#I would rather be called a SWERF then be someone who supports any group of women being exposed to violent men

[coochiequeens]

“Are women in prostitution crash test dummies to be experimented on? […] Are we still human beings [to] the state?” She asked.”

Marylène Lévesque was just 22 years old when she was found stabbed to death in a hotel room in Quebec City, Canada in 2019. Lévesque, who was in the sex industry, had decided to meet Eustachio Gallese, 51, at the hotel instead of at the massage parlor where she typically operated.

Unbeknownst to Lévesque, Gallese was on day parole while serving a life sentence for killing his girlfriend, Chantale Deschesnes in 2004.

Gallese had brutally murdered Deschesnes by bludgeoning her with a hammer and stabbing her repeatedly. After being incarcerated, Gallese began to gradually receive privileges from Canada’s parole board on the basis of “good behavior,” downgrading his risk of reoffending from “high” to “moderate” to “low to moderate.” He was ultimately granted a day parole, the facilitation of which led to Lévesque’s murder.

The case made international headlines after it came to light that Gallese had received express permission from Canadian prison administrators to visit brothels during his day parole, reportedly in order relieve his pent-up sexual tension.

Unfortunately, this case is not isolated.

In Germany, the situation is particularly dire, where women in the sex industry are being used as test subjects for a radical new therapeutic approach to the rehabilitation of convicted rapists.

Often referred to as the “brothel of Europe” for its massive legal prostitution market, there are confirmed cases of men convicted of sexual violence being granted permission to visit brothels with the explicit intention of “accumulating experience with women,” with incidents being recorded in two German states.

In one program, which the Osnabrück Forensic Psychiatric Center has been running since 2001, women in the sex trade were invited to come to the clinic to “aid” convicted rapists in learning about sexual consent. The program has attracted backlash from those concerned with ethics and women’s rights.

Rüdiger Müller-Isberner, former president and current board member of the International Association of Forensic Mental Health Services, condemned the practice as “aberrant” and “morally dubious.” 

Prostitution survivor, PhD student, and anti-sex industry advocate Huschke Mau expressed similar sentiments, questioning the morality of using women involved in the sex industry as guinea pigs for so-called rehabilitation experiments.

“Are women in prostitution crash test dummies to be experimented on? […] Are we still human beings [to] the state?” She asked.

Yet the practice continues, and has far more supporters than one might hope.

Many proponents of the program claim that the men involved in the program are considered to be “low-risk,” and so the risks to the women involved have been accurately assessed. But the claim is dubious at best in light of the Lévesque murder, where Gallese had been determined to be as “low-risk” as an offender can be categorized in the Canadian system. 

Other supporters point to the fact the program is not currently taxpayer funded, with the men who paying out of pocket for the visits. But the most widespread contention that underscores all of the support is the belief that, no matter what a man has done, denying him sex would be an egregious human rights violation. 

“Sexuality is a part of human dignity. […] Even rapists should not be excluded. After all, it is precisely they who must learn the value of consensual sexuality,” wrote legal correspondent and lawyer Christian Rath back in 2011 for the notoriously neoliberal news outlet Taz.

For an industry that has struggled to maintain a façade of decency, rebranding it as a dignified form of “therapy” or “healing” appears to be yet another attempt at normalization. It comes on the heels of years of liberal feminists attempting to assert prostitution is a form of harmless, legitimate employment.

The Federal Association for Erotic and Sexual Services(FAES), an organization that claims that all members are “current or former sex workers” is now calling for prostitution to be included in the global “care revolution,” even bastardizing Marxist theory to claim that the industry can be classed as essential “reproductive work.”

On their website, they’ve issued a statement comparing the supposed healing power of prostitution to the essential services provided by therapists and nurses.

“The emotional work performed in many cases in sex work can be compared […] with that of coaches, therapists, nurses or similar professions, which are performed close to the body and close to people,” FAES declared.

In recent years, this rebranding strategy has been successfully utilized to argue that prostitution for disabled men amounts to necessary therapy, with the care policy spokeswoman of the Green Party arguing in 2017 that the practice should be publicly funded. 

In 2022, a man successfully sued his labor association to pay for his use of prostituted women with a specific “sexual assistant” license after he was in a work-related accident and sustained a disability which he claimed made finding a consensual partner “impossible.”

The decision appeared particularly tone-deaf to many considering already-existing accessibility barriers for persons with disabilities to participate in daily life, but particularly so when noting the high rates of sexual violence committed against disabled women and girls. 

But convicts, rapists, and disabled men aren’t the only ones demanding “sexual therapy” from prostituted women; the trend continues in senior care as well. 

