#but this is very much a problem with many native american practices too

[enchi-elm]

Turn OC Week 2025 - Day 1 - "Short" Bio

James and Dico are two OCs that I created for Chapter 5: Flight and Flourish for my Tallster fanfic "You've Caught Me Between Wind and Water". This chapter, which starts with the first erotic scene in the story, ends with Caleb getting used to his new cabinmates in the hastily erected officer's log cabins that are so famous in Valley Forge. They have six bunks, including Caleb's, so I needed five OCs to fill out the beds.

My original notes for these characters are filed away in my notebooks, but let me free-hand this. Caleb's bunkmates are all part of Lamb's Continental Artillery--occasionally referenced in-story as "New York 2nd Artillery", like in the show--which is the final amalgamation of several artillery regiments, plausibly including the one the historical Caleb Brewster served in. (Please do not make me chart out how many times they reshuffled the regiments between 1776-1778.)

The five OCs I made are

Captain Armistead Horatio Folk

1st Lieutenant Arthur Garrick

2nd Lieutenant Jameson Mullcock

2ns Lieutenant Frederico "Dico" Miguel Carvalho dos Reis Ridgewell

Ensign Sidney Perks

My personal name for the Jameson/Dico ship is OTP Rile the Pope.

On to my two special boys:

Lieutenant Jameson Mullcock is a second lieutenant who serves with Garrick. He is Irish-American, a fact that he keeps to himself when he lists his birthplace as Philadelphia. His mother, Abaigeal Noiréis (Abigail Norris), from Galway, Ireland, is a Catholic who married a Protestant British soldier she met during the occupation of Ireland (huuuuuge thank you to @mercurygray for helping me with the backstory, here). She practices her faith secretly now that the family has relocated to Pennsylvania. Jameson himself attends Protestant services, though he cherishes the secret fragments of Catholicism he has gleaned from his mother. Though there are Irish soldiers in camp, his lack of fluent Irish--and his covering up of his heritage--makes him uncomfortable in their presence: he "passes" where they do not, so they bear a cultural mark of honour, alongside the stigma, that he cannot claim.

Jameson--who would go by James if he ever made intimate enough friends to allow it--is tall, gangly, and anemic-looking. His eyes and hair are unusually light, an odd and off-putting combination. Though he looks like a stiff wind could blow him over, James is highly intelligent and athletic, facts that he obscures with a wry sense of humour and a honed laziness. Older than both the other lieutenants, he is jaded by what he has seen, but finds it too much effort to be a pessimist. Instead, he sticks with banter and teasing and insincerity in all forms. He would rather light his left arm on fire than go after what he wants in a direct manner. Loves tea and tobacco. Does not self-deny his attraction to men, rarely gets to act on it. Loyal mostly to himself, he recognizes that serving in the army is about as safe as anywhere else in this war, and at least this way he's behind the cannons. Has very complicated feelings about the British, especially British Protestants, stemming from his complicated family dynamics. Inveterate slacker. Only covets men he feels nothing for and never met a problem he couldn't avoid, lie about, or delegate elsewhere, until he meets Ridgewell…

Lieutenant Frederico "Dico" Miguel Carvalho dos Reis Ridgewell is a second lieutenant who serves with Garrick. He is Portuguese-American and proud of it. His father was absent from birth; he grew up with his mother in New York in a Portuguese neighbourhood. His accent code-switches depending on his peers, though when irritated it gets decidedly more Portuguese. He is fluent in both his native languages. Like Jameson, his mother is Catholic, his father a British Protestant. Dico himself is a devout Catholic. He does not have a relationship with his father, whose family--unknown to Dico--forced his parents' relationship apart before they could marry.

Dico--and he encourages this name among his peers, though Garrick only calls him "the Portuguese" indirectly or "Ridgewell" directly--is a handsome man: olive skin, dark eyes, dark tousled hair. He's well-built and carries enough muscle mass to look healthy even at Valley Forge. With his chiseled jaw and even features, he has half the camp followers--even the married ones--sighing in his wake, and more than a few of his men grapple with some uncomfortable feelings they might pin down as "would follow into hell and back". Dico himself is unaware of both this and his reputation as a cinnamon roll. It would surprise him to know what has been projected onto his good humour, constant readiness to act, and unflagging athleticism, because what really drives this man is anger. He is a committed Patriot who may or may not be taking on an entire army just to channel his paternal anger at a man who, in his mind, abandoned a pregnant woman with barely any English to raise her first born alone.

Dico is a bit rash, which gets interpreted as "having good intentions". He commands the respect and admiration of his inferiors; he is their golden sun, the best of them. He is an odd counter-part to the laconic second lieutenant he shares his rank with, though what the two share is the ability to get the job done without taking on more responsibility than is their due. He likes Jameson for his frankness and his reliability and suspects that Jameson sees farther into him than most. He is not aware they share a Protestant/Catholic background, as Dico declares himself Catholic and Jameson doesn't reveal his Irish heritage and attends Protestant services.

[dailyanarchistposts]

The American Indian lost the war of rifles but won by default the war of symbols. To the generations distracted by modernity, Native American culture has come to represent the simple, profound life this land proffered before technology botched everything. So many aspiring poets, graduate students of anthropology, and even a few sensible people have been making pilgrimages to medicine men that Indians now talk about a new tribe: The Wannabees. I imagine a good many environmentalists are also in the ranks, and that's fine. When the ideals of passionate people begin to come of age, aspects of history get reinterpreted, re-emphasized, romanticized. And that's fine too: romanticizing nature indicates a metaphysical disorientation, but romanticizing people is probably inevitable and suggests a healthy outlook on life (didn't somebody call Earth First! a romance novel?). My experience is that only very stingy people dislike heroes.

But it seems we can only take so much romanticism at one time. Somebody has to get the boot, and if the Indians were right about nature, then the rest of us with our Western values must be the original despoilers of paradise. And a righteous boot it is, stomping away at a civilization that gave the world dioxin, Mutually Assured Destruction, and the US Forest Service.

This kind of thinking is probably behind the curious turn radical environmentalism has taken: namely, it's "rejection" of Western civilization. I say "curious" because even a little reflection will show the contradiction here. Environmentalism as a more or less coherent set of beliefs rises out of Western history; it is an episode in the Western dream of reintegration with nature which has its origins in pre-Socratic philosophy and the pagan ethos. And although as a practical matter non-Western societies have wreaked less havoc on the environment (a situation which is of course changing), this was sometimes due more to a lack of means than any spiritual inclination. Great God! even the likes of Black Elk—for many a John the Baptist of deep ecology—even he has made statements that might just as well have come out of the Medieval contemptus mundi tradition.

I suppose this rejection is really a kind of shorthand for a deprecation of modern industrial society—which indeed needs deprecating. Still, it results in an historical displacement which assigns the unnatural values of the present to all of Western history. This distorts the issue. If the task at hand it defending Earth, then we have to be very precise about what we're defending it from. And that is not some generalization like Western civilization.

Europe was, after all, at one time as tribal as pre-Columbian America. You could evn argue that these were the glory-days of the West, when homer sang his epics, druids communed in sacred groves, and the tragic myths of the North were incubating. Nor is it a coincidence that the finest spiritual values of the West—fascination with the world, self-sacrifice in a just cause, acceptance of fate—developed here, not after the urban cultures of the Mediterranean had taken root and spread. If we can believe the Roman historian Tacitus (and we can, although he was doing his own romanticizing at times), the Germans of central Europe were a lackadaisical bunch, hunting and farming undiligently, never staying in one place long enough to cause much damage: "They do not plant orchards, fence off meadows, or irrigate gardens." In general, they preferred feasting and feuding to land development.

But this isn't intended as an apologia of Western civilization, which to my pre-Freudian mind doesn't require any. I merely want to emphasize that the problem lies in a particular relationship between man and the world, not in the vague evils of our fathers.

An example. The Celtic tribes of pre-historic Britain lived in harmony with nature. Light hunting and farming supported their flourishing Le Tene culture without diminishing the vast forests of the island. There was an iron mine or two, some extra cattle and grain to export, but the economy wasn't organized enough to cause any trouble. No cities, no central authority, no industry, because the Celts felt no need to control the world, but rather merely lived in it.

The Roman invasion changed all that. A heavy plough and slave labor brought virgin land under cultivation. A timber industry arose to heat the public baths of the new urban centers and to fire the forges of a developing ceramics industry. The Roman genius for exploitation developed lead, copper and tin mining on a large scale. In other words, all the familiar detritus of contemporary society. By the time the Empire collapsed and the Anglo-Saxons swarmed in, lowland Britain was on its way to deforestation. The Germanic tribes brought a short-lived sanity by destroying the cities and returning the economy to subsistence hunting and farming. Their conversation to Christianity in the seventh century, however, renewed Britain's contact with Rome and began the process of urbanization and centralization all over again. Viking invasions of the ninth and eleventh centuries returned a little health to the land, but England was already on its way to Order, Empire, and Cow Pastures.

My point is that Western civilization didn't deforest England (all the cultures involved were Western); a debased relationship with life did, one that challenges everything in nature to be organized into a network of human utility. Such is the goal of technology. It's important to think of technology not as an accumulation of machinery, but as a relationship, a one-dimensional relationship which subordinates the complex interplay between man and nature to the imperative of production and consumption. Unlike the crafts of our ancestors, which merely tapped into the natural qualities of particular things and brought them forward, technology seizes upon everything, everywhere, in such a way that things are permitted to exist only as a kind of standing reserve for us in a larger network. It is because of this relationship that we can have such strange concepts as "natural resource" or "human resource."

Technology, in this sense, whether ascendant in modern America or Russia, or first century Rome, impels societies to urbanize, centralize, and industrialize in an attempt to confront nature with the demands of utility. This isn't a cultural distinction, but a spiritual one, as applicable in Brazil and Ethiopia as in Illinois. World Technology nullifies all culture.

Rather than hoping for absolution at the hands of others for rejecting Western civilization, I say we can't have enough of the primal Wester values—the profundity of the Celtic druid, the resolve of the Saxon warrior, the boldness of the Achaian seafarer. The legions of technology were defeated by the likes of these; perhaps we can defeat them again.

[slimehatart]

Hello everyone!

Today's episode deals with struggle! So bear with me as I struggle to find words to work through the post. Don't worry though, it's not about real life struggles, it's more about the struggles of my OCs!

Originally, I wanted the story to start shortly before or right after Liora joined Pure Prosperity. There, she was meant to climb the ladders until she was met with problems - problems her guild mates create and problems she encountered while getting to know the leader better.

Much similar to Patra, she has her own goals in sight, but she struggles far more in trying to keep a good attitude and stay motivated as she is met with difficulties on the way. It is not easy being on top. Everyone wants to be liked and acknowledged, even if they're trying to hide it, I'm sure of that. As she feels that everything starts falling apart by the time she is nearing her goals, she tries to put up a strong face.

(original Tweet: "So I saw a report about actress Mena Suvari on TV yesterday talking about her experiences while shooting for American Beauty.

They showed the infamous rose bath scene & as it seems, there have been many iconic scenes.

Wanted to reimagine the scene with my OC Liora so here goes!", July 24th, 2021)

Originally, I had planned to let the women who the guild leaders had "his hands on" have them cover their shoulder-arm areas to hint at domestic violence. I don't know if I want to keep this concept up, but you can see some marks on her arm if you look closely. Same goes for Patra too. As Liora reaches her breaking point with the guild, she starts wearing clothes more freely again which I wanted to be a symbol for her breaking free as she breaks the shuckles of Pure Prosperity. Patra on the other side I drew very rarely with uncovered arms and shoulders which is an interesting parallel as she can't break away from him so easily.

Of course, all of my characters go through difficulties and struggles they overcome with time. Beating our fears makes us stronger and I want to see my characters succeed and grow with the progression of the story! Another character I have yet to formerly introduce is the three-eyed character that used to go by the name Seth.

(original Tweet: "In my practice session the other day, I wanted to try to draw faster. It kinda worked out and I hope I can reduce my drawing times and draw more efficiently.

On the picture, you see my character Seth with his native clothes. I wanna make the scarf work and have a few ideas." August 21st, 2021)

I already shared his first character sheet earlier. I think his story changed the least in the meantime! First of all, his name changed from Seth to Ziyan. Ziyan is a Turkish word for wasting something. When you say "ziyan oldu", you pretty much say something like: "oh it's a shame! It's a waste!"

Now, why would someone call his child that? That, I can answer. Ziyan is the son of the ruler of the far Sherbet Islands. You see, he was born with a third eye. This is not the problem in itself, though. In the royal family, heirs and rulers are usually born with a third eye, too. The common folk is born with a third eye. The difference is that, in their beliefs, only those who are born with a vertical third eyes are fit to believe and carry the blood worthy to rule over the kingdom. Even though Ziyan is one of the three children of the ruler, he is not born with a vertical eye, but a horizontal eye. Which is what made his father call him Ziyan - a waste, a shame.

Originally, he meets the party by just being a regular in the motel the party is staying at. They never see or meet him early on, but after some time, they catch him which is the first opportunity to introduce him to the story and the party. For some reason, he needs to leave as soon as possible, so the party helps emptying his room. There, Miles and Sarim see that photograph of Ziyan's family.

(original Tweet: "In today's practice session, I wanted to draw something in a manga panel-esque style!

Since I'm not sure if the compression will make the text unreadable, I've attached cropped pics as well.

Tried to be a bit quicker than before. Info about chars/story in thread if u wanna know!", July 25th, 2021)

If you look closely, you will be able to see Ziyan's dad, his mother (the ruler's concubine) and his sister with the royal vertical eye. His sister is called Ziyafeth. Ziyafet is a Turkish word for, you know, a feast, a banquet, richness in a kind. You get the metaphor, I think! Those two words, ziyan and ziyafet, just sounded so good together that I felt like they are just perfect as names for those two characters.

In Sherbet Island, a civil war is sparking. The common people storm the castle in their blind rage and try to kill the ruler, but are held back by ultimately. Ziyafeth will later rise to be the current ruler. Ruthless and violent, she sees everyone without the vertical third eye beneath her. That's why she starts hating Ziyan from an early age, too. Basically, they have a similar dynamic to Avatar's Zuko and Azula.

Even though the civil war fails at some point, they manage to take away Ziyan who they think is just a common child taken there to serve or something since he doesn't have the royal eye. Then, as they are hunted by the royal family, some of the rebels flee the island with Ziyan by their side which is how he ends up in the places our party is living in.

He lives in constant fear of being hunted down by the now grown Ziyafeth which is why he struggles to trust anybody. He feels the need to hide his third eye, but will, much like Liora, break free of these chains as he begins trusting his newfound friends!

Ah, today's blog was very fun to write, but this much is enough for today. Everyone struggles, but our struggles define who we are set to become. It is decided by how we manage to get through our struggles, so I hope you're never giving up and always try to fight your way through. Give it your best and you will always succeed.

Next post, we will be talking about the party and their overall dynamic again which I am looking forward to! Take care, see you then!

[asothecrow]

Christianity and Christians are weird and I have a negative opinion on it/them. Here is an essay of a ramble about it.

