Sex Work – Page 3

Iceland bans strip clubs

While I like the idea of sending the message that women’s bodies aren’t for sale, I’m not sure this is the greatest way to do it. It seems less immediately problematic than outlawing paying for sex, primarily because prostitution bans drive sex work underground and put sex workers at risk. I don’t think there’s going to be an epidemic of underground strip clubs (although I’m sure there will be a few underground strip clubs), and I’m not sure that strippers will now face the kinds of immediate dangers that sex workers who sell sexual services negotiate every day.

But: Stripping, for better or worse, is one of the better-paid jobs that low-skilled (and hey, sometimes high-skilled) female workers can get. And no, it’s not a sustainable career, and it’s a job that traffics in discrimination — it’s primarily for the young, the thin, the able-bodied, etc, and once you don’t fit into that framework it’s no longer an option. But it does offer paid work that can be significantly less unpleasant than a lot of other jobs. With so many female workers relegated to a pink-collar work force that revolves around physically and emotionally intensive care work — being an elder care-taker or a nurse’s aid or a childcare worker — I can see how for some women, stripping seems a lot easier and a lot less messy and a lot less difficult and a lot more convenient. Which isn’t to say that stipping is all glitter and fun and empowerful — I’m sure for some women it is, and for most women it isn’t. Like a lot of other jobs. I’d be willing to bet that most strippers strip because it pays pretty well. Removing that option, even if it does send A Message, doesn’t seem like a great victory to me. Because, sure, dudes will be sad that they don’t get to male bond over seeing naked ladies anymore. But the ladies will be the ones who are dead broke because of it.

On the other hand — and this isn’t an argument I totally buy, but it’s a fair one — society does have an interest in regulating commerce, and in balancing a functioning economy and a productive workforce with human rights and ethical and moral imperatives. There are things that all of us could do to make a profit, but we’re not allowed to because it would impede a greater social good. I’m not supposed to make drugs in my basement or turn my apartment into a speakeasy (although I have actually considered that one) or slaughter cats on my roof and sell them for food; even though I could profit from all of those things, society has an interest in regulating them. Society also has an interest in securing the rights of women, and in not presenting women as items to be bought and sold. This isn’t just about women who work at strip clubs; it’s about social perceptions and the value of all women.

I can understand that take, and I am sympathetic to it, but at the end of the day you can’t regulate or legislate respect. You can outlaw the things that are tangibly harmful, but I’m not sure that stripping falls so clearly on that side.

“Killing your hooker” on Facebook

A guest-post by Miranda from Women’s Glib.

It has come to my attention that there is a Facebook fan page entitled, “Killing your hooker so you don’t have to pay her.” The page boasts such updates as, “Ever stab your hooker with a blunt object to add insult to injury?” The page was created about a month ago.

And, as of today, it has 22,127 fans.

This is a deeply offensive, misogynistic, and outright violent page. Hypothetical violence is not funny, but real violence is even less amusing — and this violence is real. The murder of sex workers is frighteningly commonplace, and all too often is excused under some bullshit pretense that sex workers are expendable, are unhuman.

What happens online matters. George Sodini showed us that much. Wrote Bob Herbert in the aftermath of Sodini’s shooting:

We’ve seen this tragic ritual so often that it has the feel of a formula. A guy is filled with a seething rage toward women and has easy access to guns. The result: mass slaughter.

…We have become so accustomed to living in a society saturated with misogyny that the barbaric treatment of women and girls has come to be more or less expected.

We profess to being shocked at one or another of these outlandish crimes, but the shock wears off quickly in an environment in which the rape, murder and humiliation of females is not only a staple of the news, but an important cornerstone of the nation’s entertainment.

Facebook pages like this one are surely a form of entertainment, of shits and giggles, for those involved. For the sex workers who are killed for no other reason than hatred, the amusement fades.

This “entertainment” is what happens when people hate women, hate sex workers, and see violence as a viable solution to their rage.

Please, please visit the “Killing your hooker so you don’t have to pay her” Facebook fan page and report it for its offensive content. (Scroll down and look in the lower left corner of your screen to find the link to report it.)

Cross-posted at Women’s Glib.

International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers

Red umbrella, overlaid with purple text reading "December 17th International Day to END Violence Against Sex Workers" Yesterday, December 17, was the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers, a day that was created to draw attention to violent hate crimes committed against sex workers all over the world. Unfortunately in my hectic day, I missed blogging about it. No excuses, and my sincere apologies.

I would, however, like to take the belated opportunity now to highlight this epidemic of violence, and the work that activists are doing to combat it. Here is a remembrance list of known sex workers murdered in the past year (pdf). There are almost certainly unknown victims whose deaths have not been recorded. And while this is a list of those who have been killed, the number of those who have lived through physical and sexual assaults is infinitely longer.

For more about violence against sex workers, and the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers, I recommend checking out this blog post about a MADRE event on Human Rights Day (thanks Robin), this article by Annie Sprinkle in On The Issues magazine, Audacia Ray’s post, the GRITtv video commentary on violence against sex workers (sorry, no known transcript yet), and lastly the new report from the Sex Workers’ Rights Advocacy Network (SWAN), Arrest the Violence: Human Rights Violations Against Sex Workers in 11 Countries in Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

This is just a tiny fraction of what actions have been taken, what information has been released, and what blog posts and articles that have been written. So if you’ve written a post yourself, or have something else you want to pass along, please feel free to leave links in the comments.

Caty Simon and the Virtues of Vice (part two)

Oh, LOL. Sike. Before I go, I present the conclusion of my email interview with the one and only Ms. Caty Simon. Part one is here.

Why do you think people on all sides of the issues involved have such strong feelings about Natalie Dyan and the choices she makes/made about how to make money and what to do with her own body? I’ve heard people argue that her exploitation of the patriarchal concept of virginity serves to increase/strengthen virginity’s cultural currency rather than undermine it and thus is problematic from a feminist standpoint (shockingly, this is not my take on it.) Thoughts?

Do you think you could just post a link to my N Dylan piece? I feel like I’ve said all I have to say about that. [Yes, you can read said piece here]

As you know, I’m in favor of decriminalizing prostitution and all drugs. Some people in the sex workers rights/decrim movement seem to distance themselves from drugs–which is understandable given the stereotype of sex workers as drug addicts, but also problematic as plenty of sex workers (like plenty of the population in general) do use illegal drugs. I noticed some local NYC harm reduction trainings recently by sex workers orgs. Do you think there’s a shift happening, that sex workers rights organizers are moving towards addressing drug use (in a non-paternalistic way) rather than trying to run from it? How do you see criminalized sex work and criminalized drug use as being intertwined? Do they intersect strategically?

