by Sunsara Taylor
On April 12, 2013, eight members of End Pornography and Patriarchy: The Enslavement and Degradation of Women (StopPatriarchy.org) were evicted, under threat of arrest, from the annual conference “From Abortion Rights to Social Justice, Building the Movement for Reproductive Freedom,” sponsored by Hampshire College’s program for Civil Liberties and Public Policy (CLPP).
Our “crime”? Peacefully advocating anti-pornography and anti-sex-industry views at our own officially registered organizational table.
According to Mia Sullivan, Director of CLPP, our political opposition to the sex industry had made a few pro-porn conference-goers feel that the conference was no longer a “safe space.”
However, just this single, uninvestigated complaint is all it took for Ms. Sullivan to bring police and insist that we leave immediately or be arrested for trespassing. And, to be very clear, the police were with Ms. Sullivan from the very first time she or anyone else from CLPP approached us.
This act of political suppression is a dangerous escalation in an overall growing trend towards a pro-porn, pro-sex work hegemony within academia, as well as large sections of the so-called “women’s movement.” Not only is there an increasing embrace of pornography and the sex industry, but critiques focusing on the violence and degradation, the dehumanization and commodification of women’s bodies and the destruction of millions upon millions of real women’s and young girls’ lives through these industries, are being shut down as “beyond the pale” and in this case, even as criminal.
It is always wrong to call in agents of the highly oppression and reactionary state to suppress the political views of fighters for liberation. But this is especially dangerous to women everywhere at a moment when debate over, and opposition to, the truly monstrous crimes against women in the global sex industry deepen and spread.
What Exactly Happened At Our Table that Merited the Police?
A group of vociferous pro-porn people approached our table to argue in favor of porn and the sex industry, citing their personal experiences with the “sex industry,” with sexual violence, and with bondage, domination, and sado-masochism (BDSM). As we are not in favor of intruding into people’s consensual sexual behavior, we argued the larger point: sexuality is not formed for anyone in a vacuum. In a world that is saturated with violence against women, a world that sexualizes degradation and humiliation, it is not surprising that those ideas get reflected in people’s genuinely felt sexual desires, including by victims of sexual violence.
But, the “right” to market yourself as a sexual commodity has no meaning outside of a world that gives rise to the idea of women’s bodies as commodities, as things to be used, tortured, degraded and hurt for the sexual pleasure of men. And in that kind of world, this real world is littered with the bodies of millions of women and very young girls who have been kidnapped, pimped, beaten, tortured, sold by starving families, drugged and tricked, and repeatedly raped and sold and then discarded as nothing more than unthinking flesh.
While this debate was passionate, we were calm, substantive and principled. We repeatedly refocused things on the need to look at all these phenomena from the vantage of the liberation of women, not from one’s own narrow experience. And on the possibility and necessity of opening up space for truly liberating personal and sexual relations, based on equality, mutual respect and a shared desire. We also drew attention to our Call to Action which explicitly states that we are not seeking to enact laws to ban pornography and that we oppose the criminalization of women in the sex industry; rather, we are challenging people themselves to reject and oppose this culture of degradation and commodification of women.
For this, the police were called and we were escorted off campus grounds under threat of arrest!
A little background
Stop Patriarchy attended the CLPP conference due to our opposition to the war on women, especially by the extreme escalation of attacks on abortion rights across the country. Today, abortion is more difficult to access, more stigmatized, and more dangerous to provide than at any time since Roe v. Wade. StopPatriarchy.org sees this as the “mirror opposite” of the increasingly degrading, cruel, brutal, humiliating and mainstream nature of pornography and was eager to get into all this with conference participants. Within this, some members were bringing the view of all-the-way revolution and communism as it has been re-envisioned by Bob Avakian.
It came as no surprise people had strong reactions, positive and negative, to our politics. Some loved that we challenged feelings of shame and guilt that many women are made to feel about their abortions, others claimed it was wrong to “tell women how to feel.” Some appreciated that we called out Obama for conciliating with restrictions on abortion, for his drone program, for assassinating U.S. citizens, and for continuing torture at Guantanamo. Others insisted that Obama is “our friend.” Some loved our opposition to porn and began wearing our stickers (“If you can’t imagine sex without porn, you’re fucked!), others got into thoughtful discussion, and still others strongly disagreed.
We welcomed this. Isn’t one of the purposes of a conference on social justice the opportunity for people to hear different approaches as they are put forward by people who share a commitment to defending the lives and rights of oppressed people?
However, we cannot dismiss that these political differences may have played a role in the CLPP organizers’ eagerness to seize on the opportunity to remove us from their conference.
One Final Irony
As we put it in our open letter to the CLPP organizers and Hampshire community:
“Finally, it is a bitter irony that your conference included numerous workshops on ‘state violence,’ ‘racial justice,’ and the ‘prison industrial complex’ yet one of the people you called the police on is a young Black man who has been Stopped & Frisked growing up in Brooklyn more times than he can remember. This young man decided to put his body on the line and face up to a year in jail when he joined in the campaign of mass civil disobedience against Stop & Frisk last year together with Carl Dix, Cornel West, and dozens of others. It is a further bitter irony that your conference held workshops and gave voice extensively to concerns about making the conference welcoming and safe for LGBT people, yet one of the people you called the police on is a transgender person who has (owing to the obvious dangers which face transgender people particularly at the hands of police and in jail) has judiciously calculated which political activities to take part in specifically to avoid the risk of arrest. Neither of these people imagined that a conference on ‘Abortion Rights’ and ‘Social Justice’ would be the place where they faced the greatest threat of being imprisoned!”
Join in Protesting This Outrageous Action By CLPP
Messages of opposition to this use of police by Hampshire College’s program for Civil Liberties and Public Policy can be sent through our website at: http://www.stoppatriarchy.org/oppose-suppression.html.
Sunsara Taylor is a writer for Revolution Newspaper (revcom.us) and the initiator of the movement to End Pornography and Patriarchy: The Enslavement and Degradation of Women (StopPatriarchy.org)