To the two women who liked my ‘Bin the Bunny’ t-shirt yesterday

Yesterday I was in a certain town whose name begins with O, wearing my Bin the Bunny t-shirt, searching for secondhand bookshops and generally cursing the heat (yes, it is occasionally warm in England). Two women at two different points in my day stopped me to say how much they liked my t-shirt, which, as you can imagine, made me very happy and very glad that I chose that particular garment to wear. I told them to google ‘bin the bunny’ to find the home of these t-shirts.

So on the off-chance that those two women happen to read my blog (very off-chancy, I know), here is the official Bin the Bunny website. And thank you so much for making my day, and reminding me of the very real resistance out there to the objectification of women!

love and hugs and t-shirts,
Laurelin

a ramble on anxiety disorder and conversation

Anxiety - it can really mess you up.

You say something… then you are overwelmed by the feeling of how wrong you are, how dreadful it was for you to have spoken. You may start shaking, sweating, derealising, depersonalising.
You have to put it right. You backtrack. The feelings increase in intensity. You are still wrong. You must be wrong. You can feel the wrongness everywhere. Worse than ‘wrong’ (as in merely incorrect, mistaken) you are bad.
You try to speak again, perhaps, but every word you say is wrong. You are getting it wrong. You are failing, trembling. You feel pathetic and weak.
The more you speak, the more you try to communicate at this juncture, the wronger and eviller you feel. You backtrack, you try to explain, the words do not come, you must have it wrong.
The ‘wrong’ feeling crawls inside and is with you wherever you go, whatever you do. You curse yourself because you were pathetic. You curse yourself for backtracking, for giving in, for speaking in the first place.
Speaking is a trap, perhaps. The more you backtrack, the worse it gets.

The answer is, of course, to back off. You learn not to comment online when you are in the midst of a panic attack such as this, you will embarrass yourself, and then curse yourself eternally.
You know you need to back off, if only for a while. Back off and think. What are you trying to say? What is the real issue here? Whence comes the panic?
You have to put up with your own imperfections, you have to allow yourself to make mistakes, to sound stupid or weak, to accept that you will not always reach the impossibly high moral standards you have set for yourself.

People with anxiety are often perfectionists with regards to themselves. Falling short of the mark is unbearable to them, yet inevitable.

So you finally retire, you grieve a little, and eventually the panic eases. Only you know it is there. Always there to some extent.
You try to live with your imperfections, try to make sense of your exaggerated sense of shame.

You try.

Sexual assualt as entertainment- boycott Johnny Vegas

Since when was sexual assault funny?

No comments criticising the woman here, or telling her what she ’should’ have done, will be published. The person whose actions are in question is Vegas; this is a clear case of an abuse of power- can you imagine how vulnerable this young woman was in this situation? It is the perpetrator who is to be censured, not the victim.

I think I may post on misogyny in comedy at some point, and I would welcome any comments on this subject.

ETA: for the next dipshit whose abusive or stupid/ insensitive comment I refuse to publish, here are some tips:
1) read what I write properly before getting defensive,
2) consider the context of your comments, even entertain the possibility (gasp!) that you may be in the wrong,
3) censorship is not a blogger refusing to publish your words on a website. Let me tell you a little something about censorship. You do not have a right to my space, no matter how smart/ important/ rational you may think you are,
4) consider apologising,
5) when I call you on your behaviour towards survivors, consider that you may have acted inappropriately,
6) read The Rules before posting,
7) if you are male, read this and think,
8 ) use your conscience, not your pride,
9) do your homework; I’m not the homework bunny.

Time for a pointless post

I’ve overslept, there’s some hayhever going on I think, and I’m desperate for a cup of tea. I’m also very achy from my last kung fu grading- would you believe that fighting two and then three people on one’s own is difficult? Still, I passed my grading and have been walking around (well hobbling really) feeling a ridiculous amount of pride. I’ve also been informed I have a very nasty punch and kick. Something to add to my CV, perhaps?

