Posted by Bitch Lab at 1:45 am and filed under Queer, Rants, Sex Wars ::
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Shame affirmative Lifestyle Feminism Return of the depressed and inflated?
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For what it’s worth, I don’t like Bitch Lab, I don’t read her, I don’t think she’s very bright, and I think the main thing she piggybacked on recently was a comment thread to a post she didn’t author. Nice appropriation, that.
So: Don’t like Bitch Lab? Join the club, and don’t read her. Read the women she rips off instead. They’re better.
So: Don’t like Bitch Lab? Join the club, and don’t read her. Read the women she rips off instead. They’re better.
01-01-2007
Just go ahead and bitch
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I think I’m going to have to read this way more than once. It’s…incredible.
well, I for one, thank you for writing that, even if it pissed you off. I feel like hoping up and down and screaming–I’m getting it I’m getting it!!
thanks bitch.
Yes… brilliant. This says it all. I’m probably going to have to write a post where I totally suck your (delicate feminine?) cock about it and tell everyone to go read it immediately.
very powerful Bitch|Lab (if I may still address you by this name). thank you thank you.
If this is what you write when you’re angry, pissed off, and incoherent…well, it’s beautiful, well-written, detail rich, and poignant. I’m not endorsing that you remain angry, pissed off, and incoherent, but you’ve created something excellent from those feelings.
– a sex positive, pro-pornstitution, radical black woman
My only compliant is that there are too many true sentences in one place here.
“They are socialists who have a critique of the whoredom and prostitution in capitalism, so can hardly imagine why anyone would want to demonize sex workers or act as if ’selling themselves’ isn’t exactly what all of us do.”
Hey, I resemble that remark!
Another great rant, B\L. You are definitely on a roll here.
WORD.
Just. Plain. Fucking. WORD.
Permission to repost at the SmackChron??
Anthony
http://redgarterclubwebsite.co...../index.php
when i first began blogging a year or so ago, i’d never heard the term sex-positive and was too embarrassed to ask anyone what it meant. so i did some digging on my own, and still had a very shallow understanding. so thank you for this, BL. I’ve never gotten as clear and as reasoned an explanation.
stamdimg fucking ovation.
what it really boils down to for me is–and you can apply this in any number of non-sexual situations as well:
“I’m cold. Put on a sweater.”
…and some peoples’ apparent inability to tell why attempting to lay this on other people is a problem, no matter how many times and how patiently/angrily/full of naked hurt and please for understanding it is explained to them.
No. That kind of boundary-blurring is not “caring about other people.” That kind of boundary-blurring is not “the personal is political.” That is, “I CAN’T TELL WHERE YOU START AND I END.” That is a PROBLEM, no matter what ideology or other justification it is dressed up in. IF one wants to sputter and whine about how this is “individualism,” go for it. But I say here: “we,” if there is going to be any “we,” means “you” AND “me,” (and “her,” and…); it doesn’t mean “you get to define what ‘we’ is.” Or I, or her, either, for that matter.
I’ve been thinking about that topic drift, in my own incoherent state. When I first started my blog, it was supposed to be primarily a religious-left perspective on sociopolitical-religiocultural issues, plus some creative nonfiction pieces, posted sermons, and accounts of radical activism and street medicine.
I feel like this little let’s-play-war forcing of us all into fictive “camps” and constant harping on a couple of issues has made me into Just Another Trans Blogger, you know? Instead of getting at what I aimed to get at, I find myself finally getting in the game by dealing with the same old bullshit and the same old ‘when did you stop beating your wife?’ baiting–and switching.
I hope you haven’t been dragged too far off course, Bitch; I may appreciate the brilliance that happens on some of the topics you get shoved onto, but it makes me wonder what kinds of stuff you’d be putting out if you were just dealing with what you wanted to.
Okay, I haven’t slept in a really long time. Maybe this is nonsense. Thanks again for this post, anyhow. I know I needed it.
i ended up writing way more about feminism and particularly the ever fascinating drama of online feminist wars than i had set out to do, that’s for sure. not really letting it bother me, though. if people want to view me as this or that kind of writer, that’s fine; i’ll just keep writing about what interests me, and they can follow along or not.
Great stuff, QDFKA(). ;)
Bila Quedew,
Wow, as someone who is still pretty green in the feminist blogosphere, I found this post particularly helpful. Way to demystify. I really understand what it means to be sex positive now. Also, as a white girl from a poor, single-mom household (and also as member of academia), I especially appreciate this part:
Exactly. Exactly.
Also, you just had to add “(even in their mouths!)” to “getting shat on” didn’t you?
For everything besides that, thanks.
JA
PS - Welcome to my blogroll.
Thank you thank you thank you, love this post. So many lived realities that people try and separate, to say they don’t matter in the grand scheme of things, or that one class of people is inherantly different from another. On a more personal note, I hate it when people declare that one person isn’t living up to another’s gendered ideals. Drives me absolutely batty.
I just get pissed when people tell me that porn, no matter how it’s made, is evil and anti faminist. Even (aparently) if its one guy sucking of another guy for the pleasure of a woman who’s directing them.
