The Sex Myth: Why Everything We're Told Is Wrong (35 page)

Yet our sources of information are often themselves recycling misinterpreted bits and parts from half-remembered and half-understood things. A newspaper covers a politician’s letter, which
then becomes a source that enters the parliamentary discussion, the transcript of which itself becomes evidence for another newspaper article. The debacle over misestimated trafficking numbers is
an excellent example of this. The cycle is seemingly endless, and how real data get into the loop is anyone’s guess.

In day-to-day life, it might not even be all that important. But when the discussion affects how serious crimes like trafficking are viewed, or is used to enact policies that victimise women,
well . . . it might be worth returning to the source now and then.

Along with the news media, feminism also has a charge to answer here. By focusing on problems of sex and sexuality to the exclusion of social justice, the aims of feminism have gone far from
where they began. And by narrowing that focus even more exclusively to problems in the West or of privileged women, there is a danger of ignoring
legitimately worrying trends
simply because the majority of self-professed feminists do not relate to them.

Over and again I was surprised to find that the closer I looked at each of these issues, it often seemed to be right-wing religious Agenda Setters and left-wing ideological feminists working to
further much the same ends. And I had to wonder why.

One of the most interesting books I have ever read is
The Handmaid’s Tale
by Margaret Atwood. It’s a novel about a dystopian future America (called Gilead) in which women are
categorised by their value as reproductive objects. The story focuses on the Wives of powerful men, the men’s concubines (their Handmaids), and the Jezebels and Unwomen who cannot be
integrated into this new, fundamentalist society.

One thing the book touches on is the coalition of far-right and far-left ideals that results in the oppression of women in Gilead. People in the middle, who had no particular investment or
opinion either way, got caught in the resulting military dictatorship. They probably approved of some of the early stages without looking into the motives of the people behind them, and implicitly
endorsed a future they probably didn’t want to live in.

Reproduction in Gilead is regulated by the idea that sex is inherently degrading to women. The book references a past (our present) in which feminists teamed up with conservatives in campaigns
against pornography. The consequences of this alliance, however, only empowered feminism’s worst enemies. Descriptions of the narrator’s feminist mother burning books – then being
sent to labour camps as an Unwoman – show feminism allying itself with the religious right, then being discarded by those ‘allies’.

When I read this as a teenager it was powerful food for thought. Also, it was kind of nice to read a sci-fi book told exclusively from a woman’s perspective, by an authentic female voice.
A lot of sci-fi has too much allegory about it for my taste, and the women all end up as traitors or queens. It was refreshing to read a book that had a point to make, but made it with the voice of
someone who did not know what the ‘right’ or ‘correct’ thing was, nor had a particular moral agenda. Offred, the narrator, is in many ways only a vessel. Anyway.

Silly as it seems, the book has greatly influenced how I interpret,
well, loads of stuff. In particular the types of people making the arguments against adult
entertainment, against sex work. The right can’t decide if you need to be in prison or saved; the left, whether you need to be in a shelter or an ‘exiting’ programme. There are
few accepted stories for sex workers other than Criminal or Victim. There are so many more nuances to issues beyond ‘porn bad, children good’.

The more closely you look at the key players behind some of the stories popping up, the more you notice some odd pairings. A group working closely with the anti-gay, anti-abortion US lobbying
group using a female MP as the mouthpiece of their opinions on the internet and porn. The well-known UK feminists lending their names to international groups with unknown agendas. Celebrities
lending star power to issues they don’t understand all that well.

Consider, for instance, a column in the left-leaning
Guardian
of August 2011. Titled ‘Should Feminists Back Michele Bachmann?’ it suggests with an apparently straight face
that support of US presidential candidate Bachmann – an anti-abortion ‘surrendered wife’ who opposes government provision of healthcare and believes homosexuality can be
‘cured’ – is a good idea. Why? For the sole reason that she is a woman. To me that’s a silly conclusion, sacrificing intellectual honesty on the altar of ideological purity.
Being dedicated to tokenism at the highest levels of achievement has clearly altered any sensible view of what the presidency of such a woman would actually mean for the kinds of people the
Guardian
claims to support. But what is clear is that rationalising such potentially undermining choices is far from rare in modern feminism.