So it must be time for pictures of ducks:

And flowers:

And for the person/ people who have googled ‘laurelin pictures’, here are two self-portraits especially for you:

This one I call ’self-portrait with old keyboard’

And this one, ’self-portrait with new keyboard’

(’Tis true, I am in reality a disembodied hand with bony fingers. Secret’s out!)

Any more photo requests? Speak now while I’m still excited about having a camera on my phone…

Miss Sammi Berg Responds to her Detractors

This post is another announcement by Sam Berg, this time in response to the rumours and slanders circulating around the blogosphere regarding her statement on William and Mary. I’m leaving the comments on for the time being, but the minute I receive abuse or other forms of stupidity they will be turned off. Rule number one: read The Rules before you comment.

There are a lot of lies being told about me right now. I’m used to that because it comes with the pro-woman activism that kooky kid called life dropped into my lap like an unexploded bomb, but it’s rather concentrated at the moment. Most of it is nonsense, like that I’m trying to get the pro-sex work group kicked off campus (I’m not) or that I’m afraid to debate sex workers (I’m not) or that I said RenEv made threats personally to me (she didn’t and I didn’t say she did), but there is one very serious bit of business tucked into the ever-heaping distortions that I feel must be addressed.

Renegade Evolution is saying that I sent her threatening private emails. I have never emailed RenEv. Not once. What would be the point?

So where did the supposed emailed “threat” come from? I think I know, and I think you’re all going to want to learn what I know, because the pieces are fitting together for me very clearly for the first time.

Remember that person who committed fraud by lying to one of Genderberg’s moderators about being anti-pornography and anti-prostitution so they could spy on our private forums and then release words from there publicly? If you need or want a recap about the violation of women’s safe space that happened one year ago today in April 2007 you can read this:

http://msjared.blogspot.com/2007/05/per … ample.html

Caught up? Good.

Also in April 2007, the aforementioned lying person started a hate blog called “Radical Feminist Terrorism” where the person who stole private writings from GB spewed her vituperative guts out with such psychotic absurdities as:

“You can’t really understand the hatred that is embodied in many of the posts on Genderberg. Many members of that forum simply do not see other women as human at all.“

“I am not sure why the belief that women should be free to live as they wish is so dangerous. I do know that to many in the Genderberg this belief in women’s freedom is utterly inexcusable. They will do anything to destroy it.”

“While many will claim that Genderberg is a “safe space” my belief is that there should be no safe space for those who work to destroy women. There should be no dark corner where ANYONE can get together and plot against or foster hatred of women.”

“There is no evil that these haters of women will not stoop to. There is no vile act of malice they cannot justify. They will do anything in their power to destroy or silence anyone they disagree with. In their hate they are trying to destroy her. In their blood lust for a purge they are trying to force Renegade Evolution to reveal who I am. They want to close the hole so they can go back to plotting against women in the dark.”

“In my time on Genderberg I read more hatred of women than I ever read or saw in pornography.”

Seeing how loony the anonymous Radfem Terrorism blogger clearly is, I brushed off replying substantively because the raging dementia speaks for itself.

Throughout May and June the moderators at Genderberg worked like demons to try and figure out which of the 100 or so members was the leak. We ask every member a series of questions before approving them and we were going member by member to try and restore some of the lost sense of security that made one prostituted woman feel she had to leave GB. By early July we pooled our research and figured out that the leak was someone who registered as “Miriam” with a bunch of hooey about being anti-pornography and caring about prostituted women. I deleted “Miriam” from the memberlist and sent her the following email on July 5, 2007:

“I feel bad for you because you’ve obviously been seriously fucked up by people in your life, but if you don’t back off slagging on radfems you’re going to force my hand.

I can prove you committed fraud when you lied to moderator deedle about your gb membership, and I can prove you were the one who leaked Pony’s words. Because you’re a pathological liar, you’re probably thinking you can lie your way out of this just like you’ve done other times.

You can’t.

I didn’t out you before because I have a soft spot for seriously fucked up women like yourself, but I’m not above initiating legal action to show the ex-sex workers in my little community that their privacy and continued peace of mind is something I take very seriously. If you cared about sex workers one tenth as much as you manipulatively tell people you do then you would not have violated a sex worker-heavy community like you did.