Christianity as a faith is not inherently problematic or wrong. It teaches the principles of Christ, and some of the most notable of those principles being to love each other and be unified. And that, in it of itself, is a perfectly understandable thing to believe in. Hell, I believe in that too to some degree. I think we should care for each other and "love thy neighbour." Biologically and according to the Theory of Evolution, that also makes sense. Humans are social beings, so it would make sense that Christianity (and by extension most religious practices) include being compassionate or good to others. But then we add the, ahem, human aspect of Christianity into the mix. Humans, inherently, are messy. We make a lot of mistakes, we do a lot of really bad and really good shit. And there have been some really bad people throughout history. And a lot of these really bad people were and ultimately still are power-hungry dragons who like to hoard gold. And people like that fear losing that power. And, I can't help but notice, there have been a LOT of Christian atrocities committed against people who were not Christian. The entire history of Colonisation is inherently linked with Christianity. Maybe not what Jesus intended for humanity, but people have been twisting the "word of God(s)" since "the word of God(s)" has been a thing. The slave trade was explicitly established and defended through religious reasoning. So over the course of 2000 years, Christians went from being martyrs and persecuted to being those who persecute and condemn. Entire cultures have been erased or nearly erased thanks to Christian influence. And the only reason this can happen is because of something called proselytising. For those who don't know what proselytising means, it's the process of attempting to convert someone from one set of beliefs to another, especially in a religious context. And Christians love to proselytise. Like... a lot. They also love forced conversion, so that's also a plus (sarcasm heavily implied.) Examples would be... the persecution and Forced conversion and murder of Jewish people throughout all of the CE, persecution and forced conversion and murder of Pagans, persecution and forced conversion and murder of LGBT+ people, persecution and forced conversion and murder of Native Americans, persecution, forced conversion and murder of Africans/Indians/and honestly every single British colony (former or current), persecution, forced conversion, murder of Indigenous people... Hell, even other Christians persecuting, forcibly converting and murdering other Christians. Mind you, the point is not to make current Christians who don't do this shit feel bad, it's to point out the very real realities of your religion's history and why so many people like me have an issue with it. (Lighthearted:) And I'm also not saying that other religions don't have similar histories, because yeah duh no shit. Don't derail my criticism of Christianity and Christians you dingus, let me finish my essay! But then we get to the minutia of why so many people like me have a negative relationship with Christianity. There's a more sinister aspect to Christianity that I think a lot of westerners tend to... overlook. And that's mostly because we live in a society where Christianity is the dominant religion. Proselytising, as a concept, is incredibly insidious. One of the core and often less frequently talked about issues about Christianity is that the way Christians go about converting people to their religions is incredibly manipulative. Missionaries are an especially scummy thing because missionaries travel to places where people are struggling and don't have much, and use those moments in people's lives to convert them, promising things like "God will set you free" and "you will go to Heaven if you convert." And the problem is that Christians don't view this as negative. They don't see it as manipulative because in a Christian's mind, it's the truth. To them, God is the ultimate daddy and whatever he says goes and he is everything that is good about life. Christians live to serve God, and according to the Bible, God wants others to convert to Christianity. Christianity promises things like "once this life is over, you will go on to the next life and be always happy" and in a vacuum that sounds appealing, but it also sounds really cult-y. Why is it cult-y? Because it sounds like promises that are too good to be true. It sounds like something people say to a) justify their converting and b) convince people to join a group. And a lot of Christian religions have had people in power who wanna abuse and control people. And to me, this all reads like a method of controlling a population. Christians are not encouraged to question their holy texts, Christians are not encouraged to have discussions with others outside of their faiths, Christians see themselves as right and everyone else is wrong. And when you are discouraged from questioning and discussion, you have a recipe for a docile and controlled population. Do I think all Christians wanna control people? No, of course not! That would be silly. A lot of Christians genuinely do believe they are serving god and that they are good people. And to me, that's not really a comfort. That's horrifying because it implies that they view the forced conversion and murder of minority groups and non-Christians as a good thing. Which they do. And some Christians are not like that. Some Christians actually do follow the tenets of their beliefs. Some Christians are pro-choice, pro-LGBT+, pro-POC rights, pro-protecting disabled and impoverished groups of people. And these are Christians who I respect. But it still feels incredibly weird because while it may offer people comfort, it's not proven. God hasn't ever been scientifically proven to be real and even in philosophical thought there is a lot of people who don't see there even being a god. Obviously if you genuinely believe you are doing good in the world, then you won't see it like how I do. And, obviously, not all Christians are bigots. Not all Christians hate the gays or the transes. But we as LGBT+ people who have been persecuted by Christians, are not fond of them or their faith because of the pain it's caused us. Some of us are definitely theists and still believe in God, just a healthier version of God and Jesus, and some of us, like me, completely reject Christianity as a result. But imagine being in my shoes for a moment. You are 13 years old and you are in a classroom with a religion teacher who is a priest who tells your class that being gay is a sin and is immoral. Imagine you, as a gay child, are the only one to stand up and leave the classroom. And as you leave, you are told "you cannot deny it." Imagine sitting in the hallway, tears streaming down your face as your music teacher tries to comfort you. Imagine telling your parents this happened and for them to take no action because kicking up a fuss would be a "waste of time." Imagine being told to "hide who you are because you could get beaten or killed." Imagine being asked if you are bisexual in a girls locker room and you lie to them because you are scared of being further bullied and harassed. Imagine having your name be the subject of scorn and mockery because none of your teachers want to respect your chosen name and want to pretend it's because of "legal reasons" when the teachers in the USA had no problem with using my name. Imagine being told that you are overreacting because you are scared of your friends and fellow LGBT+ people being raped, beaten or killed by those who hate them. Imagine being called a "groomer" because you just want to live your life as a trans person without some asshole harassing you for using a bathroom. Imagine thinking about killing yourself because you are terrified of the world you live in because people want you to die based off of something you cannot change about yourself. If you can imagine any of this, then welcome to a small fraction of my life as an LGBT+ person. But I also didn't reject Christianity because of identity, no no no, I also just... am an atheist. I don't see any rational or logical reason for there to be a god or for one or many to exist. And the worst part about is that I know how Christians will react to this post. They will say or think "I will pray for you to realise the error of your ways" because they think I'm wrong. They don't want to question anything they are taught and as soon as someone does so, their reflex is to deny and say shit like "I will pray for you" because it's their only recourse. To them, I'm wrong and I will always be wrong and I'm a sinner who needs to be saved. But here's the thing - I don't want your empty words or your empty love. What I want is for you to just leave people alone. Stop persecuting and targeting people based on the mistranslations of a book that was written 2000+ years ago by many different authors. But I doubt what I say will change your mind or make you reconsider because, again, you think I am wrong and a sinner and someone who needs to be saved by God. Sweetheart, if I'm gonna believe in god(s), it sure as hell ain't gonna be the one y'all pray to.

[vergi1ius]

Watched "Prey" and I have Thoughts™

Writing felt a little cliche in places, though there were enough bits of imagery and thought that in hindsight I don't mind them too much. (The orange herb did seem to strain credulity, but I don't know enough about North American native flora to dispute)

Some excellent visual symbolism in places. In particular the Predator's footstep over Naru's and the shot of Naru walking against the flow of women.

I appreciated the effort to show feminine work as useful and valuable to the tribe -- I feel like many "woman rejects feminine work" stories often implicitly denigrate feminine work, and that Naru uses her experience with feminine gathering and medicine to save a person, as well as gain an advantage over the Predator.

Relatedly, I appreciated the scenes of the Comanche using their environment to make tools. It was excellent to see the competence on display utilizing their environment as their personal toolbox, and the experience and tradition that goes into that competency.

The subtitles we had labeled the Comanche whooping as "ululation", which I thought was powerful. The word "ululation" comes from a Latin onomatopoeia describing a certain sound people would make, though I can't recall in what context. It feels important and powerful to me to connect these Comanche whoops, a culture often denigrated, with those of the prestigious Romans.

The "Beat... reload the muskets" shot was very funny. (Also sparked a conversation about just how fast a practiced musket wielder could reload that thing, which is always fun)

The difference between the French camp and night and at day was very good. Leaving aside how such an effect can happen in real life, it felt like a good way to show Naru's relation to that camp

It was cool to see a less advanced version of the Predator in this film. One with a cool arsenal on top. It feels like science fiction often neglects to have technological -- and especially aesthetic -- changed over long periods of time, as if a culture can just remain static for a millennium or more, so it's nice to see how different the aesthetics and arsenal of the Predators changes over 250 years. (This is also a problem I have with most fantasy media -- writers, please at least cut your timelines down by an order of magnitude, or at least study how long historic civilizations tended to last, but I digress)

THE BUFFALO SCENE. This was beautifully loaded with meaning: the waste on display to a woman who's probably thinking how all those corpses could have fed her whole tribe through the winter, if not longer, if she'd found them sooner; the red herring to first time viewers that the Predator had done this; the brief death ceremony Naru performs out of respect for this highly important, possibly sacred, animal; the way that combined with the rattlesnake earlier that the film connects the Predator with the French trappers (and not in a way that's particularly flattering to either); and the imagery reminiscent of the buffalo massacres of the 19th century. I almost want to call it the heart of the film, it was so heavy with meaning.

Sarii is best dog

[introvertbard]

not-fun news about Roe vs Wade

yeah, so it is pretty inevitable that I heard about the news in my gloriously dysfunctional dwelling-place, the USA.

Current mood is “frantic internal screaming,” but I’m also ruminating on precolonial Philippine culture.

Under the “read-more” bit for both the obvious reasons of “talking about abortion,” and for colonization.

Honestly, anyone who reads my other blog would know I talk about being Filipino and colonization ALL THE TIME, but in case new folks have noticed: HI, THIS IS EVEN LESS FUN THAN YOU THINK.

--

When the Spanish came to the Philippines, they CONSTANTLY threw a hissy-fit about how natives would abort unwanted fetuses like, all the time. Because they had PREMARITAL SEX, or THEY FELT LIKE LIVESTOCK HAVING TOO MANY CHILDREN, or because TOO MANY KIDS AREN’T GOOD FOR A REGION THAT WIDELY PRACTICES GAVELKIND / PARTITIVE INHERITANCE AND SPLITS UP THE PARENTS’ POSSESSIONS, or because THEY JUST DIDN’T WANT TO BE PREGNANT, AND ABORTION WASN’T STIGMATIZED.

And like, they mutated our folklore of the tiyanak--going from a fairly neutral “the souls of dead children have potential to be corrupted into demons if they cannot journey safely through the afterlife,” to “ABORTED FETUSES WILL COME BACK TO HAUNT THEIR CRUEL MOTHER FOR DEPRIVING THEM OF LIFE!!!” specifically to push their pro-birthing agenda.

And modern Filipinos are widely known to be extremely Catholic, and to have an extremely rampant teenage-mother problem.

Like, as an adult who lives in this hellhole because my parents swallowed the “American Dream” propaganda, because their homeland was destabilized and colonized LIKE FUCK by ‘Murica itself, one of the few things I sort-of-maybe liked about living here is that 1) we have many contraceptives to avoid unwanted pregnancies here, and 2) most options are AFFORDABLE.

Birth control is $20-50 per month. Condoms are like fifty cents each.

Plan B and other morning-after pills cost around $10-70 if those two methods fail, and you caught it early. 

The ultimate safety net of getting a first-trimester abortion, in case even Plan B doesn’t work? $400-500.

I can pay that. It’s one of my paychecks for the month, and aftercare for my “late period” would be another few days of lost pay, but if I had to? I would do it ASAP.

So like, the Spanish talk so goddamn much about how the godless heathen islanders ran around doing abortions all the time, but they obviously didn’t say too much about what methods we used, or any ingredients for medicine, and it’s just such a contrast to the Philippines in year 2022, when sex is barely discussed; my very traditional mom, for example, told me “I don’t mind what you do, just don’t get pregnant,” and that’s it.

I hear sexual education in the Philippines is having trouble because the sex-ed teachers, who are grown adults, are still overwhelmingly Catholic and are often uncomfortable talking about the thing they were hired to teach.

And it’s like, many people here in ‘Murica are talking about “OMG, WE’RE GOING BACK TO THE 1950S!” or “IT’S LIKE THE HANDMAID’S TALE HAPPENING IN REAL LIFE!!!” but people have noted that “dystopia fiction is what happens when terrible societies happen to white Europeans, instead of the Black and Brown colonies they’ve subjugated.”

You want to know a place where abortion is illegal, and THERE’S NO EXCEPTIONS? The Philippines, that’s where.

And like, sometimes I think about my decision to not go into medicine because 1) I don’t do well under pressure, and 2) I especially don’t do well if people are in distress or physical pain, and 3) I don’t want to be another Filipino nurse who went into medicine for financial stability, instead of doing what I actually wanted, but with one of my urban-fantasy stories revolving around “medieval nobility had the ‘glamorous' daily job of doing mountains of paperwork and funneling supplies where needed,” logistics is constantly on my mind.

Plan B is often good for up to FOUR YEARS, and I am already thinking of buying a few packs of Plan B and privately telling folks, “hey, if something goes wrong, I have Plan B.”

And then comes the simmering rage because I SHOULDN’T HAVE TO THINK ABOUT FRANTICALLY HOARDING MEDICATION, BECAUSE A PERFECTLY GOOD LAW IS IN TALKS TO GET REVOKED BY CHRISTIAN FANATICS.

I also have a bad feeling that gardeners will start looking up herbs for OLD FASHIONED abortions, and um... I really hope not.

Sometimes herbal remedies don’t work, but the abortifacients that DO work are notorious for being EXTREMELY TOXIC TO PEOPLE, so the way they get rid of the fetus is by “poisoning you JUST enough that your body panics and miscarries, but not making you sick enough to die or have lasting fertility issues.”

Like, say... Lysa Arryn from Game of Thrones.

[teawaffles]

Louis and the Aquaria: Chapter 3, Part 2

The next morning.

After yesterday’s incident, Moran was keen to know what Louis would do next — and so he headed to the hall with Fred, who presently had some time to spare. Perhaps it was because he’d been working late into the night, for Fred kept yawning as he rubbed his bleary eyes.

But the moment Moran pushed open the hall door, the startling sight before them banished all of Fred’s sleepiness in a flash.

“This is……”

“What the heck is this?” Moran exclaimed.

Dumbfounded, the two men stood where they were.

One corner of the hall—— had been turned into a dense jungle.

Numerous South American trees, planted in giant pots, were now surrounding the angelfish tank. At the same time, the two men were struck by the feeling that somehow, the room’s humidity had risen since yesterday.

Hearing Moran’s shout, Louis poked his head out from behind an ivy-wrapped tree.

“You’re being much too loud in the morning, Mr Moran. It’ll stress out the fish, so please refrain from shouting; but what on earth’s the matter?”

“That’s my line: what have you done here?!”

A flash of light gleamed off Louis’s spectacles.

“I was seeking a more conducive environment for my bro—…… no, the fish, so I have recreated a South American rainforest here. They were ordered a few days earlier, and arrived last night; I’ve just finished arranging them.”

Apparently, the luxurious water plants had just been the beginning for Louis. Even so, Moran had not expected this much progress in one night.

The situation raised so many questions that he had no idea where to begin. But for now, Moran refused to back down, and raised one of the problems at hand.

