I found this piece by Dr Helen Pringle, ‘Killjoys, Wowser and The P-rn Wars’ in New Matilda so inspiring. I hope my fellow women’s activists will draw strength and renew their commitment to our cause, after reading it.
“Justice is an element of beauty as much as colour and outline on canvas.” – Mary Richardson
Were the Suffragettes puritanical? Hardly. As the debate over p*rn rages, the history of feminism is being mischaracterised as the terrain of wowsers and killjoys. Helen Pringle responds to Eva Cox
Eva Cox tries to portray feminists who have concerns about what she characterises as “tasteless porn” as simply being in the grip of “current anxieties about the dominance of markets”, and as linked to “puritanical” strains in the history of feminism. In the process, Cox has rewritten that history to police the boundaries of feminism so that it does not include women who have a concern with the power of images and words in pornography.
Cox also slips in a characterisation of some of the Suffragettes who campaigned for the vote as wowsers and killjoys. She laments, “Women members of the Christian Temperance Union fought for women to get the vote in the hope that women would vote to ban alcohol”. In fact, those women and others knew only too well the dangers that alcoholism posed to women’s safety and equality when it was linked to male entitlement.
The Suffragettes more broadly are often portrayed along Cox’s lines as delicate creatures asking for protection from “evil masculinity”. But when Christabel Pankhurst coined the slogan “Votes for Women … and Chastity for Men”, it was a call for an end to sexual subordination and damage of women often caused by the spread of VD through the prostitution of women. It was not a sexually puritanical claim. There is no evidence that Suffragettes, or in fact feminists, appreciated intimacy, love or beauty any less than anyone else. Read more>
4 Responses
The WPSU were not ‘puritanical’ rather they were the first feminists to analyse precisely how and why the male sexual double standard operated to maintain men’s pseudo sex right to women, girls and female babies. Eva Cox is parrotting the same lies men in power claimed when the militant suffragettes publicised precisely how male supremacist legal system punished women survivors of men’s sexual violence and absolved the male perpetrators of their accountability. Does Eva Cox know first wave feminists were the first women to engage in researching precisely how the male supremacist legal system operates and why this system constantly excused/mitigated male defendants’ accountability when they were convicted of committing sexual violence against a female. Of course not because Cox is a libertarian not a feminist.
For a detailed account of the campaigns first wave feminists engaged in when they began analysing how and why male sexual double standard operates to maintain male domination and control over women read The Real Facts of Life: Feminism and The Politics of Sexuality c1850-1940 by Margaret Jackson.
The real issue is holding men accountable for their pseudo male sex right to women and girls and that is why Eva Cox makes these preposterous claims. It is not a moral issue rather the issue is eliminating pseudo male sex right to women and girls and according women and girls their fundamental right of ownership of their bodies and sexual autonomy. Men have accorded themselves sexual autonomy and ownership of their bodies for centuries but continue to deny women and girls the same fundamental right. That is what First Wave Feminists were challenging and why they demanded an end to the male created sexual double standard.
And let’s not forget Australia’s own female suffragists – like Emma Goldman, Leontine Cooper, Louisa Lawson and Emma Miller. One of my favourite anecdotes about Emma Miller was during the 1912 General Strike, in which she led a contingent of female clothing workers. At one point the women’s advance was stopped by mounted police armed with bayonets, and they were driven back. Finally, at Ms Miller’s command and refusing to move any further, the ladies took their hatpins and jammed them into the mounted policemen’s thighs. Miller’s target was the Police Commissioner, Thomas Cahill.
Although the 1912 General Strike failed, it was argued by some union observers that it would have succeeded, had the men shown more of Mrs Miller’s fighting spirit. At her funeral, it was observed by a male union colleague: ‘ We men sometimes call women the weaker sex; to have known Mrs Miller is to make one ashamed of that term.’
I wrote a reply to the same Eva Cox article Helen Pringle is responding to. Have re-posted below:
The radical feminist argument concerning pornography is not reducible to a communitarian ethic regarding the pitfalls of capitalism. Feminists, like Tankard Reist are concerned with the sex-industry because it seriously harms and exploits women and girls, not just because it makes billions of dollars. Commodification is central but harm is the real issue. In other words, Tankard Reist doesn’t exist simply because, as Cox says, there are “current anxieties about the dominance of markets over ethics in the public sphere”. She is part of a long feminist line of abolitionists of sexual slavery that began with the critique of coverture in the late eighteenth century and now concentrates on the last bastion of male sex-right: pornography and prostitution.