Stop telling lies, Miriam. You’re not as good at it as you think you are.”

A Guest Post by Sam Berg

The Prime of Miss Sammi Berg

Drumroll, please!

ahem

On March 19th I was invited to a panel debate on pornography at William and Mary College. My contact for the organizing group was Constance Sisk, who told me funding assistance could likely be found to fly me 3,000 miles across the country so I agreed to be penciled in until enough money could be raised. A call for donations among anti-pornography feminist colleagues covered airfare, and I had just enough vacation days earned at work to take off.

On March 24th I confirmed that I would gladly join the two other two confirmed panelists, on the anti-pornography side, John D. Foubert, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Higher Education at the College of William and Mary, and on the pro-pornography side Amanda Brooks, a former escort and sex work advocate.

Constance told me April 2nd that they moved the panel date to the 21st and the rest of April slid by without communication until April 16th when an anti-porn friend informed me that Jill Brenneman and RenEv blogged they would be on the panel. I had received no word from Constance of this and was dumbfounded that wholesale changes were being made to the panel just five days before the event without informing me. I had agreed to do the panel with John and Amanda, and I hadn’t gotten any emails saying she couldn’t attend or that they were looking for a replacement.

If they had told me Amanda couldn’t make it I would have suggested that pornographers and strip club owners are very easy to find through legal channels so they could have been asked to appear on the panel. I would have also suggested that the number of porn-using men on campus should have been able to produce just one pornsturbator willing to defend his porn consumption. Because I was under the impression that Constance & Co. were being honest with me about their intentions, I chalked up the lack of a pornographer or porn-using man on the panel to inept organizing and the extreme amount of publicity given recently to sex work advocacy at William and Mary.

How much sex work advocacy has been given a voice there can be answered with the name Constance. I spoke with John Foubert for the first time Thursday and he told me that Constance is a big pro-sex work advocate on campus and she brought the sex worker show to campus the past three years. A woman named Audrey invited John to the panel because Constance didn’t think he would agree if she asked him. Constance was a guest on Jill’s radio show a few weeks ago, and Jill did a pro-sex work chat with William and Mary college folks a few weeks ago, but in her emails Constance claimed ignorance of the lengthy pro-porn and radical blogosphere debates on this contentious subject.

Constance. Constance said she was excited to have me coming and offered to let me spend Monday night at her place, where she planned on cooking dinner for a group of people post-panel. How do you think it would feel if a pro-choice feminist were invited to a predominantly pro-life campus by a predominantly pro-life group and the pro-life organizer did everything Constance did without revealing her pro-life politics to her pro-choice panelist and house guest?

Little story: Heading home from presenting at a prostitution conference I was in the airport shuttle with a middle-aged black social worker with her name tag still pinned to her blouse. I’m a young, white, tattoo-bearing woman and at the time I think my hair was blue. We exchanged delicate pleasantries and danced around how we talked about the conference until she sat up earnestly and cut to the chase, “So, are you for or against?” When I replied, “Against,” she slouched down and sighed and we grooved on the same anti-prostitution track until we got to the airport.

I agreed to do the panel with John and Amanda three weeks ago. Though it was unethical to make major lineup changes at the last minute like that without telling me and things started feeling really fishy due to the lack of notification about the event anywhere besides pro-john blogs (it’s not listed on W&M’s events calendar or advertised around campus), I agreed to debate Jill. I could not agree to debate Ren, and I don’t suppose I have to tell most of you reading this why but I’ll touch upon it a tad anyway.

Here are Ren’s thoughts on sharing a panel discussion table with me:

“So serious I am taking it very seriously. And looking forward to it in my uniquely grim and serious way. Planning and preparing with a very serious, serious sneer on my face.

And also laughing like a super villain the whole time. Why?

Once upon a time, I had a wish, a dream, a surely wank worthy fantasy of some anti-porn sex work types having to face down, in a forum, and debate those from the other side. And I wanted to be there.”