“First off, you were obviously going to say ‘my brothers’, but still: don’t talk about such grand feats as ‘recreating South America’ so lightly! No, I had a feeling about this. A normal person would reflect on what happened yesterday, and restrain themselves after that — but for you, you’re the type who ends up going amok instead. And yet, I didn’t think you’d do something as drastic as this!”

Moran had launched into a heated tirade, but Louis kept his cool as he replied.

“Thank you for taking the time to point out each and every one of those things. However, I believe I’m treating all of the fish equally; and in my view, it’s unfair to say that I’m favouring some of them just because some plants have been placed at specific areas.”

“What kinda nerve is that, to not even admit it after going this far…….. I mean, you are actually a little aware of it, aren’t you?”

“Also, it’s actually quite amazing that you’ve managed to remain calm all this while, Mr Louis……”

Even after weathering that torrent of questions, Louis was unmoved — and if anything, that had inspired a sense of awe within Fred.

“Well, it was us who said you were free to do as you liked. In any case, your love towards your brothers is certainly terrifying.”

To Moran, it seemed meaningless to continue arguing with the youngest son of the Moriartys, who stubbornly refused to acknowledge his biased rearing of the fish. He gave up trying to persuade Louis, and went on to watch the fish as he normally did.

“…………”

He tried to focus on the vibrant fish before him. And yet, Moran couldn’t help but notice the trees standing at the edge of his sight.

Tormented by that conflict, he finally succumbed to temptation. With sure steps, Moran made his way toward the vegetation, and Fred followed cautiously behind him.

“……Well, if they’re already here, we may as well enjoy them to the fullest.”

Mumbling to no one in particular, Moran walked up to the row of trees. Using one arm to push away the leaves in his path, he moved through the greenery; then, his gaze landed on an aquarium placed on a nearby table. Inside, were some animals with incredibly striking colourations.

“What’re these?”

“They’re indeed very colourful,” Fred remarked.

Within the tank were several tiny frogs. They were a deep blue, and mottled with red.

The two men were full of questions about the presence of these unfamiliar creatures. Nevertheless, out of sheer curiosity, they moved their faces near the tank and peered in.

Louis, who was feeding the other fish, called out to them in a loud voice.

“Please don’t open the tank lid: they may look beautiful, but they secrete a lethal poison so deadly that some indigenous tribes of South America use it to coat the tips of their blowdarts.”

In an instant, Moran and Fred leapt away from the tank. Due to their natural athleticism, the distance they’d retreated was further than that of the average person.

As it were, they had narrowly escaped the jaws of death. But even as the sudden appearance of these poisonous frogs gave them chills, Moran stilled his pounding heart, and shot Louis a look of anger.

“Why are such dangerous things here?! Even recreating a South American environment has its limits, doesn't it?!”

“My apologies. One of my motivations was indeed to recreate the fishes’ native habitat. But more than that, I wanted to prepare for a scenario where Stapleton expresses an interest in other creatures besides fish. Hence, I began rearing these frogs just in case.”

As he said that, Louis made his way beside the tank. Opening the lid just a crack, he tossed in some tiny insects: food for the frogs.

“…………”

Seeing his practiced hand, at this point, the other two men had nothing else to say. In this extraordinary space created within the mansion they lived in on a daily basis, their ability to process information had long since hit its limit.

After confirming that the frogs had eaten their fill, Louis proceeded on an efficient path around the room to check on the rest of the tanks.

Moran gazed into the distance.

“It sure is amazing, what people can do in such a short time……”

But excessive zeal, once taken in the wrong direction, can lead to outcomes no one would’ve expected.

Even as various points had deeply impressed upon them just how amazing Louis was, at the same time, Moran and Fred also grew conscious of a certain truth in life. Once again, they stepped through the row of trees.

The two men parted the curtain of leaves, some part of them nervously wondering if those dangerous frogs had escaped, and walked up to the aquarium they had in mind.

“Oh, there they are.”

Seeing that the tank itself hadn’t changed, Moran finally breathed a sense of relief, and went on to admire the three “Moriarty brothers” swimming within.

The one at the head of the group was ‘William’. Right behind him was ‘Albert’, then ‘Louis’. Within the jungle Louis had created, the three angelfish shone in a way that lived up to their angelic names.

However, in contrast to the joyful Moran, Fred’s expression was serious. He narrowed his eyes slightly.

“Don’t you think…… its movements are a bit awkward?”

“Ah?”

Moran stared at the focus of Fred’s attention. Immediately, he perceived a subtle change in that fish.

Although it seemed perfectly fine at first glance, if one were to observe all three of them carefully, it was clear that the one at the head of the group was swimming a little differently from the other two.

“Is there something wrong?”

Louis came over, sensing something was off. But even before Fred explained the situation, he noticed the abnormality with ‘William’.

He put his face close to the tank, observing the fish for a few moments; but gradually, his expression turned grave.

“Oi, Louis: what on earth’s going on? Could it be that he’s sick?” Moran asked.

Louis placed a hand under his chin, thought for a split second, then quickly made a decision.

“——First, let’s move it to a separate tank. There’s a smaller one near the hall entrance: Mr Moran, please bring it here. Fred: please read the measurements from the devices installed on this tank and report them.”

Hearing those instructions, the two men assumed their roles at once.

Meanwhile, Louis took a notepad from his breast pocket, and checked the emergency response measures he’d studied on his own. Though he had already memorised all of them, he wanted to avoid any potential for error.

Moran returned with a small tank.

“Oi, is this one alright?”

“Yes, thank you.”

First, Louis transferred some water from the angelfishes’ tank into the one Moran brought over, such that it was deep enough for one fish. Then, he set up some equipment to confirm the water temperature and quality once more, then added a bit of salt to the water.

Watching him, Moran cocked his head.

“Why’re you adding salt?”

“Saltwater is an effective treatment for diseases in fish. Though it certainly isn’t all-powerful.” [1]

Saying that, Louis used a net to gently scoop up ‘William’ and move it to the tank they’d prepared. Although there were drawbacks to isolating sick fish, his priority was to stop the disease from spreading, as well as limit any damage that could be caused by the other fish.

As he worked, Louis listened to the measurements Fred read out, but his puzzlement only deepened.

“The water quality and temperature are both normal. As far as I can see, there isn’t any obvious debris or dirt in the tank, and the equipment doesn’t seem to be malfunctioning. In that case, perhaps some foreign substance had entered its food, or maybe it got stressed from its surroundings……”

“Maybe it got bullied by the other fish?” Moran asked.

Louis immediately dismissed that idea. “From what I’ve observed, there were no such quarrels between them. In that case, another possibility I can think of is the change in its environment.”

He cast a sideways glance at the trees surrounding them. And Fred picked up the implication behind that casual gesture.

“By ‘stress’, do you mean these trees? But it’s not like they came into contact with the water, so they probably didn’t impact the water quality, at least not directly. Also, weren’t they only added a while ago? To affect the fish so rapidly……”

“We can’t dismiss that possibility. Perhaps the changes to the view outside the tank had caused some visual stress…… Well, regardless of the reason, the blame for its ill health rests with me: the one in charge of its care.”

“…………”

After isolating the fish, the three of them remained standing where they were.

They gazed at the sick angelfish, swimming alone in its tank, with a sense of misery and frustration growing within them.

Footnotes:

[1] There is some truth to this: Practical Fishkeeping UK

[mostly-mundane-atla]

Hello! I have a question related to traditional tatoos. I know that it's a closed practice, and therefore non-native artists shouldn't use them in their drawings, but does this work for writing as well? I do not mean to describe them in great detail because I am a white person and it's def not my place to do that, but would mentioning Sokka and Katara having them be disrespectful? Thank you, I hope you have a lovely day!

Okay, let's talk about why good intentions with depicting tattoos can go wrong.

I personally don't mind the depiction of the tattoos themselves. A lot of my loved ones aren't comfortable with getting them because it can affect how they're perceived by others (employers, friends, potential romantic partners, etc.), and seeing the tattoos in fan art could normalize and destigmatize the practice to a degree. A big problem is that people often don't do any sort of research. They go to google image search and type "inuit face tattoos" and do screenshot redraws where Katara, who said herself she's not ready for marriage, has tattoos that suggest she's already married.

Another thing is that, well, yeah, there is some blatant racism and cultural appropriation involved in this insistant fascination with the tattoos.

"But mostly-mundane!" you folks might be saying as you read this, "You just said it could be helpful!! How can it be racist if it's helpful?"

To which I'd reply that we're allowed to have complex feelings on complex topics. It's not a simple and straight forward "this is bad because it's bad and I want you to feel bad for it" thing. In any case, I know it's not the intention and I don't mean to suggest that it is, so stewing in guilt and telling everyone how awful you are for thinking traditional tattoos are neat won't do anyone any good. Just pay attention so you guys know how to start doing better, okay?

The fact is the series itself is not representative of circumpolar peoples at all and the fandom is very reluctant to admit that. We have our own take on clothes made of fabric rather than skins and none of that was taken into account. It seems no one feels like drawing Sokka or Katara in something baggy that doesn't wrap around the body and tie at the waist, not when it's supposed to be warmer weather. I guess that would upset the aesthetic consistancy? We also have our own traditional jewelry and hair styles (the "hair loopies" aren't universal because the Inuit are a diverse people and also not the only ones who live in the North American tundra) that are also rarely, if ever, depicted in fan art. I guess Hakoda and Bato would be unrecognizable if either of them wore their hair shaved on the top but longer at the front, back, and sides or had a labret. So it seems the response to this "they should be more eskimo but not too eskimo to recognize them" mindset or otherwise lack of effort in research or willingness to work research into one's art/writing is to just slap tattoos on it and call it a day.

And there's the line between appreciation and appropriation. Appreciation is not taking the thing you find most cool and denying it the proper context or just ignoring everything else but that super cool thing.

I try to make it a habit to not proclaim what people should or shouldn't write and draw because I'm not about that. If you wanna write about a character having tupit or tavluģun, I really don't mind. My culture is dying and I'm probably gonna have to settle for a similar enough dialect because there aren't that many people that can teach me my ancestral language. If you like our traditions, I like them too and would like to see more of them! I'd just ask you to examine who you're doing it for. Yue with brown hair and eyes doesn't look any more like my family or the people I see in old photos and footage. I don't see any of my heritage in that and it doesn't connect with me. If all you're adding to Sokka and Katara are tattoos, it won't really mean anything to me as an Inupiaq. There's no cultural context there.

I'm sorry. I'm sure you wanted a simple yes or no with maybe a paragraph's worth of explanation, but this is a much bigger question than that.

[sharpth1ng]

To be honest I don't feel able to speak on Native european issues like this, I'm sorry thats not very helpful! My knowledge is specific to North American Indigenous practices, and even then the majority of what I know is specific to my nation. I wouldn't want to speak on the practices of another group.

As a disclaimer, I'm still learning. Im not an elder or a knowledge keeper. I could be wrong about things and if I am I welcome corrections.

What I can say is that determining Native identity is really complicated. Historically (for my Nation) this was not blood based. We even had adoption practices for bringing adults into the community. What mattered was cultural practice and community connections.

Now, post-colonism, things are different. Blood quantums were imposed on us by colonial governments, where our amount of blood relation had to be verified by a non-indigenous outsider in order for us to qualify for treaty rights. It's possible there are Indigenous groups that always used blood to determine membership, but I can say I dont know of any.

This practice was used to reduce our numbers, because extending treaty rights to more people makes it a harder to exploit us. It was also applied in a misogynistic way, as native women who married non-natives lost their status, when native men didn't.

As a side note it sounds like you're second generation, which is enough for status according to the current colonial government in my country.

Now we have a sort of mixed situation. For my band membership I had to prove my family line, as well as a cultural connection and community ties. Im not sure if proving the family line is required for other bands, in our case we had to because we're involved in a lawsuit with the federal government because they gave a bunch of provably non-Indigenous people (people who married in and have no consistent community involvement) legal status in our group. This has caused a lot of problems for us, but i don't really want to get into that here.

All of that is to say I don't have as much of a problem with tribal government doing this, at least for us It feels like a bit of a necessary evil.

The sad fact is that here we have had many non-indigenous people claim native identity without any cultural connection at all, and some of these people have taken positions and won awards reserved for indigenous people. Many have used false Native identity as a sort of marketing strategy, labeling their products as Native made and essentially commodifying the identity.

Worse yet, some have claimed Native identity to speak out against activists fighting for our rights, and to justify breaching our treaties. As a result we have to create a system for verifying each other's claims.

For myself the most important parts of my identity are my cultural values and the traditions im working on learning. These were practices that my grandfather was forced to hide, so for me its important to do that work for him.

In my case this is stuff like learning our language, learning about ceremony and traditional medicines, and learning traditional crafting like beadwork. Im also hoping to learn to hunt and work with hides from my uncle soon too. All of this is a process of preserving and reclaiming cultural knowledge that was systematically suppressed.

Ultimately I think saying "I have Native ancestry" says something different than "I am Native." Many people have a Native ancestor, but they may not identify with that culturally. They may not share those belief systems and values, and they may not be connected or at least working on reconnecting.

For those people I would say they may not be culturally Native, even if they have Native blood. If someone is not culturally Native, then I think identifying that way and speaking on Native issues can be a problem, even if you do have an ancestor. I have french ancestors too, but I don't really consider myself qualified to speak on french cultural issues. Culturally, I'm not very french.

Again, I'm not sure what any of this means for your situation and I want to acknowledge the privilege i have in being able to go home. My band is located in an extremely rural area, but I felt safer there as a visibly queer person than I have maybe anywhere else. There were pride flags everywhere, hung up next to our nations flag. Im so, so deeply sorry that you don't have access to that kind of safety.

I want to maybe encourage you to try to learn more about Native serbian culture if you want to though. Try and learn about your history, find out if there are any online communities that might be safer for you to participate in. Ultimately i think your situation is very different from mine because i have safe access to my community, and to the ability to reconnect, but this isnt safe for you. Its not your fault that you can't go home to learn like I can.

So yeah, i'm sorry that i don't have a more straightforward answer. But i do want to say you aren't alone in that feeling of displacement and confusion. Mixed people, and people who have been separated from their cultures all over are experiencing this.

I think that connecting to roots and history is important for literally all people. Know where your people came from and what they've been through. Know that sharing a skin color isn't the same as sharing a history.

At the end of the day I think this kind of reconnecting helps us understand ourselves better. It helps to understand how connected we are, how we're the product of generations of people working and struggling and going through shit, just like we are now, and I think thats deeply important.

Oh my god I feel crazy having to say this but I've just witnessed an interaction that made it feel necessary. If someone tells you they're native and you think they look too white or too black to be really native please fucking educate yourself?

My great aunts were literally sold to white americans as pre-teens. Why do you think their children look white?

And when enslaved people escaped their oppressors which communities do you think were safe for them to go to? At least in my area Native history and Black history is inextricably linked.

Native people can have light skin and eyes. Native people can have dark skin and curly hair. If someone is mixed, they're mixed. Don't erase their Indigenous identity.

Even non-mixed Natives have a variety of skin tones and hair textures. It's not up to people outside our communities to decide who is or isn't Native.

