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The Vagina Monologues Reinforce the Existence of Patriarchy

by Andrea Lavigne

socialphysics@yahoo.com

http://www.radicalfeminism.blogspot.com

The Vagina Monologues (TVM), is a book containing monologues of women’s “vagina experiences” recorded by Eve Ensler, author and activist. Ensler states in her book that her motivation for TVM grew out of her concern for an older woman who displayed contemptuous feelings about her vagina at a time when Ensler was longing to find a way back to her own vagina. TVM is also performed on stage as part of the V-Day Campaign, a global movement to stop violence against women and girls.

While performances of TVM raise funds for victims of sexual and domestic violence, at the same time, it expresses postmodern Third Wave and Biological Reductionist “feminism.” Postmodern Third Wavers, a.k.a., “sex positivity feminists” spin reality into one’s perspective and simple narratives, co-opts and internalizes patriarchal notions and traditions, and cultivates pseudo-liberating solutions for sexuality. In bed with the postmodern Third Wavers are the Biological reductionist “feminists” who reduce women to their vaginas. In opposition to the postmodern Third Wave and Biological Reductionist agenda, Second Wave feminists identify with historical materialist reality, attempt to overthrow the patriarchal Capitalist social and economic material conditions in which women’s oppression is rooted, and struggle for full emancipation.

With all due respect, Ensler’s book provides us with a few serious monologues and some important “Vagina Facts.” These monologues discuss mass rape of Bosnian women; hysterectomies; cold gynecological exams; rape of a ten-year-old by her father’s friend; and, childbirth. The “Vagina Facts” cover: 1. A woman, during a witch trial, was considered a witch by a lawyer because of her half-inch sized clitoris; 2. A clitoris contains 8000 nerve fibers; and, 3– 5. Mention of the practice of genital mutilation. While many additional “Vagina Facts” are included in the performances, presentation of such serious subject matters takes second place to the gratuitous, vagina-centric monologues like reclaiming the words “CUNT” and “VAGINA” and faking orgasms.

For the sake of criticism, I have selected monologues from the book and performances which promote sexual objectification, prostitution myths, and predatory behavior. My criticisms are meant to promote dialogue, awareness, and direction toward women’s true liberation.

Monologues that Promote Sexual Objectification

Reclaiming Cunt

This monologue is by a subject who plays around with the phonetics, “C C CA CA, Cunt” primarily as an attempt to bring back the ancient pro-woman meaning of the word “Cunt” and secondarily for shock value. However, in today’s patriarchal Capitalist climate inundated with pornography, rampant pimping of women and children into prostitution, and mass rape, the word “cunt” will lack ancient meaning as long as we remain in this patriarchal economic and social order. More constructive is for us to reclaim the action word, “L L, Li, lib, Liber, Liberat, Liberation.”

The Vagina Workshop

The “WOMAN = VAGINA” biological reductionist message is very clear in this monologue. A vagina workshop participant discovers that her clitoris “was me, the essence of me.” The vagina workshop leader convinces this participant that her vagina is “the essence of me, both the doorbell to my house and the house itself.” Furthermore, the participant poeticizes her vagina “My vagina is a shell, a tulip, and a destiny. I am arriving as I am beginning to leave. My vagina, my vagina, me.” This biological reductionism is a pathetic recurring theme as Ensler desperately attempts to establish feelings of sisterhood based on a common biology. This sexual objectification is exactly what the suffragettes were fighting against. Pioneers Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Sojourner Truth, and others fought long and hard so women would be empowered--not by their sexual anatomy--but by their minds. Empowerment does not consist of staring at your vagina in the mirror and weeping or exulting. I think the suffragettes would be pissed if they saw this empowerment scam.

Because He Liked To Look At It

In this creepy segment of Ensler’s, we learn that this guy Bob is “ordinary, boring, and unappealing,” that is, until his date discovers his one redeeming quality -- an obsession with vaginas. Bob voyeuristically stares, analyzes, and fetishizes her crotch for over an hour. She discovers how “beautiful and erotic” her vagina is because a man obsessively appreciates it. She actually could have just removed her crotch from between her legs, set it on a pedestal in her foyer, and left the house while Creepy Bob remained. She gives Creepy Bob kudos for validating her sexuality and making her feel worthy through his creepy fetish.

