Sokari blogs about the International Women’s Day march in London and the exclusion of organized sex workers from the march:
I and my friends and colleagues left, what had started out as a march of solidarity – or so we thought at the beginning- with not just a sense of frustration and disgust but the realisation that the words RESPECT and SOLIDARITY were not in the vocabulary of some of the women attending the march and rally. Whilst they were prepared to listen to Middle Eastern and African women about violence, rape and prostitution, they were not prepared to listen to sex workers in their own cities and country not to speak of the vulgar racism spouting out of their mouths. Clearly for some attending the march, sex workers were not entitled to respect, solidarity or a voice and Black women were bitches!
How safe to stand up in London and shout support for the “other” not on your doorstep yet when you are face to face with the presence of sex workers and women of colour you try to silence them and scream “not in my backyard”!
Is sex work legal in London? That would probably be relevant to the public opinion, wouldn’t it?
You’ve got to be fucking kidding me?
International Women-we-deem-worthy Day? It’s rights for all women or rights for no women. As soon as you accept the idea that some people are more worthy than others and rights are to be metered appropriately, you buy into a hierarchy which intrinsically disadvantages women. You don’t smash patriarchy by playing along with it. If you accept subordination for some women, you accept it for all women. You’re just jockeying for positions on the ladder.
Augh, I hate Britain sometimes. My Uni put on a concert that night which didn’t even acknowledge that it was IWD at all. meh. Anglophone countries. meh.
Hey, Les, which planet do you live on? Some people are more worthy than
others. Once you lose track of that, you’re nothing and nobody.
Now, I personally have nothing against sex workers. I do not particularly like
them, either. It’s a ungrateful job, and no, no one should have to do it. Those
who force women into it should be put away. There was a time I helped with
that. Unfortunately, I’m no part of anyone’s repression apparatus nowadays.
But there are groups that I would not march with. There are people with
whom I would not associate, period. I allow everyone the same right. In my
mind, there is no place for debating whether the march’s organizers, and
especially the march participants have the right to snub a group they dislike.
What it says about them is a different story. And frankly, I do not have a
strong opinion on that.
It is subject to debate is whether sex workers are just like everyone else working
for a buck, just like every other non-violent criminal, or victims of society, or a
plague on all that’s good and decent. I’ve seen people defend any of these views.
Since the 80s I have tried not to think too much about those who prostitute
themselves. My job in law enforcement brought me in contact with too many
of them, and messed up my stereotypes. At the same time, the experience
reinforced my prejudice towards those who manage them, or use their services.
I found peace by telling myself that I would not judge the girls until the pimps
and the johns have been sorted out. Of course, soon afterwards, the world made
itself a better place by throwing me out on my ass, and leaving me with no one
to boss around but myself.
I would not mind hearing the opinions of other posters. I hope there won’t be
too many shorthand words and concepts so even dumb old me can understand.
Petar, as far as I can tell, no one is arguing that people have no right to exclude sex workers from their march. What people are arguing is that in a context like this, exercising that right makes the organizers assholes with a questionable grasp of concepts like “solidarity” and “respect.”
So you agree that excluding prostitutes from a march makes one an asshole?
from THIS march? yes.
Petar, as far as I can tell, no one is arguing that people have no right to exclude sex workers from their march. What people are arguing is that in a context like this, exercising that right makes the organizers assholes with a questionable grasp of concepts like “solidarity” and “respect.”
You might have a point if they were actually sex workers. What they are in fact is a group well known in UK feminist circles for being neither a collective, nor prostitutes, nor feminists.
Oh and the post you quoted forgot to mention that one of their number assaulted one of the march organisers who had to be taken by wheelchair to a waiting ambulance for emergency treatment.
And now ECP are charging racism too – even though the march organisers were overwhelmingly black women and the line up of speakers reflected this. Interesting – and for those of us in the UK – utterly utterly predictable.
I don’t get why they can’t exclude a group with which they disagree.
It’s clear that there are very disparate views within feminism itself about whether being a sex worker is good/empowering/bad/patriarchal; whether it benefits or harms women; etc.
So…. is a pro-sex-work group obliged to give stage time to a bunch of people who are going to lecture them on how horribly they’re hurting women’s rights? I don’t see why. Similarly, is an anti-sex-work group obliged to give stage time to a group who they think hurts, rather than helps, women?* I don’t see why, either.
Yes, the sex work group is made up of women. So what? They can go throw their own IWD rally if they want. It’s about viewpoint. There are plenty of uber-conservative pro-life women, and plenty of “the wife should submit to her husband” women out there, too, and I sure hope that everyone doesn’t need to give their beliefs extra credence on IWD.
> > So you agree that excluding prostitutes from a march makes one an asshole?
> from THIS march? yes.
THESE people? Not necessarily.
…I mean, I’m trying to imagine an International Men’s Day (yeah, yeah, I know, IMD is the other 364 days a year*) where everyone expected all the men to suddenly become friends, or tolerate each other, or share similar viewpoints. Why are women supposed to be friendly towards folks they don’t like?