[justmenoworries]

Not Up For Interpretation - An Essay On Nonbinary - Erasure

(Trigger Warning: Misgendering, Transphobia, Nonbinary-phobia)

If you’ve been following me for a while, you probably know this was a long time coming. I’ve made several posts about my frustrations concerning this topic and how much it hurt me just how socially accepted erasing an entire identity still is. While representation marches on and things have become better for nonbinary people as a whole, we still battle with a lot of prejudice - both intentional and unintentional.

In this essay, I want to discuss just how our identities are being erased almost daily, why that is harmful and hurtful and what we all can do to change that.

Chapters:

What does Non-binary mean?

Nonbinary- representation in media

So what’s the problem?

How do we fix it?

1. What Does Non-binary Mean?

Non-binary is actually an umbrella term. It includes pretty much every gender-identity that’s neither one or the other so to speak, for example, agender.

Agender means feeling detachment from the gender spectrum in general. If you’re agender, you most likely feel a distance to the concept of gender as a whole, that it doesn’t define you as a person.

There are many identities that classify under non-binary: There’s gender-fluid (you feel you have a gender, but it’s not one gender specifically and can change), demi-gender (identifying as a gender partially, but not completely) and many others.

Sometimes, multiple non-binary identities can mix and match.

Most non-binary people use they/them pronouns, but like with so many things, it varies.

Some nonbinary-people (like me) go by two pairs of pronouns. I go by both she/her and they/them, because it’s what feels most comfortable at the moment. But who knows, maybe in the future I’ll switch to they/them exclusively or expand to he/him.

There is no one defining non-binary experience. Nb-people are just as varied and different as binary people, who go by one specific gender.

There are non-binary people who choose to go solely by she/her or he/him and that’s okay too. It doesn’t make them any more or less non-binary and their identity is still valid.

If your head’s buzzing a bit by now: That’s okay. It’s a complicated topic and no one expects you to understand all of it in one chapter of one essay.

Just know this: If a person identifies as non-binary, you should respect their decision and use the pronouns they go with.

It’s extremely hurtful to refer to someone who already told you that they use they/them pronouns with she/her or he/him, or use they/them to refer to a person who uses she/her.

Think about it like using a trans-person’s deadname: It’s rude, it’s harmful and it shows complete disrespect for the person.

Non-binary people have existed for a very long time. The concept isn’t new. The idea that there are only two genders, with every other identity being an aberration to the norm, is largely a western idea, spread through colonialism.

The Native American people use “Two-Spirit” to describe someone who identifies neither as a man nor a woman. The term itself is relatively new, but the concept of a third gender is deeply rooted in many Native American cultures.

(Author’s Note: If you are not Native American, please do not use it. That’s cultural appropriation.)

In India, the existence of a third gender has always been acknowledged and there are many terms specifically for people who don’t identify with the gender that was assigned to them at birth.

If you’re interested in learning more about non-binary history and non-binary identities around the world, I’d recommend visiting these websites:

https://nonbinary.wiki/wiki/History_of_nonbinary_gender

https://nonbinary.wiki/wiki/Gender-variant_identities_worldwide

https://thetempest.co/2020/02/01/history/the-history-of-nonbinary-genders-is-longer-than-you-think/

https://www.teenvogue.com/story/gender-variance-around-the-world

Also, maybe consider giving this book a try:

Nonbinary Gender Identities: History, Culture, Resources by Charlie Mcnabb

2. Non-binary Representation In Media

The representation of non-binary people in mainstream media hasn’t been... great, to put it mildly.

Representation, as we all know, is important.

Not only does it give minorities a chance to see themselves in media and feel heard and acknowledged. It also normalizes them.

For example, seeing a black Disney-princess was a huge deal for many black little girls, because they could finally say there was someone there who looked like them. They could see that being white wasn’t a necessity to be a Disney princess.

Seeing a canonically LGBT+ character in a children’s show teaches kids that love is love, no matter what gender you’re attracted to. At the same time, older LGBT+ viewers will see themselves validated and heard in a movie that features on-screen LGBT+ heroes.

There’s been some huge steps in the right direction in the last few years representation-wise.

Not only do we have more LGBT+ protagonists and characters in general, we’ve also begun to question and call out harmful or bigoted portrayals of the community in media, such as “Bury Your Gays” or the “Depraved Homosexual”.

With that being said: Let’s take a look at how Non-binary representation holds up in comparison, shall we?

This is Double Trouble, from the children’s show “She-Ra And The Princesses Of Power”.

They identify as non-binary and use they/them pronouns. They’re also  a slimy, duplicitous lizard-person who can change their shape at will.

Um, yeah.

Thanks, but no thanks.

Did I mention they’re also the only non-binary character in the entire show? And that they’re working with a genocidal dictator in most of the episodes they’re in?

Yikes.

Let’s look at another example.

These three (in order of appearance) are Stevonnie, Smoky Quartz and Shep. Three characters appearing in the kid’s show “Steven Universe” and it’s epilogue series “Steven Universe: Future”.

All of them identify as non-binary and use they/them as pronouns.

Stevonnie and Smoky Quartz are the result of a boy and a girl being fused together through weird alien magic.

Shep is a regular human, but they only appeared in one episode. In an epilogue series that only hardcore fans actually watched.

Well, I mean...

One out of three isn’t that bad, right?

Maybe we should pick an example from a series for older viewers.

Say hello to Doppelganger, a non-binary superhuman who goes by they/them, from the Amazon-series “The Boys”.

They’re working for a corrupt superhero-agency and use their power of shape-shifting to trick people who pose a threat to said agency into having sex with them. And then blackmail those people with footage of said sex.

....

Do I even need to say it?

If you’ve paid attention during the listing of these examples, you might have noticed a theme.

Namely that characters canonically identifying as non-binary are either

supernatural in some way, shape or form,

barely have a presence in the piece of media they’re in,

both.

Blink-and-you-miss-it-manner of representation aside, the majority of these characters fall squarely under what we call “Othering”.

“Othering” describes the practice of portraying minorities as supernatural creatures or otherwise inhuman. Or to say it bluntly: As “The Other”.

“Othering” is a pretty heinous method. Not only does it portray minorities as inherently abnormal and “different in a bad way”. It also goes directly against what representation is actually for: Normalizing.

As a general rule of thumb: If your piece of media has humans in it, but the only representation of non-white, non-straight people are explicitly inhuman... yeah, that’s bad.

So is there absolutely no positive representation for us out there?

Not quite.

As rare as human non-binary characters in media are to find, they do exist.

Here we have Bloodhound! A non-binary human hunter who uses they/them pronouns, from the game “Apex Legends”.

It’s been confirmed by the devs and the voice actress that they’re non-binary.

Nice!

These are Frisk (bottom) and Chara (top) from the game “Undertale”. While their exact gender identity hasn’t been disclosed, they both canonically use they/them pronouns, so it’s somewhere on the non-binary spectrum.

Two human children who act as the protagonist (Frisk) and antagonist (Chara), depending on how you play the game. (Interpretations vary on the antagonist/protagonist-thing, to say the least.)

Cool!

......

And, yep, that’s it.

As my little demonstration here showed, non-binary representation in media is rare. Good non-binary representation is even rarer.

Which is why those small examples of genuinely good representation are so important to the Non-binary community!

It’s hard enough to have to prove you exist. It’s even harder to prove your existence is not abnormal or unnatural.

If you’d like to further educate yourself on representation, it’s impact on society and why it matters, perhaps take a second to read through these articles:

https://www.criticalhit.net/opinion/representation-media-matters/

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/why-on-screen-representation-matters-according-to-these-teens

https://jperkel.github.io/sciwridiversity2020/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2019/05/22/why-is-equal-representation-in-media-important/?sh=25f2ccc92a84

https://www.theodysseyonline.com/why-representation-the-media-matters

3. So What’s The Problem?

The problem, as is the case with so many things in the world, is prejudice.

Actually, that’s not true.

There’s not a problem, there are multiple problems. And their names are prejudice, ignorance and bigotry.

Remember how I said human non-binary representation is rare?

Yeah, very often media-fans don’t help.

Let’s take for example, the aforementioned Frisk and Chara from “Undertale”.

Despite the game explicitly using they/them to refer to both characters multiple times, the majority of players somehow got it into their heads that Frisk’s and Chara’s gender was “up for interpretation”.

There is a huge amount of fan art straight-up misgendering both characters and portraying them as binary and using only he/him or she/her pronouns.

The most egregious examples are two massively popular fan-animated web shows: “Glitchtale”, by Camila Cuevas and “Underverse” by Jael Peñaloza.

Both series are very beloved by the Undertale-fanbase and even outside of it. Meaning for many people, those two shows might be their first introduction to “Undertale” and it’s two non-binary human characters.

Take a wild guess what both Camila and Jael did with Frisk and Chara.

Underverse, X-Tale IV:

(Transcript: “Frisk lied to me in the worst possible way... I... I will never forgive him.”)

Underverse, X-Tale V:

(Transcript: “I-It’s Chara... and it’s a BOY.”)

Glitchtale, My Promise:

(Transcript: (Referring to Frisk) “I’m not scared of an angry boy anymore.”)

Glitchtale, Game Over Part 1:

(Transcript: (Referring to Chara) “It’s ok little boy.”)

This... this isn’t okay.

Not only do both of these pieces of fan-art misgender two non-binary characters, the creators knew beforehand that Frisk and Chara use they/them-pronouns, but made the conscious choice to ignore that.

To be fair, in a video discussing “Underverse”, Jael said that only X-Tale Frisk and Chara, the characters you see in the Underverse-examples above, are male, while the characters Frisk and Chara from the main game remained non-binary and used they/them (time-stamp 10:34).

Still, that doesn’t erase the fact that Jael made up alternate versions of two non-binary characters specifically to turn them male. Or that, while addressing the issue, Jael was incredibly dismissive and even mocked the people who felt hurt by her turning two non-binary characters male. Jael also went on to make a fairly non-binary-phobic joke in the video, in which she equated gender identities beyond male and female to identifying as an object.

Jael (translated): “I don’t care if people say the original Frisk and Chara are male, female, helicopters, chairs, dogs or cats, buildings, clouds...”

That’s actually a very common joke among transphobes, if not to say the transphobe-joke:

“Oh, you identify as X? Well then I identify as an attack helicopter!”

If you’re trans, chances are you’ve heard this one, or a variation of it, a million times before.

I certainly have.

I didn’t laugh then and I’m not laughing now.

(Author’s note: I might be angry at both of them for what they did, but I do not, under any circumstances, support the harassment of creators. If you’re thinking about sending either Jael or Camila hate-mail - don’t. It won’t help.)

Jael’s reaction is sadly common in the Undertale fandom. Anyone speaking up against Chara’s and Frisk’s identity being erased is immediately bludgeoned with the “up for interpretation”-argument, despite that not once being the case in the game.

And even with people who do it right and portray Frisk and Chara as they/them, you’ll have dozens of commenters swarming the work with sentences among the lines of “Oh but I think Frisk is a boy/girl! And Chara is a girl/boy!”

By the way, this kind of thing only happens to Frisk and Chara.

Every other character in “Undertale” is referred to and portrayed with their proper pronouns of she/her or he/him.

But not the characters who go by they/them.

Their gender is “up for interpretation”.

Because obviously, their identity couldn’t possibly be canonically non-binary.

Sadly, Frisk and Chara are not alone in this.

Remember Bloodhound?

And how I said they’d been confirmed as non-binary and using they/them pronouns by both the creators and the voice actress?

It seems for many players, that too translated to “up for interpretation”.

(Transcript: “does it matter what they call him? He, her, it, they toaster oven, it doesn’t matter”)

(Transcript: “I’m like 90 % sure Bloodhound is a dude because he could just sound like a girl and by their age that I’m assuming looks around 10-12 because I’ve known many males who have sounded like a female when they were younger”)

(Transcript: “I don’t care it will always be a He. F*ck that non-binary bullsh*t.”)

(Transcript: “Bloodhound is clearly female.”)

(Transcript: “I’m not calling a video game character they/them”)

(Transcript: “exactly. The face was never fully shown neither was the gender so I’d say it means that the player is Bloodhound. So it’s your gender and you refer to “him” as yourself. It’s like a self insertion in my eyes.”)

So, let me get this straight:

If a character, even a player character, uses she/her or he/him, you can accept it, no questions asked.

But when a character uses they/them, suddenly their identity and gender are “up for interpretation”?

This attitude is also widely prevalent in real life.

Many languages only include pronouns for men and women, with no third option available. Non-binary people are often forced to make up their own terms, because their language doesn’t provide one.

Non-binary people often don’t fit within other people’s ideas of gender, so they get excluded altogether. Worse, non-binary people are often the victims of misgendering, denial of their identity or even straight-up violence when coming out.

People will often tell us that we look like a certain gender, so we should only use one set of gendered pronouns. Never mind that that’s not what we want. Never mind that that’s not who we are.

Non-binary people are also largely omitted from legal documentation and studies. We cannot identify as non-binary at our workplace, because using they/them pronouns is considered “unprofessional”. We don’t have our own bathrooms like men and women do. Our gender is seen as less valid than male and female, so even that basic thing is denied to us. I’ve had to use the women’s restroom my entire life, because if I go into a male restroom, I’ll be yelled at or made fun off or simply get told I took the wrong door. It’s extremely uncomfortable for me and I wish I didn’t have to do it.

And since non-binary people aren’t seen as “real transgender-people”, we often don’t receive the medical care we need. This often renders us unable to feel good within our bodies, because the treatment and help we get is wildly inadequate.

It’s especially horrible for intersex people (people who are born with sex characteristics that don’t fit solely into the male/female category) who are often forced to change their bodies to fit within the male/female gender binary.

And you better believe each of those problems is increased ten-fold for non-binary people of color.

We are ignored and dismissed as “confused”, because of who we are.

Representation is a way for Non-binary people to show the world they exist, that they’re here and that they too have stories to tell.

But how can we, when every character that represents us is either othered, barely there or gets taken away from us?

We are not “up for interpretation”.

Neither are the characters in media who share our identity.

And it’s time to stop pretending we ever were.

For more information about Non-Binary Erasure and how harmful it is, you can check out these articles:

https://everydayfeminism.com/2015/08/common-non-binary-erasure/

https://www.dailydot.com/irl/nonbinary-people-racism/

https://nonbinary.wiki/wiki/Nonbinary_erasure

https://traj.openlibhums.org/articles/10.16995/traj.422/

https://medium.com/an-injustice/everyday-acts-of-non-binary-erasure-49ee970654fb

https://medium.com/national-center-for-institutional-diversity/the-invisible-labor-of-liberating-non-binary-identities-in-higher-education-3f75315870ec

https://musingsofanacademicasexual.wordpress.com/2015/05/11/dear-sirmadam-a-commentary-on-non-binary-erasure/

4. How Do We Fix It?

Well, first things first: Stop acting like we don’t exist.

And kindly stop other people from doing it too.

We are a part of the LGBT+ community and we deserve to be acknowledged, no matter what our pronouns are.

Address non-binary people with the right pronouns. Don’t argue with them about their identity, don’t comment on how much you think they look like a boy or a girl. Just accept them and be respectful.

If a non-binary person tells you they have two sets of pronouns, for example he/him and they/them, don’t just use one set of pronouns. That can come off as disingenuous. Alternate between the pronouns, don’t leave one or the other out. It’ll probably be hard at first, but if you keep it up, you’ll get used to it pretty quickly.