Short answer: I do see a shift happening, but not nearly enough of one and not soon enough.

I do understand the political distancing, because we did want to get away from the agency-less TV movie image of the low income (when most of us are actually middle class ), exploited & abused (when most of us are independent workers & thus have no one to exploit or abuse us, or work with people we trust), STI infected (when most of us have safer sex than the general population), and horrendously, obsessively drug addicted (when–although there’s no real statistical evidence, because all of the evidence we have comes from abolitionists with an agenda that study the most downtrodden in jail, not a representative population, and most of those of us caught in that position tell researchers what they want to hear in order to cope and survive–it seems, like we are not more likely to use drugs than the general population, only excepting the two facts that many young, middle class or affluent people use drugs of some kind–in fact, this population uses the most drugs in this country, contrary to popular belief; and the fact that black markets often intersect.) The crack ho walking around with sores and track marks and disease is unfortunately still the image that comes to mind when many mainstream people think of the word “prostitute”. So I do understand the initial tactic of distancing–what I don’t understand is the contempt. I remember excitedly receiving every issue of $pread I ever got, only to see sex workers who were interviewed say dismissive awful things about girls working to support habits and self-righteously differentiating themselves from them. I remember reading a blog by a prominent sex worker’s rights activist which haughtily stated that there was obviously a difference between decriminalization of drugs and decriminalization of sex work, without even deigning to mention what that difference was . Callgirl, by Jeanette Angell, a woman I very much admire and a text I think is incisive and sophisticated, just fell back on the disease model of addiction to understand her friend’s problems with crack, without using any of the anthropological insight and nuance that shone throughout the rest of the book on that topic.

Even now it feels like the attention being paid to drug using sex workers is an us vs. them thing–the poor ignorant them who don’t know any better, a sort of noblesse oblige. The white, middle class, educated sex workers that, let’s face it, dominate the movement, believe that the harm reduction services they offer at places like St James’ infirmary are for powerless street workers, not for their own drug use.

It’s a shame because I do believe these two issues are intrinsically connected. It’s all about Puritanical criminalization of the ownership of one’s body ( a major tenant of feminism and the reproductive rights movement) and the right to take risks with it–sex workers take on the risk of stigma, STIs, and most of all, meeting strange men in a male-dominated society in which sex and violence are constantly intertwined and confused. Yet, they make our jobs more dangerous by criminalizing us instead of allowing us to go to the police for our safety.

Drug users take risks with their bodies as well–but most of these risks are either magnified and turned into bogeymen by the media and drug enforcement or exacerbated by criminalization. People die of cigarette habits eventually from lung cancer, but although the physiological addiction is as strong as that of heroin or tranquilizers, nobody ever has their basic day to day life patterns disrupted because of nicotine addiction, b/c cigarettes aren’t subject to ridiculously inflated black market prices so that one has to spend an inordinate amount of time earning money for them. Heroin and opiates, my drug of choice, are seen as the most deadly, pernicious drugs–yet they really have no long term health risks involved with them besides addiction and overdose that aren’t caused directly by criminalization, inflated black market prices and the poverty they bring about, and lack of clean needles and harm reduction education. Even addiction and overdose could be risks that were minimized in a decriminalized environment—a pure supply would ensure the easy calculation of one’s tolerance and dose, preventing overdose, and widespread harm reduction education would allow people to understand the timing of doses necessary, to prevent physiological addiction.

This culture is in fact truly absurd in its mores around mind altering substances. The pharmacopoeia that we know of as illicit drugs has been with mankind for thousands of years, and, for example, before the Harrison Narcotics Act in 1914, cocaine and heroin were available over the counter and did not cause any major social upheaval. In fact, most users of opiates were middle class women and doctors, and many among those two groups distinguished themselves while having active habits . In contrast, the pharmacopoeia that Big Pharma shills us to cure the every new ill of our psyches they invent by the year is not truly tested, since, as congressional committees are finding out around now, most of the research trials and the journal articles written about them are directly financially linked to the companies which sell them. Lately, interoffice documents have been discovered by mad movement groups that prove without doubt that the makers of drugs like Zyprexa and Prozac knew about serious side effects of their products such as adult onset diabetes and common suicidality and even homocidality among children and teens that took their products, but hid them from the general public. Class action suits are now in progress. Sometimes, this strange ambivalent attitude about mind altering drugs reaches ridiculous heights when drugs that are scheduled and criminalized without prescription are legitimized and prescribed at high doses under the auspices of psychiatrists—the fact that we demonize speed users and yet prescribe children with amphetamines (without even giving them a choice, in their status as minors) is frankly crazy, especially in light of recent finding that such “treatment” stunts their growth and makes them extremely emotionally volatile.

As for the argument that drug users hurt others because of drug related crime, the only drug with a statistically significant correlation to violence is alcohol, and the vast majority of other drug related crime is based around black market turf wars in a market that has no other way to mediate itself but violence, a market that the prohibitionists themselves have made lucrative enough to kill for by making it illegal and therefore highly profitable because of monetary compensation for the risk. Decriminalize, and just like the gangland violence around liquor disappeared when the Prohibition of the 1920’s ended, so would this violence. As for the small proportion of violence that remains that is caused by altering one’s mind with these substances, the crime should be in the act itself, not in the ingestion of the drug. We teach people to drink responsibly even though alcohol is the most volatile, physiologically addicting and damaging drug there is. There are certainly ways to use other drugs responsibly, as the fact that statistically it seems that most users of addictive drugs are not, in fact, addicts, attests.

Just like sex workers, drug users are criminalized for a non violent act that truly only has to do with themselves and their bodies–except that drug users are punished much more harshly, serving sentences that can be much longer than those of murderers and rapists under mandatory minimum sentencing drug laws. In fact, our drug laws are one of THE major reasons that our prison industrial complex is the most highly populated in the world. And just like sex workers, drug users are seen as agency-less, except that, instead of being exploited women or loose nymphomaniacal tramps, they are seen as the helpless against evil compulsions–physiological addiction is seen as the demon possession of our age, as if drug users were incapable of making moral decisions or any decisions that valued anything else above their drug of choice. And finally, just like sex workers, there are those who feel they are being liberal and benign towards us by advocating programs that force us to transition away from our current lifestyle–to medicalize rather than criminalize the problem, force us into treatment, the way sex workers in newly Communist China were forced to learn factory skills. These factions may be more well meaning than those that favor criminalization, but again, they’re about denying us our own ability to choose.