And yet there are interesting parallels between the fundamentalist, right-wing US Tea Party types, and the more radical versions of feminism making mainstream headway. That is, in both cases,
these are groups that perceive themselves as outsiders. In doing so, they paint themselves as marginalised rebels shaking up a system they feel holds them back (when in fact it nurtures them).
Everyone else is held to account, but if you’re a victim, seemingly anything goes. And that appears to include all kinds of unholy alliances.

There’s a saying where I come from: you got to dance with the one who brung you. I wonder, when everyone gets to the end of their
dance cards, what promises
feminists have made and what obligations they’ll have to honour.

I have to cop to an obvious agenda in calling out feminism here: my own history as a woman, and as a feminist. Until 2009, I would have called myself a feminist without reservation. To my mind
it was an informed decision that most women (and men) of intelligence would make. As I understood it, feminism meant the rather straightforward notion that women should have the same rights and
privileges as men. So far, so naïve.

When I came out in late 2009 as an ex-sex worker who is now a science researcher, I was certain a particular segment of the media, the tabloids, would have a field day. But what I was unprepared
for was the response from the broadsheets, in particular the left-leaning ones.

Before 2009, when I wrote books under a pseudonym about my experiences as a sex worker, there was no small amount of grumbling in the press. After I won the
Guardian
Best British Weblog
award in 2003, a number of female contributors to that paper suggested that if I was commissioned to write an article, they would quit. (In the end it was that bastion of Tory sensibility the
Telegraph
that offered me my first bylined article and first broadsheet column. Oh, the irony.) And yet I continued to believe that if they knew I was real, they would feel differently about
me and about my writing.

It’s probably not a surprise to you that I was staggeringly unprepared for what any fool could have predicted would happen.

Do I expect people to like me? Well, no, not exactly. Being effective and being successful at what you do does not always have a perfect overlap in the Venn diagram of life with ‘being
liked’. It’s nice if it does, but it’s not a requirement. Do I expect to be respected? Frankly, as a well-educated woman who has always paid her own way in life and written a fair
number of books alongside a science career, then yes, I suppose I do.

But what was most maddening about the analysis after I came out was the discussion about me as an object and not a person. And not so much by the tabloids I’d feared as the feminists
I’d revered. Gleeful insults about my father’s problems with addiction? A well-known columnist deriding my looks, repeatedly, over many months? And continued speculation that, somehow,
what I wrote about was
still
not
real? All by female columnists who describe themselves as feminists.

It is clear that in the minds of many feminists, to be a prostitute at all was to be a prostitute only. My how very patriarchy! Having been a sex worker at any time in your life strips you of
any other permissible identity and defines you absolutely. It makes you open to ridicule, regardless of your credentials in any other sphere of life.

Really, the part about being hardworking and accomplished shouldn’t matter. Being a woman is about who we are, not what we do. Why does no one seem to understand that yet? The concept of
Woman is robust enough to take all comers. It’s not going to crumble and disintegrate because someone whose life choices you don’t agree with calls herself a woman too.

As with many (if not most) people in sex work, my decision to become a call girl was motivated by financial need. Some need money to support a drug habit; more than a handful are supporting
educations and families. Why is it okay to generalise about the motivations of some women while demanding hands-off on analysis of your own?

Blaming sexuality for the ills of society is an old approach; blaming of women by other women is the new twist. Compare the preoccupations of writers like Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon,
whose work in the 1970s and 1980s focused blame on men, the male privilege, the patriarchy.