A Monologue that Promotes the Prostitution Myth

The Woman Who Loved To Make Vaginas Happy

This is a monologue about a woman who leaves her career as an attorney to become a lesbian dominatrix prostitute specializing in the use of sexual props, i.e., whips, handcuffs, and ropes. Why did Ensler choose this fantastical “sex worker in charge” prostitution myth in her program? What agenda is Ensler promoting? Although she doesn’t use the term “sex worker” to describe this lesbian dominatrix prostitute, the content implicitly cultivates and promotes this “free will sex worker” false notion. This “free will sex worker” spin is highly promoted on stage by the actresses who fun-lovingly perform this monologue as a highlight of women’s empowerment. This “free will sex worker” myth is also propagated when the performer intensely revels in her one-woman grand finale of faking a series of her female johns’ multiple orgasms.

These postmodernist Third Wavers would also like us to believe that because a woman is role-playing as an “independent self-assured dominatrix”, that she is truly an independent self-assured dominatrix in full charge of the night. In reality, most women used in prostitution have pimps and johns who force them into this “independent self-assured dominatrix” role---which is dangerous for the woman because the “props” can easily be used against her in a real-life, fatal scenario. The postmodernist Third Wavers, pimps, johns, and other misogynists like to conceal the issues of economic and social coercion and force, and deny the harms of prostitution.

Monologues that Promote Predatory Behavior

I Asked A Six-Year Old Girl

Ensler asked a six-year old girl the following questions: “If your vagina got dressed, what would it wear?”; “If it could speak, what would it say?”; “What does your vagina smell like?”; “What’s special about your vagina?” To the latter, Ensler quotes the six-year old girl as answering, “Somewhere deep inside it I know it has a really smart brain.” Not only do I find it hard to believe that parents would allow an adult to interrogate their first grader about her vagina, but also that a six-year old girl would know about somewhere deep inside her vagina. If a little girl knows about somewhere deep inside of her vagina, there is a good chance she was raped. This six-year old girl may need counseling from the trauma of rape and the re-traumatizing by Ensler. Imagine a male counterpart to this story: A middle-aged man asks a six-year old boy what is special about his penis. This would surely land him on a sex offender registry or in jail.

The Little Coochi Snorcher That Could

This is a monologue where an adult woman reflects back to the age of thirteen when she claims she was “sexually liberated by a twenty-four year old woman.” At age thirteen, the girl is coerced by a twenty-four year old woman into her car. The woman tongues the girl’s mouth, takes the girl into her house, plies her with vodka, and has sex with her. The now adult woman explained to Ensler, “She was my surprising, unexpected, politically incorrect salvation…transformed my sorry-ass coochi snorcher and raised it up into a kind of heaven.”

What puzzles me is that this rape is propagated as sexual liberation by Ensler, the rape survivor, and the many activist actresses who perform this monologue. We would all love to believe that sexual liberation was what truly happened for this thirteen-year old girl, for the sake of “adolescent vagina empowerment”, but it was undeniably rape according to healthy life stages of development and law. Furthermore, it is unethical and illegal to give a minor alcohol.

The notion of sexual liberation does not hold up anymore than it would if this was a story of a homoerotic curious thirteen-year old boy who was picked up by a twenty-four year old man, plied with alcohol, and anally penetrated.

What might be a scene from a public service kidnapping prevention video shown to schoolchildren becomes, in Ensler’s play, a love story.

Conclusion

TVM promotes a postmodern Third Wave and Biological Reductionist agenda of sexual objectification, prostitution myths, and predatory behavior. I find TVM's to be patronizing in today’s era. What is even more incessantly patronizing is the “Vagina’s R Us” merchandise, such as the “Vagina Warrior” t-shirts, vagina-shaped chocolate suckers, “cunt power” stickers, and other vagina-centric paraphernalia. Imagine the absurdity if this were a men’s movement where men walked around in T' Shirts that said "Penis Warriors" and sucking on penis-shaped chocolate suckers. Why would I want to wear a “Vagina Warrior” t-shirt or suck a vagina-shaped chocolate sucker, unless I was trying to fulfill some heterosexist male fantasy, which won’t be happening anytime soon.