If you’re witnessing someone harass a non-binary person over their identity, step in and help them.

And please, don’t partake in non-binary erasure in media fandoms.

Don’t misgender non-binary characters, don’t “speculate” on what you think their gender might be. You already know their gender and it’s non-binary. It costs exactly 0 $ to be a decent human being and accept that.

Support Non-Binary people by educating yourself about them and helping to normalize and integrate their identity.

In fact, here’s a list of petitions, organizations and articles who will help you do just that:

https://www.change.org/p/collegeboard-let-students-use-their-preferred-name-on-collegeboard-9abad81a-0fdf-435c-8fca-fe24a5df6cc7?source_location=topic_page

6 Ways to Support Your Non-Binary Child

7 Non-Negotiables for Supporting Trans & Non-Binary Students in Your Classroom

If Your Partner Just Came Out As Non-Binary, Here’s How To Support Them

How to Support Your Non-Binary Employees, Colleagues and Friends

Ko-fi page for the Nonbinary Wiki

The Sylvia Rivera Project, an organization who aims to give low-income and non-white transgender, intersex and non-binary people a voice

The Anti Violence Project “empowers lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and HIV-affected communities and allies to end all forms of violence through organizing and education, and supports survivors through counseling and advocacy."

The Trans Lifeline, a hotline for transgender people by transgender people

Tl:DR: Non-Binary representation is important. Non-Binary people still suffer from society at large not acknowledging our existence and forcing us to conform. Don’t be part of that problem by taking away what little representation we have. Educate yourself and do better instead. We deserve to be seen and heard.

[luesmainblog]

and i'm gonna point out something regarding the weeaboo stuff, because while of course there were a lot of problems with the era of "i love everything japanese but don't actually know any japanese people and end up fetishizing the whole thing", there is one thing i noticed while i was growing up in the tail-end of it. if your community does not have many members of a marginilized group, their reaction to the local kids engaging with content by them is a canary for how your community WOULD treat them if they were there. getting a little flustered because your kid keeps using words in a language you don't know is normal. but getting viscerally hateful of japanese and waving it off as completely cringe and nonsensical is racist as fuck, and it happened way, way, WAY too often. being confused by little cultural practices like bowing or shinto rituals is normal at first; rolling your eyes at it and telling your kid to knock it off is pushing it; outright banning japanese stuff is outright racist. let's not do that with mandarin and chinese culture, alright? especially when it's coming from a much more direct cultural exchange this time. if a whole generation of americans started massively upticking how much mandarin is spoken in this county, that would be a GOOD thing. it is quite literally the most natively-spoken language on the planet, and there is enough shinophobia out here as it is. when we see some kid who uses rednote starting to do little chinese practices because they make them happy and their mom tries to shut it down completely, let's stand up for the kid. because OBVIOUSLY you should be stepping up for the actual chinese-americans, but you may not live in a community where they live; you may very well be more likely to encounter a white kid who likes chinese stuff. normalize it. normalize chinese stuff being a part of american life so that chinese-americans feel less inclined to push that part of their heritage down just to fit in here.

cultural appropriation is a neutral term. it is simply the description of things from one culture ending up in another one. pound that into your head. the problem has never been white people eating tacos or mexican people watching anime; it has always been the people with power enjoying the cultural pieces without respecting the people it came from. it's holding "taco tuesday" at your house while bitching about illegal mexicans. it's declaring that japan is The Best Place Ever and then pretending you can't read when the imperialism and work culture come up. it's enjoying chinese food all the time while also blaming your local chinese dude for covid. it's relying on the bible, which originally stemmed from the torah, and then turning around and demonizing all of judaism.

and like... yeah, i would hope this goes without saying, but if you're gonna be on rednote and enjoying their stuff, make an effort to view chinese folk as normal people like yourself.

saw someone expressing concern the rednote thing is going to turn into "another weeaboo thing"

and like I'm not planning on getting rednote and I didn't have tiktok

but I feel the need to point out that "weeaboo" stuff tends to not involve.... interacting with actual people of the culture in question

and that's the entire problem

let's not start that "you can't eat Chinese food it's appropriation" bullshit back up

[watermelinoe]

This is kind of a weird route to terfdom but one of the things that really got me questioning the libfem blogs i followed was the strange insistence that because a thing was common in one group or they had first heard of it coming from that group, that it coming from anywhere else too was clearly copying or appropriation. Like braided bread was Jewish and Jewish only, hairsticks were asian and asain only, square peices of fabric tied at the waist for skirts were african and african only, dual dutch braids are black american and black american only. It's not that I don't think cultural appropriation is a thing but humans have been coming up with the same basic ideas for fucking ever, all over the globe, because they are simple and sensible approaches to problems. Once i started to question their weird insistance on being right about that stuff in the face of overwhelming evidence otherwise, i began to question trans politics too and look at evidence provided by radfems and spiraled from there. This ridiculous idea that humans of different cultures couldn't possibly have similar solutions to things is really similar to the idea that a western woman has nothing in common with an eastern woman and there is no universal female experiences. They seem to determined to seperate us.

sorry it took me so long to get to this, i wanted to be able to give a really well thought-out answer bc... there's a lot of nuance to this discussion imo!

my problem with the average "cultural appropriation" argument is that more often than not it's the laziest possible interpretation, usually online, usually by some white kid trying to look woke. just a little bit ago kids on tiktok were demanding these like, eastern europeans i think (don't quote me) apologize for appropriation for wearing their own traditional dress bc it "looked mexican." or however long ago when nicki minaj was in the hot seat for wearing a "native american" headdress.... that was actually caribbean.

because you're exactly right, a lot of humans were coming up with the same shit all over the world at different times.

but my other issue is this idea that all of these cultures evolved in an isolated vacuum and were never influenced by any other people groups. that's hilarious to me, personally, but also a little disturbing when i start to get major "Cultural Purity" vibes from otherwise well-meaning people who think we should all just keep to our Own Cultures :)

university is where i mainly observed this weird dissonance where i'm being bombarded with evidence of cultural amalgamation every day in my art history lectures, while in my small discussion sections i'm asked to apply cultural relativity to, say, the practice of fgm in west africa. i wrote an entirely neutral paper on its cultural significance, as if those girls (and boys as well in that case) aren't also people like me. that's just the way "they" do things. it forces you to dehumanize people from other cultures, honestly.

and this isn't to say that the dynamics of cultural interactions don't matter. there's a very good, historical reason why white americans do not and should not ever have ownership over black american culture. to me, for the most part, there's a visible difference in how braids are used in black hairstyles versus the traditional white european hairstyles. but not always. it's not really about the hair itself, but the double standard applied to black people whose hairstyles are called "unprofessional," "inappropriate," while on white people they're cool and subversive. the real harm of cultural appropriation isn't really the decontextualization of a specific culture, but that it obscures discrimination. yes, both white people and black people wear braids, but as white people we're not discriminated against when we do.

at the same time, i love to see evidence of human interaction. oppressive cultural dynamics happen on a very wide scale that can be summed up in your history textbook from a third-person perspective. on an individual level, of course discrimination still exists, but there's no real malicious significance to seeing someone do or make something and thinking "i like that, i want to join." one of my favorite things i encountered studying art history was seeing the way cultural artistic styles combined, yes, sometimes as a result of an overarching subjugating political takeover. and like, i hate to say it, but sometimes that didn't really change someone's daily life. people are very resistant to change on an individual level. look at how many people were converted to a new religion by just adding a new god to their own beliefs.

mudéjar architecture came about because of the islamic empire's conquest of spain over a thousand years ago. and check out this greco-roman influenced gandhara bodhisattva from almost 2000 years ago. cultural exchange!

"emperor qianlong watching the peacock in its pride" from 1760 qing dynasty china, influenced by the italian painter castiglione.

there's a lot more universality to our different cultures than a lot of people would like to acknowledge, i think. it dehumanizes someone to categorize them as Foreign, to label their culture as entirely separate and untouchable, and it feels to me very much like people think culture is something that can become contaminated by the wrong people interacting. and i do think heritage is incredibly important, i do think cultural appropriation hurts people from oppressed social groups. but i also think cultural exchange is very natural and important.

the refusal to see nuance (not to mention the blatant inaccuracies i mentioned at the start that happen all the time) is definitely a big part of what drove me away from liberal spaces, and i do think there are people who have a specific agenda of dividing western white women from other women around the world. specifically to keep us from empathizing with each other and finding common ground. i just think it discourages the genuine instinctive desire to explore something new and compare it to what's familiar to you.

[x--daughters-of-darkness--x]

Outlanders: How Jinjer survived a revolution and built their own world

Jinjer’s resilient spirit was forged in the civil war that erupted their native Ukraine in 2014. As the groove metal quartet prepare to unleash their fourth and most complex album to date, singer Tatiana Shmayluk relives the turmoil that shaped them. Cue: one of modern music’s most remarkable tales of survival, resistance and sheer determination…

It was when the first fighter jet flew overhead that Tatiana Shmayluk realised she had to run.

For the past few months, the mood in Ukraine had been growing increasingly tense. As a former USSR state, in spring 2014 the country had only had independence from Russia since 1991. Many citizens had wanted then-President Viktor Yanukovych to sign an agreement aligning the country closer with the European Union in November 2013. Plenty of others wanted to stay close to Russia. Protests began across the country. Then violence. Then Yanukovych was ousted from office in February 2014. Then more violence.

“There was a revolution,” says Tatiana. ​“There were huge riots in the main square of Kiev. In the end, our president, his ass was kicked out and he left the country. That was crazy. And then everything turned into chaos. And that’s when people really started hating each other.”

That April, following a highly suspect vote on whether to stay or go which resulted in a widely disputed declaration of autonomy for the region around Tatiana’s home-city of Donetsk in the east of the country, on the border with Russia, armed conflict commenced, involving Russian troops, tanks and air power. So began what Tatiana calls ​“a civil war – Ukrainians attacking Ukrainians”, with those loyal to their former Soviet masters on one side, and those wanting to break free, and have independence and closer ties with the EU on the other.

You may remember news footage of protesters banging dustbin lids at lines of soldiers and riot police. The politics of the situation are obviously layered and complex, but the simple version is: imagine a turbo version of Brexit that actually tore the country in two and resulted in one region declaring an independence that’s somewhat disputed by most of the world that isn’t Russia. And with a lot more violence. And a conflict that’s still piling up bodies now.

Tatiana was having a barbecue when she realised what was about to happen. ​“We were at a picnic, not far away from my building where I lived,” she says today from her flat in the Ukrainian capital, Kiev. ​“We were just chilling on the grass, eating food and stuff. And we heard this loud sound in the sky – we looked up and saw a jet. And that was that. We just grabbed our stuff and ran home, and we started figuring out how to leave before it was too late.”

Had Tatiana and her friends – including other members of her band, Jinjer – waited much longer than they did, their passage to Lviv some 1,300 kilometres to the west, where bassist Eugene Abdukhanov and his wife were already living, might have been much more hazardous. Even as they ​“packed all our shit into a van” and made a break for it, the country was starting to change shape around them.

“Already there were borders built being built around our region,” she says. ​“And I remember when we were crossing it, we were met by a guy, a soldier with a weapon. And then we heard [machine gun fire] somewhere very close to us.”

As she describes this, Tatiana makes an almost amusing machine gun noise, but she is painfully aware that even seven years on, the situation remains a serious one. ​“There’s no way out for this problem,” she says, ​“No solution. And that’s really, really sad.” If one needed an example of the lasting effects here, her parents have remained behind in what she calls, with almost mundane succinctness, ​“the war zone”.

“There’s an actual border between Ukraine and the former parts of the country, and it’s all blocked. And due to the pandemic, they have no chance to cross borders,” she explains. ​“They cannot receive money from the government, their pensions. I always tell my mom, ​‘Hey, mom, just try once to do this, make really big effort and cross this border, even [if you have to go] through Russia. Just come here and stay here. I can help you in any way possible.’ But she is old school. And when you have been living on this earth for over 60 years, it’s really hard to change your way of living.”

But that’s what Tatiana and Jinjer have had to do. And growing from such trying circumstances has only made them more rigid in their resolve. Because literally having to run for your life will have an effect on a person. ​“Growing balls, maintaining your balls,” is how she puts it.

“Of course, it makes you stronger,” she says. ​“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”

Today, Tatiana has lived in Kiev for more than five years. As Jinjer’s singer, she is one of the rising stars of European metal, and made her living visiting countries as far-flung as Argentina, Australia and Japan to play her band’s music. Next week, the band release their fourth album, Wallflowers, a furious, razor-sharp work of metal that will delight fans of Cradle Of Filth and Conjurer alike, and will add nicely to streams that, in total, already sit at over 100 million.

Though she says that she’s only been recognised around town a handful of times, and that she probably gets noticed more for the tattoos that cover her arms and neck (“Old women who were born in the Soviet Union really reject people with tattoos,” she says. ​“They look at you like you’re a prisoner, or a prostitute…”) than for her music, at 34 life for Tatiana is very different to what she knew growing up. As a kid in the early ​’90s, after the collapse of the USSR, her family were, she says, ​“average”, but there were clues that the Shmayluk family were not one of society’s ​‘haves’.

“I remember that we couldn’t afford meat,” she recalls. ​“After the Cold War ended we got a lot of American food, like veggie burgers. It looked like oatmeal with brown [fake] chicken that you make into patties, and then you fry them. You eat them as kind of meat, but it’s not. It’s just some shit, like some very plastic stuff. I realised how poor we were. And I was crying, ​‘Mom, I just want some meat. I don’t want to eat this.’”

Elsewhere, though, Tatiana remembers her childhood as being ​“great”, a time she looks back on with fondness. ​“We didn’t have internet and stuff, so we just played outside all day long. And school was awesome.” The food imports post-Cold War might not have been the most brilliant thing she had ever seen, but the new order also brought with it more western culture. MTV introduced six-year-old Tatiana to hip-hop (“I’d practice dancing like MC Hammer”), but via going through her brother’s room and raiding his tape collection – often bootlegs – she also got turned on to Nirvana, Metallica and The Offspring.

“We had this family tradition that every evening we had supper together around the same table,” she remembers. ​“When I discovered The Offspring, I put Smash on my huge headphones. I was sitting in a chair, eating, and I wasn’t talking to anyone from my family, just listening to music. And then when I finished, I just sat back and just enjoyed the music, doing nothing.”

Her ability to both lose and find herself in music turned into doing something more significant at high school when, after years spent doodling herself playing guitar in a band with other girls in a sketchbook, Tatiana performed her first gig as part of a talent contest, doing covers of songs by Limp Bizkit and German metallers Guano Apes (“No-one voted for us,” she laughs). Her first gig as an audience member, meanwhile, came a few years later, when Soulfly played in Kiev. Despite the fact she didn’t actually get to see Max Cavalera and his band onstage, it was an experience in itself.

“I traveled from Donetsk to Kiev, like, 700 – 800 kilometres,” she says. ​“My parents were very protective, they didn’t want me going anywhere on road trips or anything, and they didn’t give me any money to spend. I only got to watch maybe 30 minutes of the show, because my boyfriend got drunk and started a fight with someone. Security grabbed him and threw him out of the club. It was quite a shitty day!”