Associations representing elderly men are now arguing for state-funded prostitutes for geriatric male patients with the added promise of supposedly curbing the widespread sexual harassment of female caregivers. 

This phenomenon ties into the “prison sex therapy” programs, as proponents emphasize its need specifically for cognitively impaired convicts.

FAES representative Josefa Nereus argued in 2020 that deploying women in prostitution in experimental “sex therapy” for convicted rapists is morally justifiable, as long as the woman in question is informed about whom she will be seeing. 

Despite her strong support, Nereus, a high-class escort who charges 250 Euro per hour, had admitted that she’s never had to endure a rapist as a “client.” In contrast, the women of Network Ella, Germany’s first organization for prostitution survivors, have recounted the horrors of barely surviving male sex buyers who had violent criminal backgrounds. 

Another prominent defender of the practice is the university educated 500 Euro per hour escort, columnist and sex industry representative Salome Balthus. 

Balthus takes it a step further and argues that prostitution can act as a fantasy service for “ethical” pedophiles who seek out infantilized prostituted women to avoid offending against children. 

Unlike Neurus, Balthus walks the walk. Her pseudonym is based on a painter infamous for portraying prepubescent girls in sexually charged poses. On Twitter, she labels herself a “toy for adults,” and posts illustrations depicting fantasy child sexual abuse. On her website, Balthus emphasizes her childlike stature, describing herself as “child woman,” and a “half-legal fantasy.”

In the 13th century, influential Christian theologian Thomas Aquinas asserted that prostitution was necessary to prevent violence against “civil” women, comparing it to the sewers used to carry dirt out of a palace. 

Then, in the 19th century, phrenologists such as Cesare Lombroso argued that some women were born sexual deviants and thus were perfectly suited for prostitution and the task of absorbing male aggression. This belief continued into the 20th century, bolstered by fascist regimes which consequently instituted brothel networks in all their occupied territories, claiming that this was in order to “protect” the local population.

In the modern age the so-called “sex positivity” movement claims to have moved beyond these ancient misogynistic notions with calls for “equality in the bedroom” and an end to “the orgasm gap.” Yet, their celebration of the sex industry shares a curious amount of similarities with the raging sexists of history they would otherwise oppose association with. 

The belief that a class of women should be readily accessible for purchase by men is not new. But while it was once claimed to be due to women’s natural inferiority, it is now being pushed as a consequence of female empowerment, sexual liberation, and women’s ability to serve the public good by renting their bodies to men “in need.”

Though the rationale has changed, the abuse remains.

By Elly Arrow Elly is a guest writer at Reduxx. She is a vocal advocate for the abolishment of the sex industry, and analyzes the intersecting issues of female poverty, lack of rights for migrant women, intimate partner violence and sexual trauma. Elly is the creator of Die Unsichtbaren Männer (The Invisible Men), a project documenting the attitudes of sex buyers in Germany.

[philosopherking1887]

(1/8) I’m going to make my argument on anon because my blog is not political. I’ll message you off anon separately as I think it’s rude to engage someone in debate when they don’t know who they’re speaking with, but if you decide to respond to this I ask that you don’t post that message. I want to explain why I feel very uncomfortable with people calling the left and right mirror images of each other under any circumstance.

(2/8) It would be erroneous to suggest that there aren’t parts of the left the deal exclusively in black and white morality, who conspiracy-theorize, and who reduce people to basic identities such as race and sexuality. I wouldn’t even make the claim that these people are a loud minority. I’m also aware people who accept nuance in morality occasionally state things in black and white terms, and in doing so turn people off to their more nuanced arguments.

(3/8) I would argue that leftists don’t consider anybody with antisemitic beliefs or conspiracy theories to be leftist, because the backbone of leftist ideology is wanting to crush things like antisemitism, homophobia, racism, and the systems that support these ideologies. Leftists actively distances themselves from these people, in the same way the feminists distance themselves from terfs and swerfs, stating that these people are fundamentally counter to feminist ideology.

(4/8) All that said, I still identify as part of the left. In the circles I run in, it’s less about destroying anyone who has ever said or done something “problematic” (which we acknowledge would be everyone), and more about wanting to reduce the harm caused by oppressive systems, and convince others to consider their language and actions more carefully. It’s these leftists that I’d argue could actually affect societal change.

(5/8) Let’s say someone’s said something racist. People who I’d consider centrist like to focus on the fact that someone is legally allowed to say that. People who I’d consider effective leftist seek to make it clear that it’s not ok to say such things, thereby pushing back against the speech becoming morally acceptable, but also believe that you haven’t completely morally bankrupted yourself simply by saying a thing.