If spicy is correct, then perhaps not these people. I stand by my answer to your question however, which characterized them as prostitutes. Yes, I think excluding prostitutes from a women’s rights march for being prostitutes is an asshole decision.
The deal with International Women’s Day is that it is the time for women everywhere to suspend their arguments about how best to bring down the patriarchy and come together to celebrate women. Hell, I would even let Phyllis Schlafly herself come along with her Concerned Women of America, even though I personally think they are helping to maintain the patriarchy with every ounce of their beings.
The thing is, Phyllis Schlafly wouldn’t come because she doesn’t want to be associated with us man-hating, recreational abortionist, anti-marriage, free love, lesbian whores. However, sex workers do want to be associated with all who seek to empower women and by not allowing them to, it’s one way of not allowing them to define themselves. A definition is placed upon them (i.e. they are bad for women). And not letting people define themselves is feeding into the same sort of thinking that keeps women disempowered.
And Petar, I’ve watched enough COPS to know that your view of prostitution is probably much different from my sex-worker-blog reading self, but I think we can agree that prostitutes face a lot of danger, exploitation from employers, and shitty working conditions. While we may disagree about whether or not it should be legal, I do think we can find common cause in providing safer working conditions for them — you know, other than locking them up.
Michelle, I never advocated jailing the prostitutes. ‘Put away’ referred to those
who force women to prostitute themselves, and I believe it was quite cleat it did.
I am not saying that my own actions have not led to women being arrested for
prostitution, but we hauled away the organizers, and only checked the papers of
the ‘workers’. But we were enforcing the law, not writing it. Hell, even that
was hypocritical enough, given that we were going only after prostitution rings
with foreign clients, not after the gypsies that plied their trade at train stations.
As for whether prostitution should be illegal, I am not sure. My moralizing self
says ‘yes’, my libertarian instincts say ‘no’, and I am not _sure_ whether they
are good or bad for society and for themselves. I strongly lean towards bad.
But I do not agree with you about the match. Not being a woman, I may not be
qualified to speak about the March 8th rally. But if I was taking part in a
march celebrating freedom of expression, I would still not want Phelps Phreaks
marching next to me. And I assure you, some women I know feel more strongly
about prostitutes than I do about gay-bashing religious nuts. I also think that
some women would welcome Phyllis Schlafly less eagerly than you would. I
studied her at the time – as an anti-communist, not as an anti-feminist, but
still. I remember that some people viewed her as a monster for her opposition
to ERA, and would gladly ‘define’ her.
Petar, please don’t put linebreaks within your paragraphs. It makes your comments almost impossible to read, at least from some browsers/settings.
Getting back to the main point… Yes, it would be too much to expect all women (or all men) to get along about every issue. On the other hand, with the specific case of excluding sex-workers from this rally (i.e. the situation as described in the OP, before the [as-yet unverified] information introduced by Spicy)… yeah, that would make the rally organizers assholes.
Whether or not sex work is good or bad for feminism, if all the sex-workers are trying to do is seek recognition and solidarity as women, then there’s no good reason to throw them out of the rally.
OK, it turns out that this story is about one thousand times more complicated than it appears. This Comment is Free thread, if you can bear to read it all, begins to give a fuller picture of what’s going on, but you have to scroll past the article itself, which is pretty damned stupid, the millions of commenters wondering why women would want to march, given how good they have it, and a lot of sounding off from various directions.
Even given that I’m not sure you get the full picture, because as far as I can make out this has partly to do with the SWP*, revolutionary communism in the UK, and all the complexity that would be necessary for a group to end up being described as ‘Mad trot pimps’. If this is opaque to US readers I can only apologise. I am exhausted just thinking about it. Then about three-quarters of the way down the thread it emerges that they may have been excluded because they failed to provide transcripts for translation to sign language sufficiently far in advance.
Sorry for the line breaks. I hate the way Pocket Explorer formats my posts otherwise, and Firefox formats them just fine anyway. I was not aware they broke other browsers. I’ll avoid them from now on.
As for the rally. Please answer me this, feminism and sex workers aside. If you were celebrating freedom of expression, and had to march next to the Westboro Baptist Church, would you
A) March anyway
B) Not march
C) Do your best to have them kicked out of the rally
If you choose C), as I would, do you think that the feelings of the women who objected to ECP should not be considered, because they are ‘wrong’?