Both sex workers and drug users are subject to the policing of their own bodies, coercion, and criminalization. Perhaps in the short term sex workers might be wary of taking on the other group’s stigma, but in the long run, we’ll be stronger in political unity–strength in numbers seems like obvious political strategy to me. I’d like to see sex worker’s movements, as the more established groups, stop making derogatory references to drug users, run informative stories about drug decrim in their publications, fight ALL the injustices of the prison industrial complex and not just stick with their single issue, and acknowledge the fact that drug use is classless.

Finally, like all of mainstream America, we need to stop seeing drug use as always destructive. It’s all about set, setting, and situation, not the drugs themselves–context. Almost any drug, used in a particular way in a particular circumstance, can be a spiritual journey, can be therapeutic, can even be a healthy way to cope in the short term, can be good clean fun–cleaner than alcohol or cigarettes and even coffee, for the most part. No drug should be “angelicized” or demonized totally–they’re just inert substances, it’s our relationship to them that matters. Richard De Grandpre writes a brilliant and readable thesis about this topic in his book The Cult of Pharmacology, which I urge you all to read.

Taking these issues to a global level–do you see the drug war as intersecting with the war on The Sex Trade and/or “trafficking”? How does the criminalizing of drug use and prostitution in/by the US negatively effect the global “victims” of both trades?Taking these issues to a global level–do you see the drug war as intersecting with the war on The Sex Trade and/or “trafficking”? How does the criminalizing of drug use and prostitution in/by the US negatively effect the global “victims” of both trades?

Globally, I see the same outlook towards Third World people making their way in both black markets—they need to be shown the errors of their ways and rescued by the First World, as if they were childlike and could not take responsibility for the considered choices they make. Thailand’s EMPOWER sex worker’s rights organization recently issued a demand from Cambodian migrant sex workers—STOP RESCUING US! The raids in which they are “rescued” and deported back to Cambodia (much like many similar raids throughout the world), are violent, abusive and economically crippling. The workers must then spend money and time to find their way across the border again. Similarly, when the crops of coca or poppy farmers are sprayed from the air by the US with substances that poison their soil and then condescendingly told to a grow a food crop they won’t even break even on, the same sort of violence to their livelihood is done. These people are making rational economic choices in the context of their environments, and yet, they’re treated like misbehaving and/or lost children.

Goodbye Goodbye

My last day as a guest blogger! I want to thank the Feministe regulars for sharing your corner of the interwebs with me. Thank you to the readers who read my posts, and especially thank you to those of you who posted thoughtful responses to them.

Like many guest bloggers before me, I leave you with many thoughts un-posted. I have a half dozen half finished posts on my hard drive, posts on subjects ranging from Arabic hip hop to Zionism, veganism to 9/11. Etc. I’m gonna mash a few thoughts into this goodbye post.

First, I really want to talk a little bit about Israel’s ongoing occupation of Palestine while I’m here. I specifically want to talk about being a Jew who does anti-occupation activism and opposes Zionism.

When I say “Zionism” I am referring to a nationalist ideology holding that Jews have a right to a Jewish-majority nation state/”homeland” in historic Palestine. Although over time there has been much debate about the definition of “Zionism”, I am using the meaning that carries currency currently on the global political stage. Some Jews have more personal definitions of Zionism that are different; some may have nothing to do with nation states and refer instead to an important religious/spiritual connection to the land; I may not share such sentiments (I feel that Brooklyn and the Lower East side are enough of a homeland for me), but I certainly don’t object to them. Such definitions are not being referred to when most people across the globe express objections to Zionism.

Along with anti-Zionists in general, I do not question the right of Jews to live in historic Palestine. Jews have always lived there, often in peace with their neighbors. There’s no problem there. The problem is with the belief that Jews have more of a right to be there than anyone else, and that the “right” of a state with an artificially maintained Jewish majority to exist trumps the rights of all the people in the region. These beliefs are racist, though it’s taboo to say that in most public spheres here in the United States. Since the ’67 war (when the IDF proved itself to be very useful as military muscle), we’ve had a special relationship with Israel, supplying their military with an unprecedented amount of aid. The US government also has a long history of supporting Jewish migration to historic Palestine, at least in part as an alternative to a feared massive arrival of Jews on our shores.

The US stands apart from world opinion in our official, unyielding support of Zionism and our active participation in the conflation of anti-Zionism and anti-Jewish politics. I’m old enough to remember being appalled in 2001 when reps from the US and Israel walked out of the UN World Conference against Racism rather than discuss the relationship between Zionism and racism, slandering participants from every other country as anti-Semites. Similar dynamics played out when the US pulled out of participating in this years conference because Israel’s crimes were on the table. This should raise red flags for those of us committed to fighting racism. It is US and Israeli exceptionalism.

I view anti-Zionism as a logical piece of a broader anti-imperialist, anti-oppressive politic. Of course I abhor anti-Semitism, but I am also disgusted at Jews (and fundamentalist Christians, and assorted other pro-Zionist factions) who exploit the historic persecution of Jews for their own political ends. It in no way diminishes the horror of the Nazi Holocaust to suggest that the expulsion and murder of Palestinians in 1948 does nothing to honor its victims. It is not anti-Jewish to resist Jewish colonialism. The refugee crisis and ongoing oppression of those living in the Palestinian territories are not going away soon, and no amount of righteous anger at Hamas will shift the balance of power in the situation. Those of us in the US-Jewish and not–are directly implicated, as our tax dollars fund the ongoing occupation.

The number of Jews who identify as anti- or non-Zionist is growing. A 2006 study sponsored by The Andrea and Charles Bronfman philanthropies found that among non-Orthodox Jews under 35, only 54% are comfortable with the idea of a Jewish state. (as opposed to 81% of those 65 and older. ) Last year saw the launch of the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network as well as an increasing amount of Jewish organizing against the ongoing Israeli occupation of Palestine within a specifically anti-Zionist framework. In 2008, I participated in the nation-wide No Time to Celebrate: Jews Remember the Nakba campaign, which sought to counter celebrations of Israel’s 60th anniversary with events commemorating and spreading awareness of the correlating “Nakba” (or “Catastrophe”) of 1948 which resulted in the death or displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. This is a shift-it’s often controversial enough to criticize Israel at all, let alone dispute Zionist ideology. But this controversy comes not from some kind of Jewish “consensus” on the matter (there never has been any such thing) but from which factions hold institutional power and the lengths they’ll go to silence their opposition.