“And, yes, oh yes, I am seriously looking forward to it. I have so lusted for such an opportunity. Very seriously. And yes, if possible, I will have the whole thing on video. Get your cerebral wanking tissues ready.”

Serious serious sneers, super villain mocking laughter, wank worthy fantasies, whole thing on video, get your tissues ready.

Those are the words of a malicious person licking their chops in anticipation of a messy, humiliation-inducing scene they will relish. Those are the words of a person trying to waste my time with personal attacks when my time is best used educating audiences about the facts of human trafficking, prostitution, and pornography. The trash talk began within hours of being surreptitiously offered the spot on the panel, and that sort of smug pugnaciousness and disrespectful engagement was instrumental in prompting John to cancel his appearance on the panel and he suggested to me that I do the same. I believe we were right to cancel. I refuse to pose for the pornographically spiteful scene being painted.

What to do when a woman who says she’s happy in prostitution says, “Take me, for example” when you know if you actually do take her as her own example by quoting her own words and deeds she will complain, “How dare you make an example of me?” Say you’ll speak with her about prostitution as a global system and of all women’s oppression as the core problem but you don’t want to talk about her personally and she’ll reply, “You refuse to hear my truth.” If you talk about her personally like she insists then you’re the baddie radfem who makes it personal. It’s a lose-lose ruse.

I’d love to debate a porn-user, and there are tens of millions of them. I’d love to debate a pornographer and there’s no lack of those either. I’d love to debate a john. They don’t want to debate anti-pornography and anti-prostitution feminists. They want women in the prostitute supply pool to subjectively defend them against the objective mounds of testimony and undeniable data that anti-pornstitution feminists can produce proving pornography and prostitution violate women and girls human rights immensely. Most of you have seen how deftly I wield the wealth of information I’ve collected in my noodle to make the case against men’s right to economically coerce sex from others. Some of you have seen me do it before with Ren.

http://punkassblog.com/2006/08/10/blow-is-totally-feminist-though/

http://punkassblog.com/2006/08/21/each-prostitution-post-is-a-beautiful-and-unique-snowflake/

Saturday morning I woke up to an email from a professor asking if I can come speak to a few women’s studies classes of hers in May. It turns out I can make the date. Life skedaddles on and so do I.

Sam

Edited by Laurelin, She of the Short Fuse: to the sex pos-ly inclined who suddenly love my blog sooooo much, you’ve had your say elsewhere. Now here’s 50p my dears- go phone someone who gives a damn. No-one who is stupid enough to think they can patronise me gets space on my blog. Now run along!

The Random Collection IX

Edited 23/04/08: Now with correct Roman numerals!

21/04/08- 15:17

Language can be used to exclude; I have thought a lot about this lately. I write in a mixture of academic and very colloquial English, using unofficial phrases which will make sense to those whose first language is English, but perhaps not to others. It has just occurred to me that the use of such language has the potential to exclude. One needs to be part of the context to understand, or have the time and leisure to work out colloquial usages. Some of the words and phrases I and other bloggers use will not even be found in the dictionary. Language has often been used to exclude women from dominant discourses: the majority of the world’s poor and illiterate are female. In a world in which writing is so important many women are unable to access the laws, texts, discourses that shape their lives. They lack the knowledge of technical language, legal jargon, newspeak. They are then mocked for this lack of knowledge; women’s talk is called ‘gossip’ because it does not partake of the dominant discourse. Men’s talk is not called gossip. It uses the right words.

17:25

I’ve begun reading Catharine MacKinnon’s Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues and fallen flat out in love with her all over again. Her work on theory and practice, in particular, is fundamental to the forging of the women’s liberation movement (read ‘Theory is not a luxury’).

17:30

It is infinitely preferable to admit one’s own ignorance than to pretend knowledge. Smart people are the ones who ask the questions, not those who hide behind privilege and language. Ridicule and mockery are plastered over the void by the cowardly and the fearful (not the same thing: the definition of courage is to act in spite of feeling afraid). They hide nothing. The more they speak, the more they reveal. Watch language carefully. Make note of speech patterns, themes, word usage. Ask the questions. Ignorance is not shameful, cowardice is.