In 2010, aged 23, having completed language studies at university, and working briefly at a dating agency, Tatiana joined Jinjer. Two years later, they self-released their debut EP, Inhale, Don’t Breathe. A year after that, they played outside Ukraine for the first time, in neighbouring Romania. ​“That gave us a push to move forward, because we really liked it,” she says. ​“And although we didn’t bring any money back – we didn’t earn anything – we realised that we want to do this, and we’re going to overcome any obstacle that is waiting for us.”

Eight months later, this would be put to the test by fleeing the war. Having moved to Lviv, Jinjer – Tatiana, Eugene, guitarist Roman Ibramkhalilov and then-drummer Yevhen Mantulin – then all moved into what the singer describes as ​“a summer house” just outside the city. Soon, the band became a full-time concern. They still had nothing, but it was a more fun nothing.

“We were all just hoping for the best, touring just with money that we had, earning nothing, like one euro,” she says. ​“Sometimes we didn’t have anything to eat, basically, because we were broke, because everyone had just quit their jobs. We just had some coins to buy a beer. That was intense. But I remember those years only with a warm heart. That was fun. That was a really huge challenge for just people who had never done that before, but we happened to overcome all this shit because we stayed together.”

But as touring became a more regular thing and things for Jinjer seemed to be on the up and up, the band once again found themselves faced with bad luck that most will, mercifully, never know. On tour in 2014, they had a long drive to Russia for the next run of shows. Stopping at a friend’s house in Kiev for the night, Tatiana took a taxi back to her own place, leaving everyone else to continue partying and drinking. At 4am, she got a phone call about Yevhen.

“They said, ​‘You have to come here because he’s broken his spine,’” she recalls. ​“He fell out of the window. Everyone [had gone] to sleep, and he stayed there in the kitchen, sitting on the window frame, smoking. And then he fell asleep, and fell from the third floor. They heard someone screaming in the middle of the night, but they didn’t realise – they thought that it was maybe a dog or something. And then someone checked the kitchen and he was not there. Then they looked down and saw him just lying there.”

By some miracle, he survived, though he no longer has use of his legs. Tatiana says she and his bandmates were ​“in shock for many years”, and that, ​“I remember we were all around him, toured with him, just hanging out, and then he’s just like… bam.” But even this incident, which left him in a wheelchair and unable to return to the band, is talked about in the same spirited, fighty way that Tatiana talks about every challenge.

“He seems very positive,” she says. ​“He’s doing music and he tours around Russia with a band. It’s kind of a hip-hop band, and he plays guitar. He’s still doing tours, so that’s awesome.”

Should you ask Tatiana to describe to you the Ukrainian national character, she’ll tell you that they are “stubborn”, and that as a whole they feel “we have nothing to lose”. She’ll also tell you that, “Ukrainians are very passionate people. Not like Italians [are passionate], for example, or Spanish people. We are passionate with a straight face, you know, not smiling – more like Russians.” When it comes to danger, meanwhile, she says that “we take risks easily”.

Surprisingly, despite the above description matching the impression you get of Tatiana from her story, she doesn’t think of herself as ​“a typical Ukrainian”. She does, though, nod in confirmation when asked if she sees playing music as a form of resistance. Before any of the bigger events and challenges, this spirited defiance started with becoming a musician at all, at home.

“The first time I resisted something that really prevented me from doing what I love was my parents,” she says. ​“Mostly my mom, who didn’t want to see me as a musician. In Ukraine, it’s kind of a big thing. If you’re a musician, it’s not respected. From 17 to 23, I was protesting [her], silently. I didn’t, like, yell at her; I didn’t fight with her. I just said, ​‘Yeah, yeah,’ and I did my own thing. That’s when it started, and it’s still going this way.”

An example: on Wallflowers, there’s a song, Disclosure, in which Tatiana vents about treatment at the hands of certain media outlets in her homeland. Even being used to internet haters, giving the band shit for everything from daring to escape a warzone, to daring to have a female member, to daring to become successful, the experience left her boiling.

“Earlier this year, in March, me and Eugene went to some studio to do an interview with a Ukrainian guy who is a YouTuber, and he used to work on Ukrainian TV channels,” she says. ​“So there was a tense atmosphere, and very angry vibrations between us. And he was so manipulative. We had differences in our political views and stuff, and he didn’t want to accept that. So he really wanted to show us in a very bad, bad way. I was pissed off for three days after that, and wrote the song about it.”

As people with a profile, do you think you’re a target for that sort of thing?

“We absolutely are targets for those people, for haters,” Tatiana says. ​“They hate us for different reasons: for me being a woman, you know. And people think that we pay for [success], like with our money – some of them think that we are hugely rich. My mom is a bookkeeper! My dad worked in coal mining, he was a worker, just working class. But no-one cares. They always find something to blame us for. But at least they don’t do us any harm. Only with words and comments. It’s distant. They’re poison, but it goes nowhere.”

Tatiana Shmayluk is a self-evidently tough woman. She’s also extremely nice. Equally, she’s extremely modest. When she talks about her life’s trials and triumphs, survival and successes, she does so in a manner that almost shrugs these things off, that possibly anyone could do them. Possibly, if pushed by the sight of a war literally kicking off while you have a barbecue, we could. But it’s still surprising that, for someone with more real things to get angry about than most, she describes what she’s putting into Wallflower as simply ​“my whining and insecurities”.

“Every album, I find something to be angry about,” she says. ​“It’s pessimistic, but it’s nothing to do with the pandemic. The pandemic gave me some time to just sit and think about, different stuff that I’ve been going through. And we have to agree that the whole world isn’t getting any better – I put myself into this kind of state of mind that, ​‘Okay, it’s almost the end of the world.’ Maybe the next album will be more optimistic and more positive. Maybe…”

Pessimism or not, none of it makes her story of prevailing against the things she has any less stirring. Never mind the fact that the band she fronts come from a country most tours don’t even stop at. She’s – rightfully – proud of Jinjer’s success, and the work ethic it’s taken to get them where they are, but she’s almost at pains to share the glory with her bandmates. And in part, it’s this that’s carried Jinjer through all this the most. It’s this, she says, that’s helped her both survive, and to thrive.

“I would never do this myself. I wouldn’t be able to work on so many obstacles just by myself,” Tatiana admits. ​“And if I had some type of my own personal career, just a single singer, I wouldn’t even start doing that. I really need those guys. And the guys, I hope they need me. That’s just how it works: all together. Even having nothing in our pockets and empty stomachs, we could work.

“It just depends on how big your dream is.”

[comrade-meow]

“On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form, this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution.” —Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto

“It is self-evident that the abolition of the present system of production must bring with it the abolition of the community of women springing from that system, i.e., of prostitution both public and private.” —Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto

Introduction

“[…] the question of prostitutes will give rise to many serious problems here. Take them back to productive work, bring them into the social economy. That is what we must do. But it is difficult and a complicated task to carry out in the present conditions of our economic life and in all the prevailing circumstances. There you have one aspect of the women’s problem which, after the seizure of power by the proletariat, looms large before us and demands a practical solution.” —V. I. Lenin, Conversation with Clara Zetkin, 1920

The subject is endlessly debated on the internet—and terms like “sex work” are slipped in to distract would-be Marxists from examining the matter of prostitution. But we must begin by stating that the matter of prostitution for Marxists has been resolved for approaching 200 years, and there is no ambiguity on this. It is mentioned three times in the Communist Manifesto—the most basic introductory text to Communism that all Communists unite around. To be a Marxist is to oppose prostitution. More importantly, Marxism gives us the framework to analyze exactly why Marxists have historically come to this position, and why Marxists today reject terms like “sex worker” that seek to sanitize prostitution, which we understand as sexual violence, mainly against women.

It is trendy to compare prostitution to work—without ever delving into what Marxists even mean by “worker”—and to frame the most basic Marxist positions as “backward.” Without delving too far into the individual theorists behind the sanitation of sexual violence as “sex work,” it is enough to identify this tendency as the inheritance of third-wave feminism, which has overlapped with postmodern method of analysis. Engels himself likened prostitution to slavery, and for very precise political economic reasons. What brought Marx and Engels together to begin with were Engels’s astute observations on political economy. Suffice it to say, Engels is a great authority on the subject second only to Marx. Engels wrote,

“Wage labor appears sporadically, side by side with slave labor, and at the same time, as its necessary correlate, the professional prostitution of free women side by side with the forced surrender of the slave.”

Engels viewed these as a necessary correlate, meaning a unity of opposites, where the identity of each depends on the existence of the other.

When examining the trend of “sex worker advocacy” we see two things most often. The first is to totally hollow out the term “worker” of any of its political-economic definitions. The second is to lump various classes and strata together into a single category—this means even distinct trades undertaken by distinct classes are conflated and flattened into one singular “oppressed” group. By defect of the first error, which destroys the understanding of the economic identity of the worker, we arrive at the second, that porno movie performers, exotic dancers, street prostitutes, “cam girls,” and others are all one thing. Apologists maintain this as if the exchange of money for a sex service or sexualized service somehow, in and of itself, constitutes such an ultimate commonality among these “workers” that it obliterates the profound concrete differences in each case to their actual relationships to production. One of the most critical phenomena erased in their analysis is the profound stratification, which exists even within groupings that do have a similar relationship to production. Putting their position into practice entails forcing class collaboration between management, entertainer, and slave.

A brief history

Comrade Mary Inman, one of the staunchest antirevisionists in the CPUSA of the 1930s-40’s, whose contributions will be discussed more thoroughly later, offers the following powerful passage:

“Prostitution did not start with folk customs. It did not grow out of group marriages between free people, for pre-slavery tribes had no such institution. It did not grow out of mystic rites, nor sex worship. It was always a rape institution. Even in the earliest records of prostitution, the evidence shows that the people lived in terrible degradation rising from economic slavery, and did not have the freedom to decide such matters.”

We do not have any interest in going over the earth’s recorded history of prostitution, and will use this section only to establish some relevant facts pertaining to its history in the US.

In the war for control over the colonies that some call the “American Revolution,” as well as throughout the US Civil War, women were unofficially enlisted as prostitutes to follow the soldiers to “keep morale high.”[1] At this time, the ruling class found this a necessity in order to sustain the war. It is useful to understand the shifts and changes that the ruling class makes in terms of prostitution. In wartime, their puritanical Christian opposition vanishes in favor of the cold pragmatism of whatever they think it takes to win.

Prostitution, while technically illegal in the 19th century, was widespread, and brothels were commonplace. The laws were simply not enforced. This period was not without war, considering the increase in Native genocide carried out by the settlers during westward expansion. And this colonial expansion meant the expansion of brothels as well.

In the early 1900s, the precursor to the FBI, the Bureau of Investigations, cracked down on prostitution in earnest for the first time in US history.[2] Their reason, far from having anything to do with the rights of those experiencing sexual violence, was, as they put it, “to oppose white slavery.” In practice this effort constituted a political maneuver as well as a propaganda effort. In order to enforce social segregation and further consolidate settler-colonialism, the ruling class attempted to get white women out of brothels. This campaign has had long-lasting effects: even today the majority of prostitutes are not white. This is similar to the way the US imperialist ruling class carries out the “War on Drugs,” primarily to harm the oppressed nations of its population.

What we have attempted to sketch out here is that the question of prostitution in the US cannot be separated from the US history of settler-colonialism—that these things march in step as what Engels might call “necessary correlates.” Prostitution, like chattel slavery and settler-colonialism (genocide against the indigenous North Americans), was an ingredient in the US imperialist project, and it served its master well. This argument, that prostitution and colonialism in the US are necessary correlates of each other, deserves its own paper, but here we must move on from it.

In all of these instances, economic conditions provide the impulse for prostitution.

Some basic prostitution statistics

One of the strongest examples of the unbreakable link between, on the one hand, the fact that the US is a prisonhouse of nations, built up through settler-colonialism and slavery, and prostitution on the other hand, is the fact that 40% of prostitutes in the US are Black[3] (Black people constitute only 13.4% of the overall population), while the majority of johns are white.[4] And it is commonplace that many regular johns are police.[5]

According to Havocscope, a website dedicated to researching global black markets, the average cost of a trick in many places is £14–50, with minors earning less. Due to the constant conditions of national oppression in the US, Black people tend to earn less than others. This trend cannot be forgotten when we evaluate prostitution. This is yet one further way the stratification of the trade takes shape. While prostitutes earn twice as much as the average US worker and three times as much as the average woman in the US, much of this income is withheld by pimps.

The sex-positive apologists of prostitution will without fail argue that the trade somehow is or can be “empowering.” But statistically, the majority of prostitutes are victims of child abuse (one study found 73% were physically abused as children)[6], and there is evidence that they enter the trade at an average age of 15.[7] An average starting age of 15 or anywhere close all but eliminates the myth of the consenting prostitute. Underage prostitutes—which is what the majority of them start as— face physical violence, emotional manipulation, and other forms of gendered abuse to coerce them to start.

It is economic necessity that sets the conditions for prostitution—there are no exceptions. Sex that a woman would not otherwise engage except in exchange for money is no longer “sex” but rape, as the ability to consent is removed by economic coercion—and a prostitute is always coerced economically. Prostitution is most often rape.

Some men are prostitutes as well, but 69% of those arrested are women, including arrested johns and pimps.[8]

Atlanta, one of the US cities with a majority Black population, is home to the country’s highest-grossing pimps, who reap about £23614 a week on average.[9] Some of these pimps are women who maintain hierarchy and obedience among the prostitutes, another way stratification manifests. This also makes it obvious that prostitution is caused by economic conditions and is not just (as some maintain) a result of personal sexist attitudes.

For obvious reasons, the majority of assaults experienced by prostitutes go unreported. 89% of adult prostitutes want to quit, but due to economic coercion feel that they cannot.[10] Being in thrall to a pimp, who controls everything and deploys severe psychological and sometimes physical abuse, makes the victim of prostitution far less likely to admit to wanting to quit, which itself skews statistics. Understanding that many enthralled women cannot speak up about their abuse, we would do well to understand that things are far worse than the picture painted by what makes it into official reports.

Which prostitute?

Unlike workers and more specifically proletarians, prostitutes are not engaged in productive, socially-productive, or reproductive labor. They do not receive a wage in the proletarian sense (of receiving a portion of what they produce in a value form/money, with the bulk of their labor being exploited by the owner) and are not devoid of the tools of their occupation, which in this case are the bodies of the prostitutes themselves. To return to the question of stratification, we can observe that in terms of relationship to production, a woman engaged in street-level prostitution without a pimp is distinct from those with pimps, and both are distinct from women who work for escort services or through self-promotion on websites (past examples are Backpage and Craigslist).

For the majority of women trapped in prostitution, the reality of a pimp forces them to the lower strata (this is combined in many cases with national oppression). They have no financial independence from their boss/owner, who makes all or all major decisions regarding their activity: what they do and do not engage in, what subsistence is allowed, and what accommodations are awarded or denied. But those in this most common situation do not qualify in any sense as proletarian despite the pimp behaving like a boss or even like an owner, because he does not simply “own the business”—he owns the women. These women come far closer to being slaves than to being workers. The wage of a slave is nothing except subsistence; the owner of the slave, in our instance the pimp, is the chief executive of every aspect of life. That includes housing, food, clothing, tools, and everything else—provided by the pimp to subsidize the prostitute in order for her to live and continue earning them profit. This is one of the most extreme forms of exploitation, not to mention the most inhumane. Nonetheless, the degree of oppression and brutality one faces does not determine one’s relationship to production, nor does intense oppression alone place one in the social class of the proletariat. Further distancing the enthralled woman from the worker is the fact that she cannot just quit of her own accord; like the slave, she can only organize her escape.

