pledging to guarantee the safety of both students and speaker, rescheduled the talk. It happened last week, in an atmosphere I found both deeply disturbing and profoundly distressing.
…
I heard the noise before I saw the crowd. ‘Bindel, out!’ ‘Not welcome on our campus,’ ‘Decrim(inalise) sex work now’ and the like. I could have cried. How has this mad transgender ideology so captured the female students who, just a few years ago, would have welcomed me warmly as a mentor?
It would be understandable if the university had been swamped by neo-Nazi students, but this is the Left devouring its own. This is why we can’t have nice things.
My hands were shaking. I could not let the protesters see how sick I was feeling, so I approached some of them and tried to speak to them, but was blocked by a man who kept pushing a sign in my face: ‘Not on our campus’.
Every time I tried to take a photograph to record what was happening to me, he would thrust the sign towards my face as though he was going to hit me with it.
Someone waved a ‘Kiss my man boob’ placard at me. There were explicit comments about what I should do to their ‘trans dick’. Students — and a few members of staff — shouted vile things at me through megaphones. Female students turned their backs on me. It felt aggressive and hugely, horribly personal. I have reported from war zones — these were just a bunch of students. And yet it was devastating to hear them scream at me.
Because she doesn’t think prostitution is a great career option for women, and because she doesn’t believe men can become women.
How can I answer the charges when they are so at odds with reality? I speak all over the world on the global sex trade and its harm to women and girls, including at the United Nations. I have campaigned with sex trade survivors to change the law so that women convicted of prostitution-related offences have their records expunged.
Yet one twenty-something activist felt moved to mischaracterise my beliefs to her social media followers in this way: ‘Bindel is an advocate for the Nordic model. This is a model that criminalises sex-working individuals and denies them worker rights, which has been proven to put them at an increased risk of rape, murder, and coercion. Bindel’s whole career is founded in supporting the mass homicide of sex workers.’
Mass homicide? Of women I’ve campaigned alongside for 40 years?
Ffs.
I sometimes wonder if they really believe their mischaracterization or if it is totally cynical. I have been accused of advocating mass genocide when I call for a sensible population policy and point out that humans have passed carrying capacity.
No wonder they have to prevent our speech; if people hear what we really say, they will know the accusations are false.
While I don’t think that the entire “sex workers’ rights” movement is comprised of deluded bourgeois college students who have been conned by the “pimp lobby” and that some of the membership is comprised of actual sex workers (a preferable term to “whore”) who are working voluntarily in the industry and who believe that legalization and regulation would make their occupation safer, … I’m also pretty sure that the vast majority of women are not there voluntarily and are being exploited in at least some way.
The Nordic Model specifically doesn’t criminalize the sex workers. It criminalizes the johns. And there SHOULD be penalties for abusing trafficked individuals or taking advantage of a woman’s painful drug addiction that has made her desperate for money. (I once tried to discuss the latter issue with some men elsewhere on the internet. They accused me of denying a drug-addicted prostitute’s self-agency. One guy said he wasn’t voluntarily laying hardwood floors. He needed the money and it was damaging to his body. So what was the difference?)
And, anyway, the sort of close-minded, intolerance and rage that these idiots subjected Dr. Bindel to is shameful.
As I have previously put it, there is no possible future in which pimps and johns exist while harmful and degrading attitudes about women don’t.
I believe it was Sasha White who once interviewed someone who had studied the attitudes of johns. As I recall, she found that johns generally wanted the women to act as if they enjoyed it, but didn’t care if was all just an act as long as it didn’t spoil their own experience. If the women let their lack of enjoyment show, the Johns in the study tended to feel cheated (as in not getting what they paid for) and try to punish the women in various ways, but not a single one of them expressed any concern that perhaps they shouldn’t be using women’s bodies as living inflatable dolls like that.
I don’t recall if I have posted this link in a comment on “Butterflies & Wheels” before, but it is certainly relevant to this post.
http://www.paulgraham.com/heresy.html
In that essay he links to this relevant essay
http://www.paulgraham.com/conformism.html