TVM expresses the view that in order to end violence against women, all we need do is tap into our “vagina power” and become “Vagina Warriors”. I believe we urgently need to elevate our struggle for the liberation of humanity. For starters, Ensler can change her objectifying view of women and choose more liberating monologues. More substantial, we need to abolish private ownership of land, animals and people (i.e., wage slavery, slavery, prostitution, domestic servitude) and the corresponding social relations of this production. We need to abolish the patriarchal institutions that buttress the patriarchal Capitalistic economic order. We need a mass movement to affirm our struggle for emancipation. We need to collectively come together to figure out how to "break the chains and unleash the fury of women as a mighty force for revolution."

U.S. Reconsidering Amnesty for Immigrants With Abusive Spouses

In immigration news, the U.S. government is considering doing away with a longstanding policy that allows immigrant wives to remain in the country when an abusive spouse refuses to sponsor their stay. More than 30,000 immigrant women have been granted visas under the Violence Against Women Act since 1994. Many of then have given birth to children in the U.S. Attorneys for immigrant women say green-card applications have been put on hold as immigration agencies await a decision on the policy review.www.democracynow.org/2008/1/9/headlines

Myth of the Tragedy of the Commons

Mr. John Stossel, co-anchor of ABC News’ 20/20, wrote an opinion editorial on December 11, 2007 about the Tragedy of the Commons in the Opinion Editorial of the Atlasphere: Connecting Admirers of The Fountain Head and Atlas Shrugged http://www.theatlasphere.com/columns/stossel-tragedy-commons.php This article was sent to me by an Atheist who said that Mr. Stossel’s argument in support of the Tragedy of the Commons makes sense.

Throughout my life experiences as a militant Atheist, I notice, all too often, that other Atheists do not want to completely let go of the imperialist patriarchal ideology and practices so fundamental to religion. It would behoove Atheists to reconsider their cozy partnership with the imperialist patriarchal ideology by Mr. Stossel, God, and friends. Furthermore, I am responding to the TOC myth to expose bourgeois trickery.

Mr. John Stossel argues that in order to promote prosperity and responsibility, societies need private property. Mr. Stossel claims, “the pilgrims nearly starved practicing communal farming, but thrived once they switched to private cultivation”. I beg to differ. But, before I dispel the myth of the TOC, I want to dispel the use of the word pilgrim as if it is some innocuous term. I want to expose the use of the word pilgrim as a word used by bourgeois historians, liberal, libertarian, and conservative capitalists believers to obfuscate the reality of the imperialist nature behind the colonization of the America’s and which promotes the chosen people myth, via national sentimentality and/or religious fever.

The “Pilgrim” word as Trickery

The word pilgrim is one that is embraced by most non-indigenous Americans [who uphold the belief in private ownership, despite their religious background, (even though so many people pray on this day, treating it as a religious holiday)] used to describe the first Europeans who came to the “Americas”. It is understandable that the two definitions below would suit just about most Atheist Capitalists and Religious Capitalists, because belief in private ownership is just one patriarchal element that both these groups have in common. The most used definitions to describe pilgrim:

1. a newcomer to a region or place, esp. to the western U.S.. This definition sounds too neutral as if the Europeans were some good-intentioned people, peacefully just trying to find a new place to live.

2. a person who journeys, esp. a long distance, to some “sacred” place as an act of religious devotion: pilgrims to the “Holy” Land. This sounds too innocently spiritual for the real purpose as to the journey these Europeans took to the “Americas”.

It is more accurate to describe the “pilgrims” as imperialists. Imperialism is, firstly, the policy of extending the rule or authority of an empire or nation over foreign countries, or of acquiring and holding colonies and dependencies and, secondly, a way to live out the patriarchal “chosen people” myth, that both Atheist Capitalist Patriots and Religious Capitalist believers support. I will, therefore, us the words imperialists, or colonialists, conquerors, and the like instead of the word pilgrim.

