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Dear Lady Castrata Vagina Dentata, Your group BEWARE
seems very anti-queer. It’s heterosexist to assume that the entire
sex industry is oppressive when gay men and wimmin are making their
own porn that is empowering and progressive. When gay men and wimmin
make porn, they educate about safe-sex practices and alternative sexuality.
Queer pornography is not based on inequality or exploitation; it is
an expression of a sexuality that is based on mutuality, equality and
safety. Your stance on the sex industry is telling of where your alliances
really are. Your position is shared by homophobic right wing religious
fundamentalists - is this where you think freedom lies for wimmin?
------------------- Ah Queer; the cowards’ retreat. For those who don’t know, Queer is the dick-centred womyn-hating shit that’s been passed off as feminism for the past two decades. What Johnno doesn’t quite grasp is that a rainbow striped condom and a pair of angel wings flapping around St. Kilda for PRIDE march each year does not make his orgasm liberating for wimmin. Male orgasms, even when Queerly correct, do not liberate the wimmin and children ab/used in prostitution and pornography. The educational value of allegedly ‘safe-sex’ pornography created by the AIDS crisis is cancelled out by the fact that those allegedly ‘safe-sex’ videos are produced by the same sex industry that SEXPLOITS and INFECTS and MURDERS millions of wimmin every year with the same virus that it claims to prevent. What you’ve got with Queer and the sex industry is a secret handshake over wimmin’s punished, prostituted and dead bodies. It goes like this; a well-known academic gay man such as Simon Watney or Jeffrey Weeks tell us that in the age of AIDS, porn is not only necessary to teach us about safe-sex, but that porn is sex. Radical feminists agree, but the difference is that we’re not happy with porn determining sexual relations in the world, while Queer and many heterosexual men are. Step two in the Queer-porn brotherhood is to introduce porn into all conferences, workshops, educational campaigns about ‘safe-sex’. This includes university lectures and tutorials where students who object to pornography are now not called feminist, but 'homophobic', 'genderphobic' and 'transphobic'. So 'pro-sex' (which means pro-sexploitation) wimmin such as s/m advocate Gayle Rubin enter the gay male scene in San Francisco during the late 1970s. When she takes part in the San Francisco Sex Information training at a local gay centre, they show the audience ‘one hundred pornographic movies, at once’ (1/p.116). This is how gay men began to teach lesbians through ‘safe-sex education’ about what our sexuality should look like. Rubin recalls that, ‘The hardest thing for me to look at were all the spurting, coming cocks ... Their imagery is drenched with seme n... the clubs are drenched with semen ... (ibid,p.117). Sounds like the nuclear family. The sex industry begins to expand during the 1980s as pornography saturates popular culture under the defence of ‘safe sex’. Nancy Stoller reveals that:
The gay press does have a readership of wimmin and men, but it is overwhelmingly owned by men. Step three in the Queer-porn brotherhood puts wimmin at the forefront of claiming that prostitution, pornography and sadomasochism are sexually liberating and safe forms of femyle sexuality. What this literally means is that the most dangerous forms of sexual violence against wimmin are now being passed off as the safest sex. Safe for whom, fellas? While gay men in the first world reckon safe-sex means a bit of leak-free condom and a tube of lube, radical feminists are asking how the fuck do you expect wimmin to be safe from AIDS when rape, battery, and sexual exploitation are the hallmarks of male power over wimmin? But Queers in the first world aren’t LISTENING TO WIMMIN, they’re too busy pulling off to porn. How liberating is Queer porn for wimmin? How safe is Queer’s safe-sex industry? It took 12 years from the first diagnosis of an HIV infected man in New York for lesbians to even be registered on the Centre for Disease Control (CDC) Register. By that time, there had already been 100 reported cases of womyn to womyn transmission. During those 12 years, lesbians who were working for men in AIDS organisations such as ACT-UP remained in the 'other/risk not identified' category. Gay men fought for their own inclusion in the IV drug user classification, but left lesbians registered as 'not applicable', or non-existent (3/pp.94-96). Surprise surprise. How might the AIDS crisis have been handled if wimmin and not men had handled it? Well, a simple truth may have changed a lot; the truth that men infect wimmin with HIV at a rate 20 times higher than wimmin infect men (4/p.147). Makes dick-centred politics look like a war against wimmin, doesn’t it? Makes a dick look like a killer. Makes 'safe-sex' porn look like gynocide. Here’s another truth Queer skips over; the majority of AIDS victims are wimmin in sub-Sahara Africa, not gay men in first world nations (5). And yet another truth might have reared up if wimmin had controlled the AIDS agenda; that safe-sex for wimmin means freedom from sexual violence including man-child rape, man-womyn rape, man-womyn battery, and the growth of these misogynist practices into the institutions of prostitution, pornography, sex trafficking and marriage. That’s right, marriage. 50 per cent of wimmin are beaten by their male partners (6/p.13). Why don’t you give the bride a gun for her wedding present? She could wear the groom as something blue. What I want to say to you Johnno is that WIMMIN’S OPPRESSION IN SYSTEMS OF SEXPLOITATION IS NOT A FUCKING CONVERSATION. When you shove wimmin’s oppression under a rainbow flag and go skipping up parliament steps to say that pornography and prostitution are OK because you wanked to Jeffo getting it up the arse from Simon at the annual Queer festival last night, you are killing wimmin. To be for wimmin you have to be anti-Queer because Queer, like all other man-made movements, is based on the sexual subjugation of wimmin as sex and race and class. I am anti-Queer because I am for wimmin. My political position is standing beside wimmin freed from male ownership. That ownership may come in the form of the Queer/anarchist/liberal/postmodern Left-wing moulding of wimmin into comrades for a male-owned Movement that wants us on our backs for sex. Or it may come in the form of the religious/military/conservative Right-wing moulding of wimmin into wives in a male-owned Movement that wants us on our backs birthing sons. You think we don’t know that Queer and religious fundamentalist are two sides of the same fucking coin Johnno? You got one thing right. My stance on the sex industry does tell where my alliances really are. And they’re really not with Queer misogynist pricks who try to fool wimmin into believing that we can get liberated on our backs with our legs spread. One question for you Johnno; HOW STUPID DO YOU THINK WIMMIN ARE? The illusion that Queer liberates wimmin is over. Make sure those angel wings can fly because the rainbow flag won’t protect you this time. Searching
for something blue,
(1) Gomez, Jewelle; Hollibaugh, Amber; Rubin, Gayle (1998) ‘Another Place to Breathe’ in Eic Rofes (ed.) Opposite Sex (New York University Press, New York) Stoller, Nancy (1997) 'From Feminism To Polymorphous Activism: Lesbians in AIDS Organizations' in Martin Levine, Peter Nardi & John Gagnon (eds.) In Changing Times (University of Chicago Press, Chicago) (3) Campbell,C (1999)
Women, Families, and HIV/AIDS (4) Simmons, J; Farmer, P (1998) 'A Global Perspective' in Julie Connors & Janie Simmons (eds.) Women, Poverty, and AIDS Smeal, Eleanor 'Women are Casualties of World's Early Indifference Towards Aids Epidemic in Africa' Feminist Majority Foundation News www.feminist.org 6 July, 2000 (6) Poland, Louise 'Lesbians Are Everywhere' in Lesbiana August 2000 (Jude Dennis, Melbourne)
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