More later. Must do some work… my thesis doesn’t appear to be writing itself.

21:54

My ears are burning, and my visitor count has gone through the roof today. This can only mean one thing: I am being talked about somewhere. I wish I didn’t suck so much at not taking the bait. Okay, Laurelin, walk away from the hook… there are far more important things than your silly pride and vanity!

A Quick Word on My Method

It is well known that I do not answer every question that is posed to me, nor do I counter every criticism made of me. My reasons for this are twofold: 1) I am very busy, and simply do not have the time nor the mental energy to answer everything or debate until the cows come home, and 2) I believe very much that if anyone wishes to know my views, or to decide what kind of person I am, they can read my posts, wherein the truth lies.

So decide. I’m not going to pretend I agree with your conclusions; in fact I am arrogant enough that I firmly believe that statements that I am hate-filled (which have been made) are groundless silencing nonsense. I am not so arrogant that I do not think my faults and weaknesses are not amply demonstrated on this blog and throughout my comments in the blogosphere.

So anyway, hope that makes things clearer.

Silencing is

Silencing is

when one cannot speak, because the consequences of doing so are so dire. When one’s mental, physical or emotional health is at risk from the cruel reactions of others.

using sexualised language to humiliate feminists who are critiquing your pleasures, or disingenuously aligning them with the right wing for the same reason.

spreading taunts, hatred and abuse at those who would speak against you, or those whom you perceive to be speaking against you.

approving these tactics, compliance with them, cowardice.

drowning out the speech of others with your self-importance, mockery and jeering at dissenters, misrepresenting their views.

assuming the ultimate priority of one’s own speech.

 

Silencing is not

when someone refuses to publish your comments on their blog, in their own personal space.

the same as having one’s actions critiqued by feminists. the critique itself presents no barrier to your continuing to act.

being asked to take responsibility for one’s own words.

Edited at stupid o’clock: post now with correct grammar… I hope :p

Things I Don’t Understand

Obviously, with a title like this, the post could fill up several volumes. So I am going to limit my confessions of ignorance to the realm of internet writing.

1) What does ZOMG mean? OMG I get, sure, but what the hell is that Z doing there? Zeus Oh My God? Zebra Oh My God? Zzzzzz Oh My God? It pops up flipping everywhere, even in the middle of sentences as ‘zomg’ (lower case I mean) which then looks like a word rather than an abbreviation. Or is ‘zomg’ a word, and thus seperate from ZOMG? Please, oh knowledgeable and trendy internetty people, please explain!- I’ve run out of guesses!

2) Why is the Internet now known as ‘the internets’? Do we have to have plurals for everything now, as with ‘feminisms’ (which is a term I hate although I cannot put my finger on why. Any suggestions welcome)? There is only one internet, right? It’s a big muddle of wires and signals and stuff… but it’s one big muddle, surely?

3) What’s the deal with using ‘z’ as a plural? Internetz, womenz, menz? How is it any more convenient to use ‘z’ rather than ’s’? I guess that ‘z’ is further down on the keyboard, and nearer the left little finger, but does that really make a difference? The only guess I can make on this is that it is some kind of trivialisation (or trivialization, if you prefer)- most of the time when I have seen ‘menz’ it is used to trivialise and mock feminist concerns about the reality of male power/ dominance, and ‘womenz’ (or ‘womynz’) to poke fun at ideas of sisterhood. I suppose a ‘z’ makes something more informal, more childlike in appearance, in the workings of the English language?

4) WHY DO SOME PEOPLE USE CAPS LOCK for some words BUT NOT OTHERS? This is a real, longstanding bugbear of mine (yes, along with all the rest). If your argument sucks, PUTTING SOME BITS INTO capital letters in order to SHOUT AGGRESSIVELY AT THE POOR READER will not help. In fact, I’d argue that it is a CONFESSION OF BEING A POOR WRITER, in the same way that my grammar often makes the same admission for me.

Answers in the comments, please… HELP ME in my total IGNORANCEZ! (oh goddess, writing that last ‘word’ felt awful… must wash keyboard!)