The Myth of the Tragedy of the Commons

One reason the European conquerors nearly starved trying to practice communal farming, is because they were completely barren of former communal knowledge and skills. Any former communalist knowledge and skills that they once possessed were sadistically choked out of them by proponents of private ownership, i.e., patriarchal economic system, institutions, and customs: church and imperialist rulers (slaveocracts and feudal landlords), and male inheritance. The Church burned, not only their pagan libraries, but hundreds and thousands of wise-women. By the time the Europeans arrived to the “America’s”, they were well indoctrinated by the patriarchal paradigm of rape, pillage, conquer, and divide and of private ownership of land, animals, and people (ownership of people as slaves, indentured servants, and concubines). If the Europeans colonialist had the full knowledge and skills of communalistic living and were not indoctrinated with the patriarchal principles of ownership, they never would have ended up on an expansionist hegemonic venture into the “Americas” in the first place. With the inevitable interdependent relationship between the Church and imperialist rulers having power over the ecology, economy, and social arrangement, people become alienated from a sense of communal living. The patriarchal property owners rely on the church to tell the poor to pray to God, and everything will be okay. Just so the slaves don’t have a rebellion to overthrow the propertied class. And that in their next life, they will live in peace. The church relies on the capitalist class to uphold their patriarchal traditions of hierarchy, myths, etc…

Furthermore, to say that the ‘pilgrims’ nearly starved trying to live communalistically, therefore, communal living is a bad practice, is an overgeneralization. If you study the Native Americans, you will see that they knew how to live communalistically, not only with each other, but the land and animals. The Native American’s did not even have a word in their vocabulary to describe private ownership when the European privateers come to the “America’s”. Chief Seattle wrote in 1854 to President Franklin Pierce;

. …How can you buy or sell the sky— the warmth of the land? The idea is strange to us. Yet we do not own the freshness of the air or the sparkle of the water. . . . Every part of this earth is sacred to my people. . . . When the buffaloes are all slaughtered, the wild horses all tamed, the secret corners of the forest heavy with the scent of many men, and the views of the ripe hills blotted by talking wires, where is the thicket? Gone. Where is the eagle? Gone

Not only did the Native American’s know how to live communalistically, so too did all the world’s people prior to the patriarchal rule over some 5000 years ago, prior to the idea of one private ownership, one male God, prior to the Church. The idea of a male God, is so intrinsically inseparable from the whole foundation of private property. Not only did the Native American’s and the people prior to patriarchy know how to live communalistically, but also more recent cultures such as the Mosuo people’s of China.

I am not saying that I believe in the matriarchal spirituality promoting superstitions. But, I am proving my point that many people outside the patriarchy, knew how to live communalistic with each other and their ecology.

Another argument I have with regards to Mr. Stossel’s argument that “the pilgrims nearly starved practicing communal farming” is that the “pilgrims” also were not historically wise to their the ecology in which they conquered. Again, the Native American’s knew how to live harmoniously with each other and their ecology.

Mr. Stossel also argued that the “pilgrims” …. “thrived once they switched to private cultivation.” How come Mr. Stossel and bourgeois history books, leave out the real reason why the pilgrims thrived on private cultivation? The truth of the matter is that these pilgrims thrived on the ownership and exploitation of black slaves. These European ownership-freaks loved to own everyone and everything they could get their greedy hands on, destroying the lives of the “other”, and using the Church to justify their ownership fetishes. Today, ownership-freaks and many average joes who believe in capitalism are often the same as those Super-patriots, and flag wavers whose national fervor mimics that of the Religious right in terms of a colonialistic history, chosen people myths, -isms, bigotry, and stupid rituals.

Mr. Stossel also argues that it is a bad thing when the “government takes our money by force and gives it to others, that’s not sharing.” According to Michael Parenti, a political analyst and professor of Yale University, in his book Contrary Notions,

“John Stossel, an ardent supporter of big agribusiness, claimed that organic food ‘could kill you’ and that catastrophic global warming is a ‘myth’. He called for privatization of Social Security, the curbing of environmental education, and the celebration of greed as a good thing for the economy.”

Mr. Stossel’s bourgeois perspective on the “pilgrims” should come of no surprise to us. Mr. Stossel, supports big agribusiness who takes from the government billions in welfare, e.g., outright welfare for the rich or as with tax subsidies, etc…. Since Mr. Stossel and friends hate government so much, they shouldn’t take money from the government at all to fund their corporations or their war machines. Mr. Stossel and friends only like government when it is sharing its money exclusively with only them. To Mr. Stossel and friends, the word, “force” does not apply when the bourgeois government’s standing armies, courts, and police are there to protect and fund their profits financed via hard labor and meager earnings from poor working class people. But they feel that when their bourgeois government may be “forced” via generals strikes, peoples uprising, etc… to share some of the wealth with the poor working class people (this wealth created by the working class anyway), such as welfare for the poor, social security, free schooling, universal health care, then they deem this as “force”.