The only method of organization for a slave is rebellion and escape; there are no such things as reformist options for the slave. These contradictions are part of why slavery as a widespread mode of production was replaced by feudalism (in turn replaced by capitalism), which was more manageable, and why capitalism itself is more profitable than slavery in terms of the performance and capacity of the productive forces.

This highlights the position that in the women’s struggle, the only Communist approach regarding the majority of women in prostitution is to organize them out of it, and that this is accomplished mainly through People’s War and socialist revolution. At some stage of revolutionary struggle, this means the use of revolutionary violence against lumpenproletarian gangs that back up the pimps in the military sense. Short of this option, the only acceptable tactic is to secure the transition of individual women into productive work and the opportunity to gain other skills, a total change of social environment, and continuous political education and thought reform. This can improve the conditions of some prostitutes and rehabilitate them into being proletarians, but it cannot emancipate them as women or end prostitution. Furthermore, it requires a high level or organization: it needs Party committees and mass organizations to lead the effort and a Red Army and militias to defend this work and protect the ex-prostitute, securing her escape from the trade, preventing retaliatory action from pimps, and so on.

Any effort to transpose the methods used in workers struggles’ into the realm of prostitution falls hopelessly short. A struggle against a pimp cannot be carried out in the same way as a struggle against a factory owner or regular boss. Arguing that it can and must be carried out the same way—viewing prostitutes as workers and pimps as bosses to be struggled against—really lacks all Marxist understanding of why workers can be organized against bosses and so lapses into a subjective moralist approach to combating oppression. People of this persuasion attempt to implement prostitute unions; like the syndicalist, they dream of a union for everything, and are under the delusion that slaves can unionize and struggle for reforms against their slave-master.

While the so-called Maoists who promote right-opportunism will admit that prostitution cannot persist under socialism, they often make concessions, by believing in and promoting the construction of prostitute trade unions.

Being under the control of a pimp prevents a prostitute from all independent activity and independent thinking. The woman chained by the pimp cannot be organized into a trade union. A union of prostitutes who through some unknown force have ceased to be enthralled to pimps, due to the inevitable emergence of leadership and people who professionally manage such a union, will inevitably just generate its own, internal pimps. This is true because if the union bureaucracy is not completely ineffective (that is, if the union actually exists and functions), they would find themselves enforcing payment from reneging johns, securing housing in times of income shortage, bribing or negotiating with police, and sustaining their professional organizers with dues: they would in essence be pimps with a more charitable subsidiary. The use of violent reprisal and or the lack thereof is not the decisive factor in determining a pimp’s relationship to production—what is principal is the fact of reproducing prostitutes. The likelihood of successfully organizing such a union— or even making a substantial attempt at doing so—is so slim that it hardly merits mention beyond the totally hypothetical. We give it attention here only to point out the utter ridiculousness of the right-opportunist line.

In the case of prostitutes without pimps (who are not being pimped upon the point of being organized), who basically take contracts independently and have full access to their own income, these are more or less the lumpenproletarian (declassed) version of the petty bourgeoisie who own their own means of production. For them the formation of a union is impossible. After all, a “union” of those who own their own means of production (lumpen or not) is actually called a cartel. Furthermore, the existence of a cartel gives impulse to the hiring of a general staff—plus, the stratification of prostitution would allow the cartel to employ other prostitutes under its protection—this again is a return to pimping. Prostitutes who become pimps are not unheard of, and some reports show that new pimps are drawn to the trade through familial connections with prostitutes.[11]

A free market always has a trajectory that can be scientifically understood and described. A free market that sees the formation of cartels to manage the market will in turn eventually see the formation of conglomerates and monopolies. For legal and illegal trade, this inevitably leads to war. It is much more difficult for illegal businesses to establish conglomerates and monopolies due to the nature of the competition in these markets. In this case, competition is for clients (market share), for slaves (“workers”), and for other resources. The organization of competition for illegal businesses brings war faster and more often than it does for legal business. This facet restricts growth—nonetheless, these prostitution cartels would be held to the same economic laws as drug cartels and would need the same level of maintenance (the protection of the business’s interests through violence).

The existence of all sexualized business further engenders pimping, by normalizing sexual performance for money. This is made worse with the line that sex is work.

“Sex work” as a catch-all term

Rarely is the word “worker” so arbitrarily attached to any trade (or multiple trades), without any regard to class as it is with sex trades. Yet the bourgeois feminists of the “sex positivist” variety will insist that “sex worker” is a legitimate and useful category, like “service industry worker.” While it is true that sexualized professions are organized along industrial lines (including aspects of reproductive labor), prostitution, sexual entertainment, and so on do not even constitute a single industry, and this fact certainly doesn’t qualify everyone in these industries as “workers.”

Attempts to treat “sex work” as a coherent scientific category run into trouble immediately. In the case of prostitutes, a slave is not a worker, and a small business venture does not make one a worker either. A stripper is ultimately a performer. No one would assert that a professional comedian or actor is a “worker,” just as professional athletes are not “workers” and so cannot be lumped into the category of “athletic worker.” A stripper, like all performers and entertainers, has a totally different relationship to production from a worker, given the category of workers as it is understood by Marxists. Even in instances where they do not own the venue or website, these professionals still mainly own their own means of production, making them part of the petty bourgeoisie and not part of the proletariat. In the instance of those carrying out their trade in strip clubs, the stripper most often tips out the staff and pays the club a portion of her earnings. For workers, this relationship is the other way around: a hostess at a club or restaurant, like the rest of the general staff, is paid a wage by the business itself (even if she is forced to rely on tips) and thus experiences exploitation of her labor power.

Like a craftsman or small merchant who rents a booth or a stand, the “cam girl,” like the stripper, is merely paying a rent or service fee to the club or website. Furthermore, unlike workers, these people are making a brand for themselves, cultivating a clientele that follows them from outlet to outlet.

Women in pornography in some cases are coerced or trafficked and therefore have a relationship to production more like that of a pimped prostitute. In other cases, the individual has an agent and is free to take contracts, as an actress would—and no professional actress can be classified as a worker. Therefore the overwhelming majority of people engaged in pornography in the US, who occupy one of these two relationships to production, cannot be scientifically understood as workers.

It is far more apt to say that, of those whom (apologists of sexism) call “sex workers” who aren’t engaged in prostitution, the majority are small-scale sex-capitalists of the petty-bourgeois class. The term does not hold the same appeal as “sex worker” for these apologists precisely because it does not serve the purpose of sanitizing sexual exploitation, violence, and rape. While there is much discussion about rape culture, there exists a massive blind spot in its organization through the sex trades.

Sanitization of rape and sexual violence through terminology

“To describe prostitution as sex work and a prostitute as a sex worker means to give legitimacy to sexual exploitation of helpless women and children. It means ignoring the basic factors, which push women and children into prostitution such as poverty, violence and inequalities. It tries to make the profession look dignified and as a ‘job like any other job’.”

—New Vistas Publications, originally printed in People’s March, an organ of the Communist Party of India (Maoist)

The term “sex work” was coined in the 1970s by Carol Leigh, for exactly the purpose identified and criticized in the above quotation. Leigh heads an NGO called BAYSWAN (Bay Area Sex Worker Advocacy Network). A large part of the financing for this organization comes from its collaboration with law enforcement.

As with all efforts to sanitize rape and other violence against women with the term “sex work,” BAYSWAN uses the term as a catch-all to include anyone in the “adult entertainment” industries, as well as street prostitutes. Its ambiguous inclusion of “massage parlor employees” is just an obscurantist way of providing ideological legitimization to brothels, most typically attached to human trafficking and the sexual abuse of undocumented women. While BAYSWAN claims to provide social benefits and other types of help to these women, their liaison work with the police speaks the loudest to their actual class position. The police are nothing more than the strong arm of the bourgeois state. Typical of NGOs in imperialist countries, BAYSWAN serves as a managerial department delegating scraps from the master’s table to some of the most destitute. This is not undertaken in the interests of the people but in the interest of maintaining and reproducing the rule of the imperialist class at home. It is important to state that the main purpose of BAYSWAN, and other NGOs like it, is not to rehabilitate women out of prostitution but instead to normalize the abuse they face, so that their trade is seen as comparable to any normal job, and accepted like any other.

The typical liberal and postmodernist analyses of the oppression faced by prostitutes hold that its roots lie in socially imposed “stigma” rather than in the exploitive nature of capitalism—as if workers who were proud of their assembly-line jobs would be any less abused and exploited. Even proletarian jobs under capitalism that maintain some shoddy “integrity” in the social sense or at least lack “stigma” are still alienating for the worker and operate on exploitation of the workers’ labor. But again, prostitution is unlike any proletarian job, as nothing is produced or reproduced, and the “labor” itself is not socially necessary. In fact, for women as a whole and particularly for women of the proletariat, it is socially destructive.

For the Marxist, not recognizing prostitutes and entertainers as proletarians is a matter of political economy and not of any kind of outdated moralism. Marxism does not blame the victims, in this case women forced into sexual violence and exploitation due to economic hardships.

Marxists have never evaluated prostitution in moral terms but instead have insisted on examining it in political-economic terms and, as always, with a class analysis. This is why Lenin considered bourgeois women to be engaged in prostitution. Lenin also grasped the progressive aspect of those would-be defenders of prostitutes, but he drew the line at defending prostitution itself. In his conversations with Clara Zetkin in 1920, he explained how this moral impulse can turn into a backward idea:

“I have heard some peculiar things on this matter from Russian and German comrades. I must tell you. I was told that a talented woman communist in Hamburg is publishing a paper for prostitutes and that she wants to organize them for the revolutionary fight. Rosa acted and felt as a communist when in an article she championed the cause of the prostitutes who were imprisoned for any transgression of police regulations in carrying on their dreary trade. They are, unfortunately, doubly sacrificed by bourgeois society. First, by its accursed property system, and, secondly, by its accursed moral hypocrisy. That is obvious. Only he who is brutal or short-sighted can forget it. But still, that is not at all the same thing as considering prostitutes—how shall I put it?—to be a special revolutionary militant section, as organizing them and publishing a factory paper for them. Aren’t there really any other working women in Germany to organize, for whom a paper can be issued, who must be drawn into your struggles? The other is only a diseased excrescence. It reminds me of the literary fashion of painting every prostitute as a sweet Madonna. The origin of that was healthy, too: social sympathy, rebellion against the virtuous hypocrisy of the respectable bourgeois. But the healthy part became corrupted and degenerate.”

While addressing the means that bourgeois forces use to “combat” prostitution (or, in reality, to maintain it in whatever form they need it to take in a given historical circumstance), Lenin was equally critical: “What means of struggle were proposed by the elegant bourgeois delegates to the congress? Mainly two methods—religion and police. They are, it appears, the valid and reliable methods of combating prostitution.”

Lenin did not argue for the legal recognition of prostitution to combat social stigma, but for its end, through socialist revolution, which destroys the root economic causes of it. We must understand that even after socialist revolution, exploitation does not vanish overnight; it is done away with in the processes of the dictatorship of the proletariat and, critically, with cultural revolution. Marxists, while insisting that prostitution is not “sex work,” still stand firm against the hypocritical moralization of the bourgeoisie, who create and preserve the very conditions that force women into prostitution.

What is crucial to understand in the position of the great Lenin is that he simultaneously opposed the organizing of prostitutes as prostitutes for the revolution while at the same time condemning the bourgeois moralism that helps reproduce prostitution and deepens the oppression of prostitutes. After the revolution, Lenin and those who held the revolutionary line after his premature death worked tirelessly to abolish prostitution. We will get more into the experience of the socialist projects’ approaches to prostitution in later sections.

Arguments for legalization

Those most committed to the sanitization of rape and sexual violence are the most vocal advocates for the legalization of prostitution, which Marxists emphatically oppose. Legalization, far from securing “workers’ rights” in the instance of prostitution, only opens the floodgates for major investment of capital on the part of imperialists. With legalization, the pimp becomes protected by law—taking on a new form, and the prostitute legally owes and pays him a portion of her earnings. With legalization come legal recruitment and the widespread indoctrination of women and girls to prepare them for the trade.

Arguments that legal recognition protects the employee are based on bourgeois moralism and not Marxist political economy—and profound naiveté or ignorance of the actual workings of capitalism. Miners, factory workers, and fast food workers all have laws that are in place (usually hard-won through class struggle) that are supposed to protect them, yet as long as capitalism persists they are hounded, worked to death, and exploited without mercy. The legal recognition of these trades has not stopped the boss from stepping on our necks.

The idea that legal recognition will somehow limit the use of trafficked girls and women is also absurd. Pornography has been legal for decades, and the flow of black-market pornography and coerced women has not gone away. For that matter, many workers are hired illegally for all sorts of trades, hyper-exploited, and then discarded like old shoes. This would be magnified with legal prostitution. Countries with legal recognition of prostitution can and do see an increase in sex tourism;[12] people from all over the world can go exploit and dominate women in these countries, the only difference being that in these places the bourgeois State can tax it officially rather than unofficially through payoffs.

“Prostitution Is Sexual Violence,” first printed in People’s March, an organ of the Communist Party of India (Maoist), explains the global forces behind prostitution in this way:

“Firstly, the sex trade is now organized on a global basis just as any other multinational enterprise. It has become a transnational industry. It is one of the most developed and specialized industries [and] offers a wide range of services to the customers, and has most innovative market strategies to attract clients all over the world. The principal players and beneficiaries of the sex industry are cohesive and organized. The intricate web of actors involved in the sex trade today includes not just the prostitutes and the client, but an entire syndicate consisting of the pimps, the brothel owners, the police, the politicians and the local doctors. The principal actors connected to the sex trade are not confined by narrow national or territorial boundaries in the context of a globalized world. They operate both legally as well as clandestinely and it is believed that the profits … to the organizations of [the] sex-industry currently equal those flowing out of the global illegal trade in arms and narcotics. Moreover [it is] like any [of the] other multinational enterprises, such as the tourism industry, entertainment industry, travel and transportation industry, international media industry, underground narcotics and crime industry and so on.”

From this they draw the following conclusion:

“Thus the magnitude, expanse, organization, role of capital accumulation and range of market strategies employed to sell sexual services make the contemporary global sex industry qualitatively different from the old practice of prostitution and sex trade.”

Suffice it to say that genuine Marxists must insist that any legalization in the US would be the further bane of women in the nations oppressed by US imperialism. As “Prostitution is Sexual Violence” puts it,

“in fact this argument [for legalization] is being promoted to make it easy to legalize the import of prostitutes to the imperialist countries and other centers of tourism.”