By the way, please don’t take me as endorsing the ‘mad trot pimps’ description. I even came closeish to joining the SWP myself, and held back mostly because I felt excessively pressurised, though I had other reasons as well. Leftist politics in Britain is so much a matter of strategic alliances at every single level, it’s not funny. One aspect at least of what is going on there is that the far left genuinely do want to ‘radicalise’ those in more moderate movements, so as to build up the tide of popular support that a genuine social movement would require. In order to do this, they have to keep the more ‘extreme’ aspects of their politics in the background and stress their common ground. Many of the more ‘moderate’ members of such alliances feel resentful of what they perceive as infiltration. Add the fact that in such groups there are always some who feel that desperate times call for desperate measures, and are, I would suspect (though I have no direct confirmation of this) prepared to stage ‘radicalising’ scenes that are essentially faked, and of course the fact that there are always those within ‘radical’ groups who just like fighting and making noise – and you have a recipe for all kinds of trouble. One of the things that concerned me about the pressure I felt was being put on me to join was that I sensed they were more concerned that I join than that I join freely and informedly. And I wonder whether some of the troubling antifeminist comments attributed to the ECP in that thread aren’t instances of speakers ‘playing to their audience’; though they could equally well be instances of the sexism that does sometimes plague the left – I have just been reading Zizek (don’t know how to do those mark-over-the-Z things) and it’s frustrating as hell when he segues straight from astute analysis to what-the-fuck statements about male and female thought patterns.
There are several comments on the thread I linked to in which sex workers speak up about the counselling and advocacy work that the ECP provided for them when they were threatened with prosecution, or when police refused to prosecute crimes against them. If ECP is a revolutionary movement, this could be a heartwarming story about not forgetting what’s important in the face of larger goals, a heartwarming story about how you build grass roots well and positively, a worrying story about using good works to target the vulnerable the way some of the more unsavoury Christian groups do, or even deliberate disinformation by ECP members using sock puppets. I’m lost. When I’m trying to work out things like this, it seems like my usual epistemological toolbox gives me nothing.
Edits don’t seem to be working for me, but if they were I’d want to amend my ‘sexism that does sometimes plague the left’ to ‘sexism that does sometimes plague the Marxist left’. Because I was trying to talk about a distinct problem whereby Marxists and Marxist movements can become more sexist than would be usual in more ‘mainstream’ movements, not to act as if nobody had ever commented on sexism in politics before; though of course the ‘Unhappy Marriage’ is nothing new either.
I think it’s irresponsible to post this, without mentioning – as one of your commenters has done – that a member of the group involved assaulted a steward at the rally.
Your post is also inaccurate – there were a number of sex worker groups on the march itself and at the rally. Sex workers were not excluded from the march.
There was an issue with one of the speakers at the post-march rally – I’ve heard contradictory accounts about what happened, but I believe the march organisers are due to release a statement about this tomorrow.
Sorry if my previous comment is a bit harsh – I just think that it’s so sad to see that a massive, 4-5,000 march in London has received barely any attention from feminist blogs outside of the UK, despite being a vital and impressive demonstration of the resurgence of the feminist movement in this country.
The only thing that gets linked up is a post giving one side of a regrettable incident, without any balance or consideration that there might be more to this than the account on this particular blog. Even a quick glance at Cath’s post on CiF, or a search for ‘million women rise’ on google will bring up some accounts of the other side of the story, and mentions of the fact that there was an assault.
Whatever actually happened between the organisers and the woman who was apparently disinvited to speak, and the stewards, it happened behind the scenes. The only thing that the thousands of women on the march and women and men at the rally knew about it, was a brief message over the loudspeaker calling for the police.
Going back to the original blog, the accusation that a member (members) of the sex worker group attacked people involved with the march is being contested.
That’s no surprise – it’s a typical ECP tactic but as an eyewitness to the events in question, I know it to be utter rubbish.
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Spicywrites and everyone else – Yet more demonising of the ECP and members of the Global Strike for Women. I was present with this group, women I had just met and as such I consider my observations to be objective. I did not witness any of the vile actions that have been attributed to the group and yes I did see everything.
As I have said elsewhere and I will repeat here. The mantra against this group of women is something I would expect to here out of the mouths of the police force not other women. You can see my comments at the Women’s Space and on my blog about what happened. I was there and lies are being spread about who did what and about abuse and violence attributed to the ECP and their supporters.
I was present when Terisa MacKay was being told she could not speak and the reasons given in my presence where to do with her speech and not to do with anything else about transcripts etc etc. We were also informed that this decision was made by only two of the organisers whilst the rest had no problem but agreed to go along with the two. The organisers may now wish to tell another story but that is what was said in my presence.
The speech by Terisa MacKay is now online so maybe someone will tell me what was so inappropriate about the speech. We are all equal but sex workers are less equal than other women – I think we have all heard that one applied to other groups now and in the past!
On a final note what really disgusts me is the inference by some men and women who talk as if sex workers wake up one morning and say you know what – i think i will be a sex worker and have men fuck, rape and abuse me all day long, risk my life on the street, because thats what i want in my life!
re. #16:
if i had to march next to Fred Phelps for the cause of freedom of expression, well, i frankly don’t know what i’d do. free expression of strong disapproval by means of a custard pie to somebody’s face would at least be considered.
but if i were marching for the cause of freedom of expression, and found myself marching next to anybody who’d tried to kick anybody else out of the march because disagreeing with what they freely expressed… i’d probably pack up and go home in disgust, giving that cause up as obviously lost.