I also want to plug my new favorite movie, Slingshot Hip Hop, a documentary chronicling the emerging Palestinian hip hop scenes and movement. It is particularly interesting from a feminist perspective, as the consciousness around the need for women’s voices in Palestinian hip hop displayed by both male and female musicians in the film puts to shame the gender analysis of most music scenes I’ve ever been around. Please, order it and watch it if you haven’t yet. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll probably learn things, you’ll be left both angry and inspired.

What else.

It’s a little early, but September 11 is next Friday and I won’t be blogging here then. This year I hope to get tickets to the big Jay-Z 9/11 benefit concert thing at Madison Square Garden. That would be nice. Not that most years I do anything, other than reflect. It’s still a date on the calendar that provokes a visceral response from me. On the morning of September 11 2001 I was at work at a phone sex call center in Manhattan. I was on a call when the first plane hit the tower and yes, caller, you really will always be very special to me. On 9/11 I thought I was maybe gonna die at various points. Not to be dramatic, I wasn’t near the towers. There were initially rumors reported on the news that there was a third plane headed towards New York, and I was near other famous NYC stuff that people speculated might be a target. Obviously the third plane didn’t exist. No one I knew was hurt or killed. Some I knew lost friends and family.

It was a really, really fucked up day.

The thing everyone says about the city coming together was true, in my experience. I was unlike anything I had experienced before or have experienced since. From the women at my job banding together and helping one another through those early, awful hours to just about everyone I saw after wards. Strangers talking to strangers, asking each other how we’re doing, offering whatever aid or comforts we could. I don’t have the words to express the power of experiencing that this is what happened to my city when hit with a crisis of such proportion. We didn’t know what to do but try to help one another.

And then Bush and Giuliani got on TV and told us we needed to shop and “smoke out” the terrorists. And suddenly the horror was constant and everywhere. Attacks on Mosques and random people perceived as being Arab and/or Muslim. The looming war. A lot of us started having anti-war strategy meetings, back when opposing the war on Afghanistan was a fringe wingnut thing to do. Now the majority of the country opposes it.

And yet, we’re still there. In fact we’re sending 14,000 additional combat troops, on top of the increasing number of contractors from firms like Blackwater (excuse me, I mean the re-branded “Xe Services LLC.”) We’re still in Iraq, too, despite the popularity of Obama’s anti-Iraq war platform. The horror marches on. I wish I could see an end.

And on that cheery note…I guess I’m out? You can follow my pop culture critiques, short videos, vegan recipes and political griping at my blog. Hope to see you around the internet.

The White Liberal “Feminism” of Tina Fey and Baby Mama

Last night I decided to watch Baby Mama while doing some not very mentally taxing work online. Oh, my. Was that movie worse than I expected or what? It was so bad, in such an interesting, ugly bouquet of ways, that I feel the need to share my thoughts with you, both about this movie in particular and my ish with Tina Fey’s schtik in general.

The various characters played by Tina Fey on television and films form a more or less cohesive comic persona. Fey was the head writer on SNL (where she co-chaired the Weekend Update segment) when she successfully pitched 30 Rock, a sitcom on which she plays Liz Lemon, the head writer of a comedic variety show. The Lemon character is similar to the persona Fey adopted on Weekend Update, as well as to Kate Holbrook, the character she portrays in Baby Mama (which she didn’t write, but seems tailored specifically to her appeal.) In all of these Fey plays a version of a financially privileged woman in a powerful corporate position who is conventionally pretty, smart, a bit awkward, and romantically challenged.

I’ll start by mentioning my own hesitancy to use one of my dwindling days as a Feministe blogger to criticize Fey. Her success as a feminist(ish) comic and writer is notable. She is skilled, talented, and often funny, and I feel kind of gross going at her on the internet—I don’t like the catfight vibe. Somehow, somewhere, I have a deep seated desire to support other women rather than tear them down. All those years doing Riot Grrrl zines and talking about “Girl Love” really took. That said, Fey should not be above criticism. She has become a kind of feminist heroine, especially to middle to upper class nerdy white liberals, and while I share some of her fans’ appreciation, there are aspects of Fey’s comedy that I find constantly chafing.

Let’s start with her whorephobia and slut-shaming. I can imagine that the kinds of sexist pressures that Fey has probably faced as a conventionally attractive lady in showbiz include people trying to sex her up more, go the Maxim route, whatever. I absolutely respect her choices regarding how she does or doesn’t actively present herself sexually. However, her derogatory attitude towards women that she finds unacceptably slutty needs to be checked.

I watch 30 Rock occasionally, and enjoy it, though the Liz Lemon character’s anxiety around sluttier women makes me a bit uncomfortable. It’s fine if I view Lemon as just another flawed character with her own set or quirks and neuroses (I certainly buy the anxiety,) but not if Lemon is meant to be the “sane”, neutral audience entry point into the world of the show, as if of course all self-respecting intelligent women wish to police the sexuality of others, wish they’d button up their shirts and put on some pants and view the fact that they sometimes don’t as a sign of stupidity, if not evolutionary failure.

Kate Holbrook in Baby Mama is a similarly wealthy, liberal professional who seems to view women who aren’t exactly like her in these respects as somewhat alien. The classist “friendship” she develops with Amy Poehler’s character Angie Ostrowiski , a “white trash” woman who is contracted to carry a baby for her, contains this theme to a degree. There are various comments throughout that further establish Fey as being on the proper side of sluttiness; “My avatar dresses like a whore!” she exclaims in befuddlement while playing a karaoke videogame. Later, her love interest jokingly asks if she works as a prostitute at night, the humor lies in the outlandishness of such a notion– corporate women never do sex work on the side!