By contrast, many of the critiques out today gloss over old ‘man-hating’ attitudes . . . and place blame squarely on other women. Instead of embracing women who challenge convention,
the preoccupation seems to be with shooting them down. There have been a lot of recent books – many by women – doing exactly that.

There is a feeling in these books that could be interpreted almost as contemptuous. A distaste for things of which the authors don’t approve. These include, but are in no way limited to,
sexy clothes, pole dancing, and shaving. And that is simply the beginning.

What are we to make of titles such as
Female Chauvinist Pigs
by Ariel Levy or
Living Dolls
by Natasha Walter? Books in which men are only mentioned insofar as they are the mildly
amused directors of
Girls Gone Wild
or consumers of porn?

The anecdotes presented seem to imply this: that the problem is women who choose to dress a certain way, spend their free time doing
particular activities, or earn money
from their looks. For me, there is more than a little aftertaste of schoolyard gossip in these books. Who’s a real feminist, who’s just a jumped-up slag?

The slut-shaming attitude is implied in Levy’s conclusions, when she says of women who have ‘their vaginas waxed . . . their breasts enlarged’: ‘I wish them many blissful
and lubricious loops around the pole.’

As I read it, she’s fine with the idea that there are
some
women who get Brazilians – just as long as they are fine with the idea that she will judge them for that. Rather
than imagining pole dancing can co-exist with a brain – or recognising that the privilege of feminism is being permitted to do and think whatever one wishes to do and think – Levy
appears to write off the
some
women making superficial and aesthetic choices different from hers. Prim and proper, ladies, that’s the way to be! Same as it ever was.

In
Female Chauvinist Pigs,
Levy begins by collecting many anecdotes. She visits the set of
Girls Gone Wild
in Miami. She watches
Charlie’s Angels.
She has seen
Nuts
and
FHM
on the shelves; she talked with an editor of the US television series
The Man Show.
She compares these experiences to her own recollections of life at a private
New England college in the 1990s, where someone could have been ‘pretty much’ expelled for using the word ‘girl’ instead of ‘woman’. She saw someone walking down
the street wearing a Playboy Bunny shirt, and made her conclusions: sexualisation is more rife than ever and the effects are damaging.

To my eyes, she tells a lot of stories, but does not offer much new in the way of either analysis or substance. Important research is hinted at, but the data never broken down comprehensively.
What the reader gets instead are impressions, feelings . . . anecdotes. And Levy is not the only one who appears to be using this approach.

Natasha Walter, in
Living Dolls
as I read it, seems to spend most of her time preoccupied with the contents of other people’s diaries and bemoaning New Labour. Jessica
Valenti’s
Full Frontal Feminism
is definitely about feminism, but the title seems to promise something new – something that, for me, the book doesn’t deliver. And Kat
Banyard, in
The Equality Illusion,
opens each chapter with what one review called ‘a quasi fictional description of a girl or woman touched by each
of the issues
under discussion’.
²¹⁷
Quasi fictional? How about some facts? I rather like Kat as a person and respect her focus; I expected better from her.

Possibly the single most grating thing about the recent spate of women-in-crisis books? The covers. While it’s true that few authors have complete control over their covers, these books
tend to have pink, glittery covers, predictably emblazoned with a woman’s silhouette like cheap pulp fiction. (The conspicuous exception being Banyard’s
The Equality Illusion.)
What message do covers like these seem to send? A depressingly reductive one. A message of ‘We’re going to win you over to our way of thinking, by using exactly the same tactics we
criticise other people for.’

In Broadsheet, the ‘women’s blog’ of the popular online news source Salon, I see the contempt as particularly above board. ‘There’s a new and efficient way to
become a published author: sleep with a famous male celebrity!’ spits one piece of May 2010 in which a million-dollar publishing deal for one of Tiger Woods’ mistresses is derided . . .
alongside recent books about Norman Mailer by Norris Church Mailer and Carole Mallory, both notable writers in their own right.
²¹⁸
The implicit message?
Write about a famous man and you’ve sold us out, sister.