(6/8) People that I’d consider effective leftists don’t believe that media with morally wrong elements shouldn’t exist, and we recognize that it doesn’t have to expressly state something is wrong for it to clearly be wrong. I personally enjoy media that includes ableism, racism, rape, etc. The story doesn’t have to remind me these things are wrong, because a well written story will present these things accurately, and these things are wrong.

(7/8) What I understand to be the right does not have room for people who want to consider humans, their words, and their actions complexly. Their very ideology believes whole sections of our population unworthy of consideration. It’s this core difference that makes me extremely uncomfortable when I see people compare the left and the right.

(8/8) Are there people on the left who think too much in black and white terms? Or course, but this isn’t an intrinsic part of the ideology, it’s the result of not developing or engaging critical thinking skills. The right on the other hand ideologically opposes critical thinking and complex understandings of all human beings.

You’re right that I was overstating the case when I said that the Left was just a mirror image of the Right. There are some good principles motivating the Left; I have no sympathy at all for the principles that motivate the Right. But I do think that the black-and-white morality, bolstered by a simplistic worldview, is an intrinsic danger of being at either extreme on the political spectrum.

The main reason I no longer consider myself a leftist is in your second paragraph: the people who think in black-and-white morality and reduce people to their social identities aren’t just a “loud minority” on the Left; they are the voice of the Left. I see it from my academic friends (“friends”) on Facebook and I see it from people on Tumblr, where the ideas from leftist academia get popularized and proliferated. If anything, it seems, the people who genuinely accept moral ambiguity are a silent minority who are gritting their teeth and going along with the complexity-challenged majority because they agree, on the whole, with their policy goals. I, too, agree with the policy goals, but I don’t accept the -ist label, the identity as a Leftist, because I don’t share the general worldview.

This got incredibly long (and took way more time than I was expecting), so the rest is under a cut.

In paragraph 3 you say: “leftists don’t consider anybody with antisemitic beliefs or conspiracy theories to be leftist, because the backbone of leftist ideology is wanting to crush things like antisemitism, homophobia, racism, and the systems that support these ideologies.” Probably the biggest single factor that’s driven me away from the Left is the very shallow understanding of Jewish history and identity that I see even from people who claim to oppose antisemitism. Most of them don’t even seem to recognize antisemitism within their own ranks, much less distance themselves from it; as commented by David Schraub, a UC Berkeley law professor, on his excellent blog The Debate Link, all kinds of blatantly anti-Jewish crap can get excused as legitimate “criticism of Israel” (including, in a German legal decision, firebombing a synagogue). Despite loving to insist that Israel should not be equated with Jews when they claim that criticism of Israel can never be considered antisemitic (even when that includes saying that the Jewish state should cease to exist, or that Israel’s actions prove that Hitler was right), they’re perfectly happy to interrogate any Jews who show up at progressive political events about their views on Israel. And, apparently, protest LGBT-rights events partly sponsored by Hillel on the grounds of “pinkwashing.” Ah, there are those conspiracy theorists!

Tumblr has actually been a breath of fresh air in that respect: I’m seeing a lot more people on here than among my leftist “friends” in academia (whom I would have expected to know better) who acknowledge that antisemitism is actually still a problem and maybe you should believe Jews when they say it’s a problem, rather than automatically dismissing it as a tactic for shutting down criticism of Israel. Many of my Tumblr mutuals also seem to understand the apparently difficult-to-grasp concept that Jews, even pale-skinned Ashkenazi Jews, have not always and everywhere been considered white—and still are not, by the people who call themselves “white nationalists.” I’m not sure how widespread this view is, but an idea seems to have gotten hold in some segments of the Left that the Jews are just a group of white Europeans who fabricated a historical origin in the Levant to justify a colonialist land grab. This is stupid for a variety of reasons—the basic ignorance of history foremost among them—but what really strikes me about it is how it’s actually a logical consequence of the simple guiding worldview that seems to be widely espoused by the Left.

Here are a couple of general principles of that worldview:1) The world is divided into white oppressors and oppressed people of color.2) The original sin of the modern world (indeed, of the world in general) is European colonialism.

To be clear: I agree that in the vast majority of the contemporary world, white people (i.e., people of European descent) are in a position of dominance and privilege over non-white people. I also agree that colonialism is a great evil and the source of most of the systemic injustices that continue to plague the world. But I also think that racial identity is contingent and contextual, and while leftists will pay lip service to that idea and trot it out when it suits them, their approach to the history and situation of the Jews, which throws a wrench into the simple worldview, suggests to me that they don’t fully understand or believe in that contingency and contextuality.