It’s harder to watch Fey’s characters exhibit slutphobia and not take it personally when she makes comments like this :

“I love to play strippers and to imitate them,” says Fey. “I love using that idea for comedy, but the idea of actually going there? I feel like we all need to be better than that. That industry needs to die, by all of us being a little bit better than that.”

what does it mean for Fey as a self-avowed feminist use a group of people (Women, I assume, in her imagination,) for their comedic possibilities while believing that they should cease to exist? I don’t want to read too much into this quote in terms of the contempt Fey appears to feel towards strippers. Maybe she just sees them as victimized by an evil industry. Paternalism is so much better than out and out malice, after all. The wording suggests that Fey engages with strippers—or at least the idea of strippers (as well as other inappropriately sexual women)—only as a subject of ridicule. How is this feminist?

Here are some other things that I hated about Baby Mama:

-There is a recurring joke where Fey discusses the horrific possibility of having an intersexed baby. Intersexed people themselves are the semi-mystical, thoroughly confusing and gross butt of the joke. Ha ha ha ha.

-Fey’s character is the VP of a Whole Foods stand-in called Round Earth. Steve Martin’s portrayal of the company’s capitalist hippie CEO is funny. Less so is the subplot about Round Earth opening a massive flagship store in an abandoned warehouse that I think was supposed to be in West Philly (I was multitasking, if they clarified the neighborhood, I missed it.) The film reduces tensions between Round Earth and small local businesses and residents who feel invaded to some kind of irrational bias that can and will be overcome if we just listen to Tina Fey, caring corporate VP. Gentrification is great when it’s companies with Liberal appeal doing it. Baby Mama throws a few softballs at Whole Foods through the Round Earth subplot (health food is gross! Some yuppies are too obsessed with vitamins!), but at the end of the day the company triumphs as responsible and admirable and Good For The Community. The film creates a space for Liberals to scoff at Wal-Mart as Evil but embrace Whole Foods, in all it’s healthcare opposing union busting as a Good Corporation that’s just a little silly sometimes.

-Racism. There are few roles for people of color in Baby Mama’s white world. The biggest is that of Fey’s doorman, Oscar Priyan (played by Romany Malco), who assumes the role of the Magical Negro, receiving no character development but dispensing much sassy advice and support to the two white female protagonists with whom he never, ever has any sexual tension. Towards the end I though perhaps Amy Poehler’s character would end up coupled with him—during a climactic spat Fey calls her white trash” to which she replies “I deserve that” and Malco intones “no, you don’t”. Wow, is Baby Mama actually going to develop the latent class-solidarity theme that cried out from under the cutsey scenes of Poehler and Malco asexually bonding? Given the predictable, formulaic trajectory of the entire movie (I spotted the films final “twist” the second Fey met Greg Kinnear), they should have gotten together—except for the Magical Negro law which forbids him from having any sex life, especially one involving a white lady. Despite the existence of his own child, who we see in a birthday party montage over the closing credits. It is actually Malco who gives the film it’s name—Fey explains that Poehler is her surrogate, to which he replies “oh, your baby mama.” Fey tries to explain no, it’s different, she has no romantic relationship with Poehler, to which Malco replies (paraphrasing) “Relationships have nothing to do with it—she has the baby, you pay the bills. Ask any black man in Philadelphia.” HA HA HA shoot me. That line might be a little less overwhelmingly less offensive if there were, I don’t know, any black female characters in the movie, but no. The only woman of color I recall at all was a sexxxy Asian woman coupled with Tina Fey’s ex who is on screen soley to cause insult to the injury of Fey’s bruised ego. I don’t think she got to say anything.

-It was directed semi-incompetently and never reconciled it’s balance between comedy and drama, slapstick and heartwarming, resulting in an agitating and tone-deaf eyeroller. Strange edits and flat scenes abound. Scenes go on too long. It has its funny moments, but doesn’t cohere. Even as an entertaining piece of offensive, oppressive propaganda for white ladies’ liberation within liberal corporate capitalism.

Fey didn’t write Baby Mama, but she chose it as her start vehicle into the world of feature films. It fits nicely into her oeuvre as a “feminist” icon, if feminism is only for rich white straight ladies doin’ it for themselves by climbing the corporate ladder with their exclusively abled bodies. (another recurring joke involved a woman with a speech impediment, btw LOL.) Of course they have to climb over the bodies of everyone else—except their white male bosses, natch—to do it. Woooo sisterhood!

Caty Simon and The Virtues of Vice (Part One)

Soon after I was asked to guest blog at Feministe I emailed my internet friend Caty to ask if I could interview her for one of my posts. She maintains the fabulous blog The Virtues of Vice and is generally one of my favorite people to talk with about politics or pop culture or pretty much anything. Her thinking and writing is both validating and challenging to me, which is a great combination. I’m sure a lot of Feministe readers will be interested in her work as well. So without further ado, I bring you the first part of our Q&A.

Please us give a little introduction to you and your activism and anything else you feel like sharing.

My name’s Caty Simon. I’m a small town escort and activist. I’ve worked with multi-issue low income rights movements all my adult life, from Arise to Social Justice to the newly founded Poverty Is Not A Crime. I’ve participated in campaigns that prevented the criminalization of panhandling in my town, fought against the then illegal status of needle exchange in Massachusetts, and asked local police departments to consider deprioritizing vice enforcement, as well as many others. A few years ago I was in a Curve magazine feature called Top Ten Dyke Activists Under 25 To Watch (or some other equally unwieldy title.) I’m also a member of the board of the Freedom Center, an organization that fights for the rights of those diagnosed with mental illness, exposes the fraud of the pharmaceutical industry, and the human rights abuses within the psychiatric system. Recently I was on ABC’s Primetime Outsiders representing the mad movement and arguing that those diagnosed can live successful lives without psychotropic medication, and that in fact many of these supposedly life saving medications are incredibly neurotoxic. Most of my activism has focused around sex worker’s rights, harm reduction and drug decriminalization, and the mad movement. I’m a biblomaniac & a biblioklept (don’t lend your books to me), and after many years of being a no-TV prude, I took a cultural studies class a few years ago and discovered it was intellectually credible to like low culture, and now I’m obsessed with The Wire and Mad Men. True Blood has awakened this weird vampire sexual fetish in me. I also have been an unapologetic user of IV drugs. I’m not like you. I’m probably a lot more boring, actually.