As for property rights being associated with benefits, the bourgeois once again, only concern themselves with financial benefits; they do not operate in terms of social or environmental benefits. The few elite think only in terms of the “benefits” they alone exclusively get from their market to exploit who and what they want. They leave out the fact that these exclusive “benefits” often have a detrimental effect on people and the environment.

Mr. Stossel and friends complain that socialized health care doesn’t work. Well, for one thing, socialized medicine doesn’t work when greedy profiteers can’t, therefore, make profit off of death and disease. Furthermore, socialized medicine superimposed on top of a Capitalist patriarchal economic base has major limits. Socialized medicine in countries such as Great Britain, France, Canada, don’t work perfectly because it so happens that when you have socialized institutions resting upon a Capitalist patriarchal economic base, they won’t be perfect. And, as much as Cuba’s socialized health industry rests upon a defunct form of so called Communism, it at least has some of the best doctors in the world, doctors without borders, and allows anyone in the world, including the United States, to attend their medical schools for free. All these various forms of socialized health care industries would work better if they did not rest upon the Capitalist economic base or some makeshift version of so-called Communism --- an antagonistic relationship from the get go. A democratic socialized economic base, would be a more compatible bed fellow for socialized medicine to rest with, which would synergistically buttress the socialized health care to it’s utmost potential, never seen in all of history.

Mr. Stossel and friends like to dumb down the classism which they create with their private ownership fetishes which create masses of dispossessed people.

Capitalist doctrine mimics Church doctrine of the ownership, hierarchy, authoritarianism. Capitalist atheists should resist anything that resembles the church doctrine, therefore, they should resist Capitalist patriarchal ideology and practices.

Andrea Lavigne

1

Research Project for Advocates of Legalization / Unionization of Prostitution

Research Assignment for Advocates of Legalization / Unionization of Prostitution

Begins 8/2007)

Simple Requirements
Dr. Freedom, Research Project Leader, from the University of Liberation is looking for volunteers who are liberals and leftists who view prostitution as sex work or work and supports the legalization / unionization of prostitution as a solution. Dr. Freedom is looking for males and females, drinking ages 21 years old and up.

Definitions: The use of “grow your profession” and “research assignment” is used interchangeably in this document.

First Tier or Second Tier Assignment: You get a choice between First Tier or Second Tier Assignments.

Your Field Supervisor
You get to have a Field Supervisor, such as, protector, boyfriend, bouncer, union representative of your choice. If you form a union, you will get extra credit.

Time: Your 6 month assignment will only be extended to 9 months, then 12 months, indefinitely, etc….until you meet your requirement of growing your profession to a least 10 clients per day, 5 days per week.

Type of clientele:
All clients must be both male and female, drinking age, 21 years of age or older. You must check ID’s to make sure clients are 21 years or older.
Client’s must proposition you, not you propositioning them. Your duty is to just walk around looking sexy (which is legal) until you get propositioned.
If clientele offers you money, don’t accept under any circumstances, because you are a research VOLUNTEER ONLY. Don’t tell your clients that your work is free, until after they offer you a sum of money (because you will be keeping meticulous track and logging in a journal how much was offered to you.)

Amount of clientele: Whether male or female, you will have to service at least 10 clients a day, 5 day’s a week. At least 2 clients per week have to be of the same sex, optimizing your performance. You can also perform with 5 or more clients at the same time for efficiency.

Location: You can perform your assigment anywhere in our global economy.

USA (One or several locations across the beautiful rolling hills of USA. If you like to travel, try Glamorous Las Vegas; Motor City Detroit; Southern Charm Huntsville; fabulous Hollywood; and/or Harlem. Netherlands, Switzerland, Germany (Where prostitution is legal) Cambodia, Tanzania, India, Costa Rico (Exotic locations) If you get stuck in a never ending debt bondage to a brothel owner when you want to quit the assignment, just form a union. Negotiate!

Condom Use: Use!

First Tier Assignment (High Class Call Girl or Call Boy) This involves fanciful specialization, multi-tasking, high confidence, expensive cloths. Your clients could come from fraternity homes on university campuses, business persons who married and single, and even other kind of person in between.