I agree with leftists that the state of Israel has oppressive policies toward Palestinians. I also agree that in America, Ashkenazi Jews (which most American Jews are, though NOT most Israeli Jews) are for most practical purposes white. Here’s where a problem arises: part of the reason colonialism is such a great crime is that it displaces people from their ancestral homelands—both the indigenous populations who lived on the colonized land and the African people who were transported from their homes into slavery on distant continents. So, the Left concludes, there must be a great moral importance to the connection with an ancestral homeland. Acknowledging that Jews, even Ashkenazim, have a historical origin in the territory of Israel/Palestine would (a) complicate their designation as white oppressors and (b) raise the possibility that they have some rightful claim to the territory. Now, there are all kinds of ways to dispel (b). You could say that diaspora Jews have been gone from the land so long that there’s no longer a meaningful connection to it… but then that raises the question of how long Native Americans, aboriginal Australians, etc. get to claim that they have been wronged by the displacement of their ancestors (is there a statute of limitations on an ancestral connection to a land?). You could say that it’s still wrong to forcibly reappropriate your ancestral land from people who have moved in in the meantime… but that would be a problem for the argument that Palestinian refugees have the right to return to where their grandparents lived. Maybe you could say it’s wrong to reappropriate land from people who aren’t the descendants of the appropriators (the Romans, in the relevant case)? Except then it’s OK to punish descendants for their ancestors’ crimes…?

It’s easier to square everything by just saying that Jews have no historical connection to the land, they’re white through and through and have never been otherwise, and the displacement and continued oppression of Palestinians is merely an instance of the very same European “settler colonialism” that (according to Principle 2) is the wellspring of all the other injustices of the modern world. You may have heard that expression applied to the existence of Israel; it’s a watchword of the BDS movement, beloved of much of the Left. The Chicago Dyke March borrowed from them the credo that “Zionism is an inherently white-supremacist ideology”—which would be a really weird thing to say if you acknowledged that Zionism (meaning the movement to found a Jewish state) arose in response to the prevalent European attitude that Jews are an “Oriental” people who can never really belong in Europe because they don’t have the proper kind of ancestral connection with European lands. Better just say—as did a Facebook “friend” of mine, a philosophy grad student from a prestigious university—that turn-of-the-century Jewish settlement in Palestine had absolutely nothing to do with rising antisemitism in Europe, because racialized antisemitism wasn’t even much of a problem in Europe until the Nazis came to power. Because apparently that shit just came out of nowhere. He even went so far as to say that any Jews who may have left Europe for Palestine before 1930 out of fear of antisemitic persecution were “alarmists.”

Do you see how this reflects the same kind of black-and-white morality that we see on Tumblr in other contexts (whether that’s telling people that they’re horrible for sympathizing with villains and other Problematic™ characters, or that they must be rapists and abusers if they read, enjoy, and/or get off on fic that depicts rape and abuse)? Acknowledging the origin of Zionism in European antisemitism, acknowledging that the state of Israel exists in large part because of the Holocaust, even acknowledging the correct geographic origin of the Jewish people, might mean allowing moral ambiguity into the situation. It might mean that early Zionist settlers were not white-supremacist monsters; it might mean that Israeli Jews, many of them the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors and refugees from the USSR, are not merely callous racists (which many of them, I’m sure, are), but frightened, and not entirely without reason. Not to mention that acknowledging sources and forms of oppression that predate European colonialism and defy color-based racial categories would complicate the simple worldview.

It’s having those kinds of arguments (over and over and over) with people on the Left—trying to explain very basic things about the history and experience of my people—that has thoroughly alienated me. I sometimes like to say, savoring the deliberate irony, that “identity politics is bad for the Jews.” It is, on both sides: we’re not white enough to be considered worthy by the Right, but apparently we’re too white to be considered worthy in the way that matters to the Left: a claim to oppression. People on the Left and the Right both like to say (or just insinuate) that Jews control the media and mainstream politics and are using it to make U.S. foreign policy subservient to Israel (the Chicago Dyke March and the KKK can bond over that). You know what was good for the Jews? Enlightenment universalist humanism. The principle that individuals are to be judged as individuals, not by their membership in a community; that association with a minority religious or cultural community is a private matter, as long as you’re a good citizen of the state in which you find yourself. Those were the principles that drove the emancipation of Jews in Europe (i.e., the elevation to full citizenship), and the principles with which Zola et al. defended Dreyfus. And yes, you can recognize the effects of systemic group-based oppression and work to fight it, while also insisting that the ultimate locus of moral value is the individual, and that all individuals must be presumed to have equal value in virtue of a common humanity that is more important than group differences.