Can you talk a little bit about your blog, why you started it and what your goals are?

well, there’s this old notion of what people used to call “the deserving poor”, and I think that trope is still implicitly very much around. When a marginalized group agitates for its rights, it naturally attempts to portray its members as good, noble, and most of all, besides whatever difference coheres them as a
minority group, NORMAL–people whom the mainstream are able to relate to and emphasize with. Deserving. Hence, for example, the Ward & June
Cleaverization of many major LGBT rights groups. So in the sex worker’s rights movement, we have the deserving ho, and in the mad movement, we have the person just like you or I who for whatever reason, because of a period of trauma in their life, got diagnosed and was labeled and forced drugged and mistreated. And since out and unrepentant drug users are such pariahs in a culture in which the discourse around the use of mind altering substances is mostly limited to how badly we’ll criminalize those who partake in it, or at best how we’ll force them into treatment, there IS no deserving drug user by definition.

So as I wrote in my live journal once, “But I’m so sick of thinking of what everybody thinks. Image and image and image. I must be the political poster child, not the sad stereotype, I must. I must be a perfectly wholesome all American girl who just happens to have sex for money. The movement depends on it, right? All the other call girls were so angry at me when I started doing heroin. It wasn’t just concern–I was giving them a bad name…”

Because we can’t talk about the complexities of our identities, the many things that make us Other instead of focusing on single issue microcosmic movements, we can’t talk about the intersections between our various issues and struggles, which I think are vital–for example, the paternalistic Puritan criminalization of both drug use and sex work. So, I decided I was willing to put myself out there as the undeserving Other, and talk about all the marginalized groups I was a part of at once so that I could make these vital connections. Even if that meant allowing the inevitable accusations to be flung at
me–I obviously was only escorting to make money to score drugs, I obviously was only a junkie ho because I was crazy, etc.

I’d written about these things before for many years in a pretty widely followed livejournal, but I wanted to write in a less personalized memoir fashion now, because what I’d found is that many readers from the mainstream kept making excuses for me and seeing me as some sort of exception, the kind of tortured smart girl who indulges in all these bad things but redeems herself as an individual because of the fact that she’s bright and engaging, rather than politicizing the issues and accepting rather than excusing what I was.

One post you wrote that I found particularly thought provoking was about the bad rap pimps get. I did see the pimp as the boss– inherently exploitative even if not abusive, so my economic analysis led me to feel negatively towards pimps in general. Your post really made me re-examine and re-evaluate that. Can you talk a little bit about what a pimp actually, legally, is, and how pimps can play an important role in partnership with prostitutes?

Well, to the extent that I’m a socialist/leftist/Marxist/whatever I’d agree that all labor is inherently exploitative and alienating in some way. But if we’re
defining pimps as employers of prostitutes–the BOSS– it’s interesting that we view them as particularly, brutally exploitative, rather, than say, as impersonally exploitative as your boss at the pizzeria that pays you a bit above minimum wage. And that’s of course, again, a direct result of the fact that the culture sees sex work as inherently degrading and dehumanizing, and thus can’t conceive that any sane woman (this second wave feminist analysis, in
portraying these damsels in distress, conveniently omits the fact that so many men and genderqueer people do sex work, since it wouldn’t fit their lurid story so well) would choose to do it of her own volition, so she must be being forced by an abusive boss figure who must be inhuman and heartless to live off the earnings of such work without qualms.

Essentially, the sex worker’s rights movement is a labor movement, and we’re fighting to work the way we choose. And while that includes the right to be independent entrepreneurs–which is why the Nevada system is not a satisfactory system, because it allows the industry to be monopolized by a male dominated draconian big brothel business which doesn’t even allow the women it employs off brothel grounds for fear that they might turn a trick independently, and uses their virtual imprisonment on the job to overcharge them for every necessity–that also includes the right to structure our work in other ways.

Not everyone wants to work as an independent, taking on all the tasks of running an escort business by themselves–working the phones and screening clients can be some of the most exhausting parts of the job. Other workers aren’t criticized for having managers or bosses. Sex workers should be free to choose to work for themselves or someone else.

But beyond labor issues and into matters of the heart: I think the real tragedy of the taboo of the pimp is how those of us who live off
the black market are isolated from each other.

Legally, a pimp is anyone who knowingly takes money from a prostitute. So that means If you were working and your husband was taking care of your kids, he’d be your pimp. If you had a friend staying with you to escape a domestic violence situation and she wasn’t paying rent she’d be a pimp. Your child could be a pimp! If you have ever given money to anyone, expecting nothing in return, they are a pimp, if they know what you do.

I wrote on my local escorts’ listserv on this topic (and I apologize for how I keep on shamelessly quoting myself!):

“I think we should judge every working relationship, every personal relationship, and every relationship which straddles these two categories
on a case by case basis–not assume what they’re like based on class and race (remember, all the evil pimps of the media imagination are usually
black), based on labels. I’ve had a boyfriend who’s taken care of me by hook or by crook when I’ve been too depressed to work, and I’ve also taken care of him–while he did a bunch of work driving me, protecting me, and all sorts of other stuff. I decided where our money went, but some of it did go to him. I have never thought of him as a pimp.”

It seems like the romantic relationships of drug users and sex workers are constantly written off as abusive and or at least totally dispassionate and utilitarian. When I was still doing heroin daily, an ex-boyfriend accused my relationship with my new boyfriend of consisting only of using each other to obtain drugs. Again, nothing could be further from the truth—the reason that I worked with my boyfriend to obtain drugs for each other is because I trusted and
loved him. In the dangerous world of criminalization, I trusted him to care about protecting me from the police and other people who might want to take advantage of me, I trusted him with the money I gave over to him, trusted that he would split the spoils with me fairly, and trusted that he would watch over me and care about my safety when we injected together. He lived up to these implicit promises, and my trust in him as a driver/bodyguard/running partner was vindicated the one day that I did have a problem with a sex work client–he scared away a client that approached me aggressively, got between me and the
violent person with no hesitation, wielding a tire iron and getting the man to back down. I didn’t choose him as a lover because he was handy to me in terms of scoring drugs, I chose him as a running partner, driver, and bodyguard because I loved and trusted him. In an environment in which drug users and sex workers are reviled and criminalized and their safety is not a concern for most people, it only makes sense to team up with good friends and intimate partners, people who actually do care what happens to you. To paint all these relationships as exploitative and abusive by definition does a huge disservice to the people involved—many of whom are trying to take care of each other in an environment that cares nothing about their welfare.