First Tier Assignment:
Street: On the street, 1 night of the week, from sun up to sun down
Brothel / Message Parlor: At a high traffic brothel or high traffic sensual massage parlor, 1 weekend night per week
Home: Out of your home, 1 night per week. If you want, send your children and spouse off into the next room during volunteer work hours. You also need to have a Pole mounted into one of your rooms: living room, basement, bedroom, or other to perform mandatory pole dances for your clients.
Strip Club: In VIP rooms of strip clubs, at least 3 clients per during this 1 night of the week
Bachelor Parties: At 2 bachelor parties, during the same night, 1 night per week:
Requirement 1: Pole: You will need to have a portable pole that you set up at all parties you perform at.
Requirement 2: At least one Line Up Performance is required by you at one of the bachelor parties. A LineUp is laid out like this: You wait in the bathroom in sexy cloths or completely naked, while many clothed party attendees line up at the entranceway of a bathroom. Your job is to every few minutes, service each client (10 plus), by any means or penetration necessary to get clients to quickly orgasm. (Male Volunteers: If you can’t find a bachelorette party of 10 or more women who are willing to line up at a bathroom to mount or grope you, you will do so at a bachelor party of heterosexual or homosexual males. Understandably, you might find it easier to find male clients to participate in Line Ups.
Requirement 3: The 69 Twister: This is a sexually intimate contact dance performance between you and another dancer of the same sex where you both together perform in the nude, horizontally, simulating a 69 style sex act. You are required to perform The 69 Twister with a pack of 20 or more clients closely encircling your dance performance. If you decide to Jello Wrestle instead of doing The 69 Twister, the rules still apply. After you perform The 69 Twister or Jello Wrestle with your same sex dance partner, then you can let the bachelor either perform these games with you or you can jump into the shower together.
Requirement 4: Gang Sex at least 1 gang bang of 5 or more clients per week is required or allowed if you find it more convenient to get the work done faster.

Second Tier Assignment (Strip Club Industry). You will have to work in a club that requires you to be totally nude, orifices shining bright.

Second Tier Assignment:
10 stage dances per day/night
3 lap dances per day/night
3 close encounters in the VIP room per day/night
1 favor for your boss per week
1 after-hour party for your boss’s buddies per week or one night dancing for 2 bachelor or bachelorette parties per week. Note: Bachelor party Requirements 1, 2, and 3 from the First Tier Assignment apply to you whether you service your bosses buddies or any bachelor party.

Male Volunteers: You will have to work at least one day a week at a gay strip club or cross dresser club and still fulfill all of the requirements listed above. Even though you are a male, you will also have to work one day a week wearing 5 inch high heals dancing around a pole (movements need to be gyrating moves that are traditionally typical of female strippers) Find the Duke Lacrosse Players, or your choice of any combination of racist sexist pigs. You will be rewarded to be the object of their power tripping circus freak show entertainment (white male supremacy rituals). In order to achieve more brownie points, let the white males poke and fondle your body, make sexual/racial slurs, and commit harassment. During these legal supremacy ritual hours, what normally is sexual/racial slurs and harassment is healthy white male bonding for the purchasers and is sexual/racial liberation for the dance performer(s) because money says so. But, don’t take the money. Just count it and give it back. Keep meticulous track of how much in your log, though. You are only a volunteer trying to prove that prostitution should be legal.

Written Assignment:
General Assignment: Questions you will need to answer and write about in a 3-5 page paper: Can you sit down or are your orifices too sore? Did you need to take alcohol and other drugs to dissociate? Are you saying that you loved your “job” out of liberation of the mind or out of internalization of oppression? What do you children/ family/ friends/ lover think about your assignment in prostitution or stripping? Is prostitution something you would want to put onto your resume? Is prostitution a job you would want your unemployment agency offering you and then telling you that if you don’t take it, you will lose your unemployment benefits like as what happens in Germany? Are you still for the legalization?

