"See, I think if you want to call yourself a feminist maybe what you really need to grok is that whatever a woman wants to put in the orifice of her choice is no one's damn business but her own. Is that really so hard to understand?"
--Cassandra Says
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13 comments:
That's about as blunt as you can put it.
sometimes simple is best.
So I've been thinking about something. On the American feministosphere, you can basically guarantee that there will be at least 3 parallel flamewars on pr0n at any given point in time. But I also hang out on a few blogs and sites run by Canadian feminists, and while on OCCASION there'll be a porn flamewar, it's rarely a subject that anyone seems to think about much. I wonder what the difference is.
How many sites are there run by Canadian feminists, anyway? I only know two - Majikthise and Liberal Debutante - and of these, only the Liberal Debutante really lives in Canada.
Even on American feminist blogs, there aren't that many flamewars about porn. Feministing hasn't had any porn flamewar in months. The closest thing to a porn flamewar I've seen on Feministe lately involved Ilyka flaming me for saying that the correct way to criticize Kendall's porn-rape study was not to snark but to explain why the methodology is for shit.
There are quite a few sites that are run by feminists in Canada or have a Canadian component, but they aren't strongly connected to the US blogosphere. Majikthise is technically a Canadian but she comments mostly on the US, and I've vaguely heard of Liberal Debutante but she's also not really connected to the Canadian blogosphere much. I'm thinking of sites like Marginal Notes and Politics'n'Poetry and so on.
It's obviously not going to be as large as the US feminist blogosphere.
I've got a number of non-U.S. feminist sites in the 'roll, can't tick off who's from where off the top. I did once see a French site that takes the anti-pr0n position and the usual stance; that's not on there.
there are a lot of U.K. neo-radfems, possibly even more than in the U.S. otoh, there's way more of a socialist feminist movement over there. well, Volsunga left recently, but she was one example. stroppyblog's another you don't see so much of over here. Winter runs a site that links to radical/anti-porn feminists as well as non-radicals; she herself is more queer-oriented. they still pulled the link from Alas, though, with regrets.
It's also by and large (not exclusively, but overwhelmingly) a very white thing, this particular form of infighting.
But I mean, well, here's a list of international feminist activism links; one can browse for oneself. fighting pr0n isn't high on the agenda, at first glance, even if Feminista! is listed.
http://www.worldfeminism.com/links.htm
--oh Alon, if this is what you mean by the Canadian fora, then: yes. just added them recently. it does have a rather different flavor.
http://www.breadnroses.ca/forums/
If anyone's interested in what Irish feminists are up to, this site looks promising:
http://www.tallgirlshorts.net/thewayofwomen/
again: rather different feel from U.S. sites. not boards, though. mostly interviews with prominent Irish feminists, including the amazing Mary Condren.
http://www.threemonkeysonline.com/threemon_article_mary_condren_serpent_goddess_feminism.htm
--i mean mandos, sorry. is breadnroses one of the ones you hang out on?
Yes. I'm their occasional volunteer tech support.
Breadnroses is not specifically intended as a feminist site, although feminism is contained in its mandate. It evolved into something that is largely feminist-oriented because of its peculiar history. Basically, it's the result of a schism with enmasse.ca, which is the result of a very massive schism in Babble, once (and probably still) the most prominent progressive board in Canada. This cascade of schisms started a few months ago. I stuck with the most schismatic group...
hm. I'm presuming the schism wasn't about pr0n, then.
The original schism was very emotional, but mostly procedural. The original moderator of Babble was fired by its parent, Rabble. A lot of things that had gotten wound up and suppressed were all of a sudden released, and a major exodus ensued. A major issue was, really, a matter of whose board Babble really was---the giant community it had built (of which I was a member from almost the beginning 5.5 years ago) or the parent organization who originally intended it as a means of publicizing their own content from partner activist organizations.
So the first schism had nothing to do with feminist issues as such.
So a lot of these oldies left Babble and started up a new board, enmasse, that would operate more as a democratic co-op. Let's just say that in the absence of the rabble/babble ecology, the personality conflicts among some of the oldies were cast into sharp relief. What happened was that, bubbling under the surface, there had been some resentment between people whose focus was mainly gay rights and those whose focus was mainly feminism, and it boiled over massively, for many complicated reasons. The feminist component eventually had enough, and they moved to breadnroses.
It too didn't directly have much to do with pr0n. I didn't myself entirely understand what the fight was about. In both schisms, I stuck with the schmatics for various reason other than what the schism was about. (ie, I wasn't too exercised over the firing and I didn't understand the gays vs. feminists warz.)
The point of breadnroses was to have a general lefty political discussion board that was friendly to the feminist perspectives of the second-order schmatics.
Rabble, by the way, is the brainchild of Canada's most prominent feminist Judy Rebick who was for a while also its titular head. The Babble schism had as a subtext certain fissures among offline activist groups in Canada. Canada's a smaller place, so the personalities of its public activists are much more obviously visible on its political web sites.
thanks, mandos.
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