To survive criminalization, people team up to conquer odds with those they trust most. In a heterosexual context, this can often mean a husband/wife or boyfriend/girlfriend team. Women make the most in the adult industry, and certainly someone working on the black market makes more than someone who doesn’t, so the woman ends up being the main wage earner (especially since most couples realize that having two people work on the black market in the same household is too risky). Often rather than having their male partners work in the legitimate marketplace while they have to hire some stranger to do call in checks, to drive them to outcalls and do bodyguard work, or worse, have an agency that provides these services take a huge cut out of their earnings, they prefer to have their partner do this backup work for them. And it’s hard to work in a profession so beset by criminalization and stigma all alone.

And yet, as sex workers we’re denied the comfort and safety of working with others whom we trust. Even in countries where sex work is decriminalized or legalized in some way, often “pimping” or “procuring” or whatever the label is is still criminalized. Personally, I can’t imagine living in the kind of cold world it would be for sex workers if it was possible to perfectly enforce these laws. I can’t imagine working my first year on my own without the great women employers I started off with, who started me off with clients they knew and trusted, taught me to protect myself from arrest and other dangers, and told me to always trust my intuition. What they took from me financially was a pittance compared with what they gave. And if I hadn’t had my friends living with me at the time, whom I did partially support, who cooked and cleaned from me and supported me emotionally when I was first entering the business, I don’t know what I’d have done.

Why is the idea of a partner who is part of a sex worker’s business so shocking? Is it because many libertarian or leftists accept and respect the sex work that independent, single indie escorts do,but when we talk about a man in a couple who accepts and abets his partner’s work in the industry, they fall back to old sexist knee jerk responses? Like a “real” man would never accept having his partner do sex work, and would certainly never actively back her up in the business? And if he is doing so, then he must be a batterer? If we were talking about the woman being the main wage earner because she had a high paying straight job, we’d never hear a peep about the man in the relationship, even if he did work for the woman–and if you understand sex work as “real” work, there should be no difference between a woman doctor paying the household bills and a woman escort doing the same thing.

I’m not romanticizing anything. I’m not saying that these relationships can’t be abusive or exploitative. But I don’t think they are inherently so because the woman is working in sex work and her partner receives some of her profits, and may work for/with her. In fact, criminalization protects the abusive partner in these relationships when things turn sour. A woman who is intimidated into giving a man all of her income from prostitution is less likely to report that kind of abuse than a woman who suffer the same kind of treatment who earns money through legal means. And because criminalization makes it hard for women to protect themselves, especially on the streets–most prostitutes do not feel comfortable calling the police when a client physically or sexually assaults them (for example, given a recent case in which a U Michigan law school student was prosecuted when she reported being assaulted in the context of a call, it’s easy to see why). So when they have protection, they are reluctant to strike out on their own, even when the person who protects them physically and sexually assaults them and exploits them for their income.

But I have to say in general I don’t think that our working relationships as sex workers are more likely to be abusive than anyone else’s relationships.

Actually, after I posted that pimp entry, I was talking to one of the good old friends who lived with me at the time and she said she really appreciated that entry because, as she said, “I was one of the best pimps ever!” And I really had to agree. Maybe we’ll come around to reclaiming the term–that’d be fun.

I’m really surprised that in all the coverage of the Craigslist murderer, more has not been made of the husband who saved his erotic masseuse/exotic dancer wife’s life from this monster. The husband obviously knew what his wife was doing for a living, and it seems like he was providing security for her. This is a “pimp” as hero. But we don’t get much about this story–no one has followed up with an interview with the husband or the wife–but whenever we hear about an abusive prostitute/intimate partner relationship, we’re sure to get a comprehensive account.

New Sex Workers’ Rights Blog

Caroline recently emailed me to fill me in on a new blog project that sounded cool and important, and which I thought might interest many Feministe readers. (Full disclosure: Jill and I will be occasionally guest blogging.) Check out Caroline below:

Hi people! I’m Caroline Shepherd. Cara has very kindly given me the chance to guest post to let me tell you about my new blog.

It’s called Harlot’s Parlour; it’s a group blog for sex workers and allies to discuss sex, sexuality and sex workers rights and issues in the UK, Europe and beyond. As well as writing about current issues in sexuality and sex work, we’re going to be writing theoretically about sex work and feminism, looking at how sex work is portrayed in the media and the law. Here’s the first post that introduces the writers (some you’ll know, some you won’t) and contains all the information on how the blog came about.

I hope you all pay us a visit, we’re pretty excited about this!

Man charged with kidnapping 11 year old girl and imprisoning her for 18 years suspected in serial killings of 10 prostitutes

(via Bound, Not Gagged)

This story is beyond sickening. The San Francisco Chronicle reports that a man named Phillip Garrido and his wife pleaded not guilty to abducting Jaycee Lee Dugard 18 years ago, who they had allegedly kept imprisoned on their property since then. During this time, Dugard had two children, allegedly fathered by Garrido. Apparently authorties were notified recently after Garrido brought these two girls to the UC Berkley campus to discuss “holding an event related to God, the FBI and other topics.” Campus police were sketched out by Garrido and the “robotic” behavior of his daughters. Officer Ally Jacobs did a background check and discovered that he had been convicted of rape and kidnapping in the 1970s. She called his parole officer, who further freaked her out by revealing that Garrido supposedly had no children. A parole officer (presumably the same one Jacobs contacted, though the article is unclear,) visited the Garrido house and interviewed the family, including Dugard, who revealed that she was the 11 year old girl who had disappeared 18 years ago, and presumably was like “get me and my kids the fuck out of here right now.”

Supposedly here reunion with her parents has gone “well.” I can’t even imagine. At least she and her daughters are out of there and Garrido and his wife are in custody and being charged with a lot of things.

Police are now searching his house for evidence that links him to the unsolved murders of 10 prostitutes during the 1990s. Garrido worked in an area where some of the women were found.

The horror here is beyond words, and I hope that Dugard and her daughters will receive the help they need to heal and move forward. I would also like to echo a commenter on the Bound, Not Gagged post who argued that this guy would probably not have been able to get away with all this for so long if prostitution was not criminalized. Criminalization kills sex workers. I am tired of anyone arguing otherwise in the name of paternalistically “helping” the very population their prefered policies endanger and drive underground.

Notes on Gore

I had about half a post written about my sometime contentious relationship with veganism (I am vegan), PETA, food justice, and a whole mess of other stuff, but then Renee had to go make an excellent post about the frequent failings of PETA and too many other animal rights orgs and activists in recognizing the history of dehumanization of people of color. The comments are still going strong, and I should probably wade through them before throwing my hat in the ring of related ish.