Logs: Applies to First Tier volunteers, but also apply to Second Tier volunteers if Second Tier volunteer happen to provide some types of First Tier (extra) favors to your clientele. Before getting a restful night’s sleep, you will have to spend about 5 to 10 minutes of mediation, going over all the bodily and psychological sensations you experienced during each encounter. Record- How man vaginal tears? Level of soreness? How many tears in the anus? Level of soreness? Do you have an infection? Colorful bruising? Soar jaws? Sores in the mouth? Unwanted pregnancy? Did you get an STD even though you used a condom? (condoms break, guys refuse to use condoms, guys pretend to use condoms, or condoms fall off inside the orifice during course of intercourse). Did you need drugs or alcohol do dissociate from the work? Do you feel psychologically liberated? Or, psychologically devastated? How so? Anyone stalking you? If so, fear level? Were you pressured to perform an act that you didn’t want to, but consented to anyway? If so, how do you psychologically feel?

Books/Articles: You will have to read about 3 - 4 articles/books about cultures that never had prostitution. You will have to write 3-5 pages as to why they did not have prostitution (What was it about their socio-economic conditions? Status of women? Property relations? etc…)

10 Reasons for Not Legalizing Prostitution: http://www.rapereliefshelter.bc.ca/issues/prostitution_legalizing.html. You will have to write 5-7 pages as to why the legalization of prostitution is not working as a solution.

Swedish Law: http://www.prostitutionresearch.com/swedish.html (good, as it does not criminalize the women, but does criminalize the purchasers, but not sufficient). You will have to read about how the Swedish Law on Prostitution is the best so far, but insufficient in protecting women from the steady flow of misogyny. You will have to write a 2-3 page document as to why the Swedish Law is claimed to be better than all other laws on prostitution, even though it is insufficient

USA Law: You will have to read USA Laws (unfortunately, it criminalizes the women used in prostitution, too). You will have to write a 2-3 page document as to why the USA Law on Prostitution is harmful to women used in prostitution as it criminalized them and as we still have our streets littered with strip clubs and message parlors.

Fundamental Change: You will also have to read articles/books that call out for eliminating the patriarchal and Capitalist foundation itself (which is the root of the origin of prostitution in the first place). You need to write a 5-7 page document as to why mirroring the Swedish Laws on Prostitution alone are not enough. You have to actually get rid of patriarchal and capitalist foundation, the reactionary ideology and social practices of patriarchy and capitalism in conjunction with having some form laws maybe like the Swedish Law in order for liberation of women to really happen.

Unions: For all you union buffs, it is advised that you write a 5-7 page document about what you ended up having to negotiate. Did you have to negotiate the amount of blow jobs per day? The amount of double penetrations? Health care options (even though health care should be universal anyway) etc….
Movies: You must watch at least 4 movies: 2 that glorify prostitution, like “Pretty Woman” and “Best Little Whore House in Texas”, 2 speaks about prostitution as violence toward women and children, like “Darwin’s Nightmare”, “Turning a Corner”, “Sleeping with Cambodia”, “Sex Trafficking”, “Not For Sale”, etc…) and write a 1-2 page paper on each film.

Note: If you use the technical terms in your written documentation to describe body parts, please also document somewhere pejoratives terms used for your body parts by clientele or region of clientele.

This project is interchangeable between non-fictional and fictional, you choose.

If you do this research project, send any questions, comments, or results, to the Research Project Leader, Dr. Freedom, at freedom_dr@yahoo.com

Truly,

Dr. Freedom
Research Project Leader
University of Liberation
Research Division
Wall Street, New York
USA

The Duke Lacrosse Team and Their White Male Supremacy Ritual

The Duke Lacrosse Team and Their Supremacy Ritual

In April 2007, legal authorities announced that the Duke Lacrosse ‘boys’ were “innocent”.

According to the mainstream media, the woman who accused some Duke Lacrosse players of sexual assault was a so-called evil black woman out to get white boys. Mainstream media dragged her through mud. And, while grossly trivializing the sexist and racist unethical behavior of the Duke Lacrosse team, they focused solely on the unethical behavior of Prosecutor Nifong, which pales in comparison.


MISOGYNISTIC CULTURAL LANDSCAPE

Just to shed some light on the misogynistic mentality of the Duke Lacrosse frat boys, check out this email by one of them, namely Ryan McFayden. I guess the email was sent out after the famous, “show”. Ryan had called out for his teammates to join him once again in another male supremacy / white supremacy ritual, see below:

“To whom it may concern:
tomorrow night, after tonights show, ive decided to have some strippers over to edens 2c. all are welcome.. however there will be no nudity. i plan on killing the bitches as soon as the walk in and proceeding to cut their skin off while cumming in my duke issue spandex.. all in besides arch and tack please respond”

If it is true that Eden was going to hold Ryan’s male supremacy / white supremacy ritual at his home, then that would make him Ryan’s accomplice or henchman.