When women and increasingly girls are reduced to body parts and orifices, as they are in porn, and this is one of the most popular forms of pop-culture consumed by men (often in secret), we have a massive societal problem on our hands. Why is that position so hard to countenance? Why are those who espouse it howled down, harassed, belittled, caricatured and otherwise demonised? Surely because they’ve struck a nerve? I’m not suggesting Cox is doing this but she does imply that Tankard Reist has some murky religious background that disqualifies her from feminism. I wonder: what is the point of this?
Cox in part agrees with Tankard Reist’s arguments concerning pornography, but her dismissive use of the term “sexploitation” fails to accord the abolitionist argument its due. It is thanks to feminists such as Tankard Reist (Dines, Jeffries and others) that the problem of porn, and the sex-industry more generally, is back on the agenda. This argument cannot be conflated with the right, and it cannot be reduced to a critique of capital by the left. It concerns as Caroline Norma says “the dominion of women by men”.
It’s not about making women victims, it is about acknowledging the society wide effects of a powerful, visceral form of media which depicts women as sex-objects to be used and brutalised. Even at its most benign pornography defines women’s worth in their looks and sexual value to men, and abstracts this from their humanity. Just because an individual woman defines her participation in the sex-industry as “empowering” does not mean that porn is not damaging to women as a sex class. Sociology 101 tells us that an individual’s experience is not the same thing as an institutional or structural impact. For example, one young woman may make a lot of money in porn and feel ok about it, but does that make it ok if ten other women have entered the industry because of homelessness, poverty, drug addiction, sexual abuse, or sex trafficking? And what about society at large and the impacts of pornification on male and female sexuality? What about the women and girls who find themselves pressured into – or worse, forced into – sex acts men have seen on porn? What about the partners of male users who are deeply distressed when they stumble across a gargantuan porn habit?
The issue here is over who can legitimately call themselves a feminist and, given the mutually exclusive criteria established by those in different camps, it seems there are some irreconcilable differences. One has to live with the paradox both of (inevitably) subscribing to a position and accepting that there are a multiplicity of positions. Melinda Tankard Reist is no less a feminist than Eva Cox, but she is a feminist with a different underlying philosophy and politics. Her religious perspective, and her putative “anti-abortion” stance is itself complex: rooted in a belief in the sanctity of life and a sense that women ought not to live in a society where single motherhood consigns them to poverty (as indeed it does). She is critical of the social context within which women make decisions about abortion. She is also critical of the termination of disabled or otherwise “imperfect” foetuses, which is an argument that deserves a hearing. I find it deeply problematic that she is not pro-choice, it is certainly incompatible with my own feminism, but this does not automatically disqualify her other arguments concerning pornography and the sexualisation of girls in popular culture. Here she has an important contribution to make.
The real question is not whether she is a feminist or not. Of course she is. The real question is why people are looking to derail her argument concerning the deleterious impact of porn. I would say – as a therapist – that we are in denial as a culture and very defended against the kinds of arguments that question male sex-right.
‘I would say – as a therapist – that we are in denial as a culture and very defended against the kinds of arguments that question male sex-right.’
I guess that’s as good an explanation as any. But I just don’t know anymore – not that I ever did. I have been trying to understand the way in which all calmness and reason seem to completely leave otherwise sensible people whenever these issues come up for debate and commentary.
At the heart of it seems to be a primevil rush to project an absolutist censorship intent (i.e. controlling parent) onto anyone who raises objections to pornography or to look at abortion in ways other than the polar opposites of pro-life and pro-choice. Many people whose politics are deeply opposed to free-market economics seem to see no corresponding dangers in leaving the pornography industry, cultural sexual imagery and abortion practices completely unregulated. So too, people who immediately see red at the possibility of censoring a repugnant music video or ban a child pageant, have little concern about the worrying news blackouts and officially enforced biases – in other words ‘invisible censorship’ – surrounding our military alliances and endeavours.