But here the moral rigorism of the Left—the view that a person, action, or institution with any moral taint must be rotten through and through—causes me problems again. Enlightenment ideals were formulated, articulated, and enshrined in government institutions amid racist European colonialism and misogynist patriarchy. Therefore, the Left concludes, they must be wholly bankrupt. Enlightenment individualism, they say (with a little help from Marx), is just a pretext to glorify the white wealthy landowning male and the capitalist order. Racists and sexists like Locke and Kant, slaveowners like Jefferson and Madison, cannot have had good, genuinely liberatory ideals that they failed to live up to; the ideals themselves must have been devised purely to uphold the system of white supremacist patriarchal capitalism. I find this extremely ironic, considering that the ideals to which the Left swears loyalty, of casting off oppressive systems of domination and striving for equality and “liberation,” have their roots firmly in the Enlightenment. Yes, we should acknowledge the failings and limitations of Enlightenment thinkers, and we should keep expanding our conception of the humanity that deserves liberation. But we should also acknowledge our debt to these flawed, sometimes even overall immoral, human beings—keeping in mind that we, too, will probably look deeply flawed to future generations, even if we are striving in the right direction.

I can cite all kinds of other examples of this moral rigorism, including the very loud people who liked to say that there was no moral difference between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump (and then, oddly enough, cited the 90-some percent of African Americans who voted for Clinton and the 53% of white women who voted for Trump as proof of the virtue of the former and the depravity of the latter). In fannish spaces on Tumblr, it shows up as a hybrid moral-aesthetic rigorism: if a work or its creator is morally problematic, nothing about the work can have any artistic value, either. Thus, since Joss Whedon is a bad feminist (or perhaps not a feminist at all), not only can we no longer enjoy Buffy or consider it progressive in any way, but we must say that he’s a bad storyteller, and a bad writer of dialogue and character, even for white male characters (and if we have to read sloppily to come to that conclusion…? *shrug*). The issue is not just about enjoying media that depicts problematic things (though there is a truly batshit wing of the Tumblr Left that does have a problem with that); it’s about whether you’re allowed to enjoy the good aspects of media that depict certain things in a problematic way.

As for the issue of condemning hate speech and acknowledging the legal right (in the U.S.) to speak it: someone genuinely committed to the reality of moral ambiguity would say that you can do both. You can very strongly condemn white supremacists and neo-Nazis, you can go out and protest their rallies, while also saying that it’s not a good idea to initiate violent altercations with them. You can say that the ACLU is still a good organization even though they defend the rights of neo-Nazis to march. You might think that, as a Jew, I’d be in favor of the “punch a Nazi” attitude—and when it comes to dyed-in-the-wool Nazis like Richard Spencer and Steve Bannon, punch away. But as a believer in moral ambiguity, I also recognize that a lot of the young white men drawn to the alt-right have been radicalized in the very same way as the young Muslim men who are drawn to Al-Qaeda or the Islamic State. Here’s where I see an instance of mirroring between the Right and the Left: Conservatives will tend to say that Islamic terrorists are inherently evil, there’s no redeeming them, and the only good terrorist is a dead terrorist, while many neo-Nazis are just unhappy, isolated, vulnerable young men, despairing over the bleakness of their economic prospects, who have been led astray. Meanwhile, over on the Left, people say that neo-Nazis are inherently evil, irredeemable, etc., while many Islamic terrorists are just vulnerable young men who have been led astray. So both sides accept a double standard, only it’s reversed. Can’t we say that there are some vulnerable, misled young men (and women) among both kinds of extremists? In fact, in Germany, the very same strategies that were developed to deradicalize neo-Nazis are being adapted to deradicalize Islamic extremists.

I know a number of genuinely critical thinkers who want to continue throwing in their lot with the Left for its generally good goals and ideals, despite its problems with moral ambiguity, and I don’t have a problem with that. As long as we’re working for the same outcomes, it’s just a matter of labels. But there are some serious issues where I part company with the Left, and some deep differences on matters of history and philosophy. As a historian and a philosopher, those differences matter a lot to me. And, specifically, as a Jew with a profound sense of Jewish history (though not the religion, which is why I’ve been sitting at home writing this essay instead of going to Yom Kippur services), I also have a profound mistrust of ideological extremes that regard group identity as more important than individual humanity, because people on both ends of the political spectrum have always found reasons to hate us as a group.