Nifong’s unethical behavior pales in comparison to the Duke Lacrosse player’s unethical behavior. These Duke Lacrosse male supremacists do something so unethical as to not only purchase female humans to sexually and racially objectify them, but to even suggest, “killing the bitches” and “cut their skin off” – this suggestion alone is a violation of human rights and dignity that pales in comparison to the unethical behavior of Prosecuting Attorney Nifong.

Male supremacy / white supremacy correlation
Just look at the master/slave financial transaction: the Duke guys purchased this woman from a wholesale cargo of female humans from a strip club (i.e., female auction block) off the plantation.

Women as the Other
Sexual and racial objectification of the OTHER, like any other hate crime, serves as a prelude to commit sexual and racial violence (anywhere from light groping to murder) toward that OTHER. As John Stoltenberg in his book, Refusing to Be a Man: Essays on Sex and Justice, states, that

“Not all sexual objectifying necessarily precedes sexual violence [that is, if you don’t think all sexual objectification, in and of itself, is not violence], and not all men are yet satiated by their sexual objectifying, but there is a perceptible sense in which every act of sexual objectification occurs on a continuum of dehumanization that promises male sexual violence at its far end. The depersonalization that begins in sexual objectification is what makes violence possible.”

One thing we do know about male supremacy / white supremacy rituals is that it is a common patriarchal tradition in today’s class society where misogynistic and racist assholes like to form into groups in order to objectify several women at once time. Why do many heterosexual males in today’s world like to either individually or in concert sexually objectify women and girls? Let me ask this another way, “Why do so many heterosexual males in today’s world organize themselves closely with hard-ons, under one roof / one room to make homoerotic sadistic attempts to prove their “manhood” by sexually objectifying the Other?” I guess my longwinded question answered itself.

Bachelor parties serve to uphold male privilege
Bachelor parties are a type of male supremacy ritual held most often by misogynistic heterosexual males as an “innocent” rite of passage into so-called manhood, a way to uphold male privilege, and a homoerotic way to male bond. Their manhood, male privilege, and bonding is achieved via the sexual objectification of woman’s commoditized bodies. This parasitic process of jacking themselves up by exploiting women paradoxically proves that these guys are anything but real men.

Why not male bond through the purchase of a blow-up doll? Why not bond by purchasing a 1930’s Dancing Samba or Dinah Coon doll to celebrate their stupid fucking whiteness rather than purchase a human? No! Firstly, that is just too 1930ish. Secondly, the life of women, especially if she is black, is so very cheap and affordable these days for even the poorest of males, why not purchase the real thing!

At many of these male supremacy rituals, males can freely enjoy going so far as prostituting the female “entertainers”, because in class society with one of it’s pillars as patriarchy, as it exists today as Capitalism, money absolves men from the crime of rape for pay. And, if you treat her like she is not a real human being in a world where women are not real human beings, she is not a real human being. You’re, therefore, legally off the hook.

Our Patriarchal Legal System
Just because our local and federal patriarchal, and Capitalistic legal system allows for the purchase of women for sexual objectification, via “adult entertainment”, the commoditization/objectification of women is still a violation of human rights and dignity.
Firstly, our legal system does not take into account the context for which a woman, black, or any other minority “consents” to being objectified for money. In our legal system, consent has become the defining factor in determining whether violation has occurred. In this way the human experience and self is reduced to will, intent or consent, as if that is all that is involved in violation. In this way, liberal legal theory does not consider the oppressive condition of class domination which invokes consent. It sees just the “consent”.

Secondly, our legal system, regarding men’s purchase of women, also believes that if there is money involved in the purchase of a woman, (where the woman pimps herself or is pimped by a strip club owner aka legitimate business man), that that absolves the strip club pimp and male purchasers from a crime.

Thirdly, our legal system also supports property rights over human rights when it comes to male property owners owning women as property.

Male supremacy should be left behind, back with the dark ages.

Andrea Lavigne