So instead I will finish up this post about my special feelings towards Violent Movies. Specifically, GORY movies. I love them. Sometimes.

There’s a lot of talk these days on my corners of teh interwebz about Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarentino’s latest, an ahistorical revenge fantasy filled with Jews gorily killing Nazis. Quentin Tarantino is not Jewish, so far as I know, nor is the fictional head of the Nazi-vanquishing title outfit played by Brad Pitt. Brad Pitt is supposed to be part American Indian, however, which is why he and his Basterds like to scalp Nazis. This all rings a little…problematic to me. I’m also not here to defend the film (which I haven’t seen) or QT’s oeuvre, which is also problematic, to say the least. I am just here to discuss the fact that I find the idea of Eli Roth beating the bloody hell out of a Nazi with a baseball bat to be rather appealing. I’m planning to go see the thing–get a large popcorn and soda and (hopefully) enjoy the hell outta some air conditioning for a few hours. Setting Nazis on fire? Sounds good to me. As my internet friend Sabotabby wrote:

It’s a movie that has Brad Pitt killing a bunch of Nazis in brutal and historically improbable ways. Either you read that and go “DUDE, AWESOME” or you don’t. I think you know by now which camp I fall into.

I got into a brief discussion about “torture porn” with another internet friend earlier today, prompted by a discussion of said film. He said that it was “torture porn” and thus vile. He thought torture, and thus “torture porn”, was inexcusable. I think that torture is inexcusable. “Torture porn” is a made-up nongenre that links together often very disperit films based upon the vague idea that they eroticize or sensationalize or just depict graphic acts of torture (or other gory violence) for the audiences viewing pleasure. Everything from Hostel to Saw III (et al) to Funny Games has been widely referred to as “torture porn”, despite their widely varying intents and treatments of violence.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Back to my defense of Inglourious Basterds against charges of evilness by virtue of being “torture porn”.

Revenge fantasies that involve oppressed people torturing their oppressors are all fine and well, So far as I’m concerned. They can be cathartic, they can be healing, they can be a lot of fun (at least for those of us who can distinguish between fantasy entertainment and reality, which hopefully those of us who are grown-ups can.) Even besides the oppressed/oppressor context—fictional graphic violence can be can be cathartic and otherwise enjoyable for a variety of people for a variety of reasons. I don’t think I’m so special a snowflake that my love of gore is wacky and subversive whereas all those other (probably dude) people are just sick. Fuck that.

I hope that most of us at Feministe are in a s/m sexually fantasies are not bad (0r good) in and of themselves. Violent movies of the thrill-ride/cathartic horror variety are a similar thing. If I hadn’t loaned my copy of Men Women and Chainsaws out and never gotten it back, I could look up some pertinent quotes. One thing I know from doing phone sex and talking to countless cis straight-identified men watching (non-torture) porn is that the subject of identification in a given text (or film) may not be the one the author(director) intended or that a critic might expect. We know what they say about making assumptions, don’t we? So I won’t judge anyone for liking “torture porn” or any other maligned violent genre in and of itself.

People across a lot of different demographics like violent movies. Not just teenage boys, or grown men who think like the stupider of them as marketers have historically led us to believe. I’ve been fascinated by gore ever since I used to sneak peeks at the boxes in the horror section of the video store when I was a little kid. I’d have nightmares. I wondered what could possibly happen in these terrifying, anything goes, sometimes X-Rated (Wizard of Gore!) monstrosities. When I was older and actually started watching “real”, adult, horror I was sorely disappointed in how…crappy and boring most of it is. But I do enjoy a good, creative bloodbath, and I don’t think the art of depicting (fictional) violence is anything to sneeze at.

So, It annoys me time and time again to read stuff like the following, from Entertainment Weekly’s cover story on the Watchmen movie:

Snyder hopes the female fans he gained from 300 (and Gerard Butler’s abs) will watch Watchmen, too, though it’s hard to imagine that they’ll be buzzing about this film in the same way. ”I think its human themes appeal to all,” says Malin Akerman, whose character Silk Spectre is a knowing commentary on the obligatory superteam-sexpot heroine. ”But I do think men will have a much easier time swallowing all the violence.”

Hi. I’m a woman. I want more violence, pls, and I don’t give a fuck about Gerald Butler or his abs.

I was thrilled a couple months later when my friends at Entertainment Weekly (I‘ve been a subscriber for, like, over a decade. They’re my friends.) ran an article about how OMG, we were all wrong! the horror movie audience is generally actually slightly more female than male (just like the population overall is slightly more female than male, but lets not push things!) Of course the article had to posit theories as to why this bizarre fact could be. Including that it (wait for it) gives them an excuse to cuddle with their boyfriends. I’m fucking barfing right now, No, I am, really. I just did it again. Also, can we just note that it’s a cliché as old as cinema itself that dudes like scary movies cuz they give them a chance to squeeze the hand of their ladydates. But these are DIFFERENT, GENDERED grabby motivations, cuz dudes are just cuddling cuz they wanna score.

In any event, I’m excited for the main subject of the above-mentioned EW article, Diablo Cody’s Jennifer’s Body. It is supposedly gory, it’s both written and directed by women (a rarity in mainstream of the genre, or in Hollywood at all,) and it’s named after my favorite song on Hole’s classic Live Through This album. So: I’m going. I have this almost charitable project going of trying to make one-sided peace with Diablo Cody, who wrote the thing. I want to support women in the film industry, I especially want to support current/former sex workers in the film industry who have written popular books, especially since one day I would like to be them. I want to be able to forgive her for subtitling her memoir Candy Girl “A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper”–implication being that all those uneducated trashy stereotypes are “likely”. Unlike a witty blogstress such as herself who seems in interviews to have been more engaged with her work as an anthropology project than as a job. I hope that all those reader reviews I’ve seen on Amazon about how patronizing she is when discussing her coworkers, how above other sex workers she posits herself as being are inaccurate…because while I thought Juno was extremely overrated, I would love to have this movie actually be good! I wanna get behind the ex-stripper with the Oscar! I’m not hating!

But I am digressing.

I know I’m not the only one here who appreciates some splatter. Why do we like it? Why do you like it? And even more interesting, why do some people find it upsetting that we do?