I wish to hell that the anti porn crew *knew* about porn. I mean really knew about the industry, the mechanics, the people in the industry, what a day as a porn producer or actor is like, etc…
Which is to say, lots of really good people I knwo work in the porn indutry. To me, they’re real people. To the anti-porn crowd (who’ve never met them, of asked them one damn thins), they’re monsters destroying the world.
What sort of ratfucking scumbag would I be if I turned my back on real friends to go sit with people who were throwing shit at them for what I can see to be no good reason?
Which is to say, you are against porn as it exists now and want to see a world where something like porn probably exists but it is shorn of it’s sexism, racism, classism, ablism, etc.
I’ve got some Buck Angel porn lying around. Want it?
“getting shat on (even in their mouths!) ”
I could have gone all day without knowing that…
For everything else, fascinating stuff! Well said and all that.
Josh Jasper,
Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.
And re: Buck Angel… I mentioned him in a comment on another blog earlier today.
BL:
BRaVO. Amazing post. You rule. That is all…
Josh- You aren’t the only one who has those thoughts/feelings/wishes…trust me…in short…right the fuck on.
Thanks for this, Dewd. :)
I think it’s really telling that the spotless feminists would slum with the “sluts”. It reminds me of some stories I’ve heard of right-wing women getting abortions and leaving and going right back to picket other women getting abortions because they’re not like that.
I’m thinking of several anti-SM feminists I’ve known who will finally, secretly, shamefacedly admit to their fantasies about incest, rape, ageplay or other, often very extreme, erotic domination or submission. I think a lot of people are far more concerned with not being sullied by the rest of us and our supposed patriarchy-stains than they actually are about really cleaning up their own consciences. It’s easier if we own up to it, if we’re the out ones, and they’re the ones who run to us in moments of unreasoning need, forced by the alien demon of lust into eventual indiscretion.
I think it’s important to talk about the people out there who do this, to mention that it does go on and it’s not acceptable.
MMMMMMMMMMWAH!
Q|D, you rock to the extreme. This post is one for the ages.
I dun get it? Cliff Notes pwease?
Wow. I’m not sure if I should thank you or bitch you out. My fever was starting to die down and then I read this and now it’s shot through the roof again.
I’ll be re-reading this several times. I’ll be learning something several times.
Un-fucking-believable.
Incoherent my ass. Talk about dwelling in possibilities, being large and containing multitudes, knowing rivers?
I reference poets here because this is the stuff of poetry. It may be prose but it stretches the limits of language and knowledge in ways that many think only poetry can (well, those with a limited idea of poetry, but that’s for another rant of mine).
I just have to say that I have been rocked like I have seldom been rocked before by this post. This is too good for even a poet’s words.
Oh and for the record, I’m not disparaging poetry above (who me? never!). I’m just saying that folks have a limited view of poetic writing. Poetry is not always written in verse.
I know you didn’t write this just so that you could collect backpats and “attagirls”, but wow. righteous.
Amber: And hey, we both read Jefferson’s blog. Small blogosphere.
Damn.
And, thanks.
Josh:
My acquaintance with Jefferson goes beyond reading but… some people might not appreciate me hijacking this thread for such sordid purposes.
Kevin,
Prose poetry, discursive poetry, etc. etc.
“Stretches the limits of language” Yes. That’s it.
Dude yes.
One for the ages, for sure.
yes, thank youuuuuuu. seriously, as a middle-class young white woman who’s kinky and bi, this totally rocked my socks and made me feel so good about my sexuality and who I am. And I love how you included the bits about sex-positive not necessary excluding people who aren’t into casual sex–I’m definitely a strictly monogamous person for whom sex is full of emotional intimacy, so sometimes I feel, well, like a prude.
Thanks again, :]
Shit. I just looked over all of this again and it’s amazing (and long!)
I just found you via Belledame and I think I love you. THANK YOU for writing this.
I don’t call myself “sex positive”, because the initial description of what that meant didn’t seem like me, but what other term is there to use? I think that feminists need to start cutting each other a lot more slack about what we do in our private lives, and about our personal choices in general. I don’t get why participation in BSDM, or wearing clothing deemed “inappropriate”, or fucking men means that someone should be kicked out of the club. I don’t get why there should be only one model that everyone has to follow. People are almost infinately varied - what’s so wrong with that?
The class issue is there too. I’m part of the class that’s doing the oppressing and setting the stupid “standards”, at least demographically, but that doesn’t mean I’m not aware of how alienating all this crap about standards is. If we just want to form a little clique that makes us feel better about ourselves then sure, exclude away, but if we want an actual movement? This exclusionary stuff needs to stop.
It’s always comforting to run across other people who seem to be on the same page.
YES YES AND FUCKING YES. God I wish I’d had even an ounce of your phrasing and your explanation when during a “feminist discussion” at my college (strong feminist history, women’s school, etc. etc.) it very quickly became the blind-to-the-patriarchy (or at least this is what we were insinuated as being) us versus the Real Feminists (TM) who were totally and unabashedly saying that what sex-workers said didn’t matter, because THEY knew what was good for them. Who couldn’t handle a showing of an interview with a feminist pornographer, and refused to associate us (the org) with it. Two sides of the same feminist org– fucking frightening.
I’m going to read this again and again and print it out and take it to meetings- fuck yes.