Re: Prostitution and the left

[Xxxx Xxxxx Xxxxxx <xxxxxxxx@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Lou, thanks for the clarification and making this dabate much more clearer.

Here we have! That is how "sex work idealism" sounds!  "High class call girl".
Should I join the ranks from now on? I may look like a super star!

ohh well..

Xxxx

Louis Proyect wrote:

> I think this discussion/debate would be a lot clearer if two of the leading
> principal's were here, which is about as likely as a snowfall in hell. One
> is Harry Cleaver, a adherent of 'autonomist Marxism' and the other is Doug
> Henwood, LM fellow-traveler and postmodernist. In a debate on PEN-L around
> these same questions, both Harry and Doug were oblivious to the class
> dimension and relied exclusively on the testimony of 'feminist' call girls,
> in Doug's case Tracy Quan and in Harry's case, Sera Pinwill. In my opinion,
> neither Doug nor Harry, seemed that engaged with the compulsory character
> of class relations that forced poor women to sell their bodies. Both saw
> the activities of call girls as having some kind of emancipatory feminist
> character. Here is a letter that Pinwell wrote to Cleaver that he made
> public on PEN-L in order to refute his and Doug's critics, which included
> me and Jim Craven. It is not so much that Quan or Pinwill are wrong. It is
> that to rely on their testimony exclusively leads in the wrong direction by
> omitting class considerations. With Doug, we understand that it is part of
> pattern. Whenever the discussion of maquilas came up, he was always anxious
> to cite a boneheaded Nation Magazine article that spoke about the
> 'feminist' benefits of women working in maquila factories. This boiled down
> to them being able to watch male strippers after work and not having to put
> up with the 'rural idiocy' of farming villages.
>
> ----
>
> Dear Harry,
>
> __________ posted some of your correspondence with James Craven on Whorenet
> (for sex workers and interested others), and I have to say that I think
> Craven's arguments are so typically thoughtless and patronizing.
>
> A bit of background:  My name is Sera Pinwill.  I am the co-ordinator of
> Workers In Sex Employment (WISE) in the ACT Inc., which is a sex worker
> education/advocacy group in Canberra, Australia.  I have worked as a whore
> on and off (no pun intended) for the past 15 years, both on the streets of
> Melbourne and Sydney, in brothels and massage parlours, and for myself as a
> high class call girl.
>
> It enrages me to hear other people - people who have absolutely NO IDEA of
> how I feel and what my life is like, making assumptions and judgments on my
> behalf, and that is exactly what Craven has done.
>
> Of course - this is my truth and the truth of many, many women and men who
> I am involved with on a daily basis.  Knowing how much pride I take in my
> professionalism, I am much more inclined to seek out the services of a
> professional during the times when I feel that I need someone to cater for
> my desires.  I do not abuse them, nor they me.  We fulfill each others
> needs.  We are adults engaging in consensual and pleasurable activity - and
> to suggest that I am abusive or deluded in my thinking is patronizing and
> shows egomania in its extremes
>
> Louis Proyect
> Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org/

--

Xxxx Xxxxx Xxxxxx
PhD Student
Department of Political Science
SUNY at Albany
Nelson A. Rockefeller College
135 Western Ave.; Milne 102
Albany, NY 12222



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