They highlight the dialectical relationship between the sex trades of the imperialist and oppressed nations. We will quote the pamphlet at length:

“As Engels succinctly put it, it is ‘the absolute domination of the male over the female sex as the fundamental law of society.’ She is a victim of patriarchal oppression within the profession. Once a woman enters the trade, there is no way out. She is completely at the mercy of the sex-starved customer, the pimp and the police. Physical assaults and rapes are a daily occurrence. More than half of the prostituted women in the Third World countries had contracted HIV/AIDs. A 1985 Canadian report on the sex industry reported that the women in prostitution in that country suffer [a] mortality rate 40 times the national average. It could be even worse in countries like India. All this proves that the argument that once prostitution is legalized it can be more effectively regulated[,] making it safe for all those involved, that the spread of HIV can be slowed, that sex workers can have access to health and so on, are sheer fraud. The fact is that all forms of sexual commodification, whether legalized or not, lead to an increase in the level of abusive and exploitative activity.

The interest of the State in permitting legalization is not the prostitute and her rights but to check the spread of sexually transmitted deceases. It involves heavy regulation of prostitution through a whole host of zoning and licensing laws. Zoning segregates the prostitutes into a separate locality and their civil liberties are restricted outside the specified zone. Licensing means issue of licenses, registration and the disbursement of health cards to the women. Legalization makes it mandatory for the women to undergo medical check-ups regularly or face imprisonment.

Legalizing prostitution is legalizing violence.”

We must look beyond the ideological sanitizers of sexual violence, who speak loudly from academic, activist, and “harm reduction” circles and look closer at the actual economic forces behind these advocates. It is the commercial sex industry that stands to benefit the most from legalized prostitution, and so they are its biggest backers. Legalization is just a moral shield to protect and secure greater profits from the continued sexual abuse of women. With legalization, small brothels can become big chains, and whole corporations can be built up; those involved legally and illegally in the sex industry who possess the most capital are in the best position to reap the profits. The same issue exists with the legalization of the recreational use of marijuana: the small-time grower/dealer gets swallowed up by the white corporate elite, while oppressed-nations people remain incarcerated for their role in the trade. Legalization, in the final instance, benefits only the ruling class.

The Indian Maoists address the question of legalization succinctly:

“Legalization of prostitution is not a solution because legalization implies men’s self-evident right to be customers. Accepting services offered through a normal job is neither violent nor abusive. Legalizing it as a normal occupation would be an acceptance of the division of labor, which men have created, a division, where women’s real occupational choices are far narrower than men’s. Legalization will not remove the harmful effects suffered by the women. Women will still be forced to protect themselves against a massive invasion of strange men, as well as the physical violence.

Legalization means [the imposition] of regulation by the State to ensure the continuation and perpetuation of prostitution. It implies that they have to pay taxes, i.e., the prostitute needs to serve more customers to get the money needed. Legalization means that more men will become customers, and more women are needed as prostitutes, and more women, especially women in poverty, will be forced into prostitution. Legalizing prostitution will only increase the chances of exploitation. The experiences of the countries where prostitution was legalized also show how this [has] given [a] big boost to the trade and [has] increased sexual abuse. For instance, in Australia and in some states in the US where legalization was implemented, it was found that there was an alarming increase in the number of illegal brothels too along with an increase in the legal trade.”

Prostitution, through allowing the purchase of access to women’s bodies, harms all women, and not just those in the trade—legalization, far from being harm reduction, just increases social harm for all women. Recruitment is one of the cornerstones of pimping. With legalization, the horrors of recruitment and the pressure to be recruited take on dystopian proportions.

American exceptionalism: The legacies of revisionism and settler-colonialism

The women’s struggle was going strong in the Communist Party of the USA—up until Earl Browder became general secretary of the Party and began implementing his arch-revisionist line. The revisionist ideology that overtook the CPUSA—Browderism and then William Z. Foster’s continuation of it—was like a prototype of the revisionism that would take hold in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Even though the latter would completely consume the former, the former was in many ways its forerunner. Foster, like Brezhnev, would come out against his predecessor—and just as it was with Brezhnev’s condemnations, this was only superficial politicking that still carried forward, and in fact fortified, the revisionist position. This revisionism brought deep harm to the women’s movement, with a lasting stain on the US left today that extends far beyond the husk that calls itself the CPUSA.

Browderism successfully liquidated not only the program of the Party but the Party itself in 1944. It comes as no shock that Browder’s wife led the liquidation of the women’s struggle against antirevisionist women in the Party like Mary Inman. Inman wrote a great deal on the question of prostitution, devoting three chapters to it in her book In Woman’s Defense. To understand the question of prostitution today, it is important to grasp the reverberating effects of Browderism. Rightist lines that seek to either sanitize prostitution by dressing it up as “sex work” or misconstrue prostitutes as a revolutionary subject all result in part from a faith in American exceptionalism—first, in that they all seek to establish a reformist, class-collaborationist approach to prostitution; and second and more importantly, because they divorce the phenomenon from imperialism. It is important to remember that the bourgeois definition of “work” is anything you do for money. In this way they can frame owners and bosses as workers alongside those they exploit, since any job (legal or illegal) can therefore be misconstrued as work.

Many of these rightists (who are abundant in progressive struggles as well as in every revisionist organization) will concede that sex-based tourism in the Third World and human trafficking are, in principle at least, something to be opposed. They take no major issue with the writings on the subject from the Maoists in India, including the text “Prostitution Is Sexual Violence.” But when it comes to applying these universal principles at home in their imperialist country, they stir up the ghost of American exceptionalism. For reasons they cannot explain without their belief in this exceptionalism. They impose an artificial disconnect: here in the First World (not just in the US but clearly in Canada also, with the opportunists in the fake PCR-RCP), prostitutes are now workers, and furthermore an important part of the proletariat!—and to hell with actually studying nearly 200 years of Communist agitation and propaganda on the matter! They charge those who do assert the correct historical position with being outdated dogmatists. To oppose prostitution from the Marxist position, just as Marxists have always opposed it, earns one a volley of buzzwords and condemnation as a SWERF (that is, “sex worker exclusionary radical feminist”)—even while (a) “sex work” is a made-up term that runs counter to Marxist political economy and (b) Marxists explicitly reject radical feminism on a fundamental level. Without any economic analysis, the American exceptionalists have made defending prostitution a prerequisite for being a leftist, not only defending it from a moral standpoint but even going so far as to frame degradation and abuse as empowering. Revisionism still plays its part in turning a thing into its opposite.

Mary Inman described the continuum of revisionism aptly:

“Furthermore, wrecking on the Woman Question has not only continued since the ousting of Browder, but has even been accelerated under the leadership of Dennis (ably abetted by Foster, who warned against an ‘over correction of errors’ at a time when nothing had been done to stop their liquidatory practices affecting Communist work amongst women).” (13 Years of CPUSA Misleadership on the Woman Question)

The liquidation of Communist work among women today is assisted tremendously by postmodernism, which has practically been established as “common sense” for the left and occupies a near-hegemonic position in mainstream US activist movements. And of course, postmodernist cretins agree with Browder that the class struggle itself is mitigated in a country like the US, where “free women” can “freely choose” prostitution and it is backward to pass critical judgment on the trade of women.

Inman referred to this thinking as the “culture of prostitution”:

“Prostitution has been laid at women’s door, and it is said that she enters the practice from choice because it suits her nature, and is one of the attributes of Eve. Nor is this all. Prostitution has created its own degenerate philosophy, which has penetrated into circles not directly affected by it.” (In Woman’s Defense)

The contemporary apologists still maintain that prostitution is a choice, by insisting they are workers like any other who are free to choose a career (within the confines of their class and circumstance). Even though they do not resort to Scripture to justify their views, the same metaphysics finds traction.

Inman contributes valuable criticism of bourgeois culture’s portrayal of prostitutes in films as free-spirited travelers who select their own johns. Writing in the 1930s and 40s, Inman portrays this superstructural device, which has remained in currency since the time of her writing:

“Persons who acquired their opinions about prostitution from such as Mae West pictures, wherein the talented star portrayed the woman of questionable character who went freely about the country having adventures, knowing romance, wearing swell clothes and dominating the situation in which she found herself, selecting carefully her lovers and avoiding those men who did not appeal to her esthetic tastes, in fact roving, wise-cracking, free-lance, exploited by no one, will have the wrong picture of the real lives of such women.” (In Woman’s Defense)

We can cite obvious examples like the film Pretty Woman, but the message is driven home in the more up-to-date postmodern approaches in films and television shows, where the term “sex worker” has fully replaced the term “prostitute,” and “prostitute” is now viewed as nothing more than a sexist slur. The culture of prostitution still exists, finding its niche in the phony progressivism of postmodernism, which tirelessly seeks to pass off a fanciful illusion as the truth.

On the website Mel Magazine we find articles like “The Most Realistic Sex-Worker Portrayals in Pop Culture, According to Sex Workers.” In this article we find such gems as the following: “The Deuce is a sweaty buffet of debauchery calling back to the kind of heroin-soaked freedom Janis Joplin sang about.” Only the most profoundly deluded petty-bourgeois dilettante would conflate heroin with freedom, as it exists mainly as a weapon to keep the lower classes enchained, robbing them of even the most basic freedoms.

The author continues, “The protagonist is Candy, a clever veteran escort played by the excellent, but oddly cast Maggie Gyllenhaal, who walks the tracks, pimp-free. Unfazed and visibly bored, Candy works alone while her cohorts — mostly large and lovely black women — get smacked around by their white regulars and bullied by their pimps. She says to one fast-talking hopeful, ‘No one makes money off this pussy but me.’ Candy’s optimism in this regard is admirable but naïve (capitalism, for instance); still, she has more agency than most of the show’s other characters.”

The tokenization and abuse of Black women is merely unpleasant background noise for the free-spirited “Candy,” whom the author finds immediately relatable. No mention is made of the fact this devil-may-care character rises throughout the series to become a well-paid pornographer and exploiter of other women. The only real criticism of the show put forward by the article is on the basis of crude identity politics—they complain that the show was written by men and not co-written by “sex workers.” This is the best they can come up with when parroting the culture of prostitution today.

For the petty-bourgeois dilettante, “sex workers” are often imagined as struggling heroines, usually white women who choose prostitution as a clever way of bucking the system, and thus they view it as a rebellious act against capitalism itself. They are far removed from the mass tragedy and genocide that the women of the Third World face. Nor can they fathom the anguish of the people of the internal colonies in the US, where prostitution is the most prevalent.

The “sex worker” image constructed by bourgeois intellectuals has a special allure for the petty bourgeoisie: it evokes the myth of class ascension (like that of the fictional Candy mentioned above). With this myth we find a girl—most likely from a troubled background—who grinds her way toward becoming a small business proprietor. Maybe she becomes a pornographer producing the films after starring in them. For the identity politics crowd, this is thrilling because now exploited women are the ones exploiting women. They are not at all concerned that exploitation remains intact and has now simply found a better way to apologize for itself. This rags-to-riches story so often told is a powerful device in the service of ruling-class management of class relationships under capitalism. After all, their argument goes, this is just the unchained agency of free modern women.

In the following passage, Inman might as well be writing in the present day on the question of those who argue for the existence of agency in prostitution by rebranding it “sex work”:

“There is a noticeable tendency in much of the literature on prostitution to confuse a wanted sex act with prostitution, and efforts are made to show by indirection, or otherwise, that they are either the same or that the former leads into the later.” (In Woman’s Defense)

Of course, she also recognized that the phenomenon is not exclusive to women from the working class:

“The scope of prostitution is wider than the working-class women, for by no means are all the daughters of the middle-class families secure, nor, for that matter, are daughters from professional and upper-class families where fortunes were affected by economic breakdown.” (In Woman’s Defense)

Anyone “freely choosing” “sex work” without the pressure of economic conditions is not experiencing the reality of the declassed women Inman is writing about, or of the majority of women trapped in prostitution in the US for that matter.

Browderism did not limit its assaults only to the women’s struggle. It also directed attacks against the national liberation struggles of the internal colonies, and a major casualty of this time was the Communist work among the Black Nation. The work among the Black Nation was more or less eroded by the Popular Front period of the Communist International, and it was none other than Popular Frontism that gave powerful impulse to the rightists in the Party, led by Browder and then Foster.

The national question has all but gone from the program of the CPUSA and only a few of the revisionist relics of the New Communist Movement still uphold it even superficially. And even given their acknowledgment of the necessity of this work, no meaningful struggles are led to conquer the power of self-determination for the internal colonies. And it is perfectly natural for these types who insist on delinking prostitution from colonialism to be seduced into the quagmire of prostitution apologia. No honest study of colonialism can go without mentioning the settlers breaking the colonized into prostitution, through direct violent coercion as well as the violence of economic coercion, both equal in their atrocity.

Even cursory examinations of the real conditions faced by indigenous people in the US and people in the internal colonies—even studies carried out by bourgeois researchers—can highlight the way settler-colonialism manifests in prostitution, as the following passage reveals:

“Many AI/AN [American Indian and Alaskan Native] people live in adverse social and physical environments that place them at high risk of exposure to traumatic events with rates of violent victimization more than twice the national average. High rates of poverty, homelessness, and chronic health problems in AI/AN communities create vulnerability to prostitution and trafficking among AI/AN women by increasing economic stress and decreasing the ability to resist predators. AI/AN women are subject to high rates of childhood sexual assaults, domestic violence, and rape both on and off reservations. The vast majority of prostituted women were sexually assaulted as children, usually by multiple perpetrators, and were revictimized as adults in prostitution as they experienced being hunted, dominated, harassed, pimped, assaulted, battered, and sometimes murdered by sex buyers, pimps, and traffickers.” (Farley, Deer, Golding, et al., Prostitution and Trafficking of American/Indian Alaska Native Women in Minnesota; citations removed from quotation for brevity)

The argument that prostitution is a free choice, combined with the disproportionately high representation of Black and native women in prostitution, is nothing short of the thinly veiled racism of the petty bourgeoisie.

It is as absurd and cruel to divorce these facts from the US settler-colonial project as it would be to pretend that South African apartheid had nothing to do with prostitution in that country, as elaborated on here:

“Indigenous South African women are at great risk for all of the factors that increase vulnerability to prostitution: family and community violence including an epidemic of sexual violence, life-threatening poverty, lack of educational and job opportunities, lack of health services throughout their lifetimes, and lack of culturally appropriate social services that would help them escape prostitution. When alternatives to prostitution are not available—although it can appear to be a choice—prostitution is coerced by social harms such as child abuse, racism, sexism, and poverty. All of these forms of violence against women, including prostitution, are related.” (Madlala-Routledge, Farley, Barengayabo, et al., “‘I feel like I’m still living under apartheid’: Racialized Sexual Exploitation of 100 Women in South African Prostitution”)

While bourgeois feminist researchers can come up with no actual method of abolishing prostitution, they can be useful insofar as their data can be verified. Socialism, meanwhile, has direct means of both fighting and abolishing prostitution successfully.

According to Lenin, “no amount of ‘moral indignation’ (hypocritical in 99 cases out of 100) about prostitution can do anything against this trade in female flesh; so long as wage-slavery exists, inevitably prostitution too will exist. All the oppressed and exploited classes throughout the history of human societies have always been forced (and it is in this that their exploitation consists) to give up to their oppressors, first, their unpaid labor and, second, their women as concubines for the ‘masters.’”

The great socialist projects’ approaches to combating and abolishing prostitution

“We are now approaching a social revolution in which the economic foundations of monogamy as they have existed hitherto will disappear just as surely as those of its complement—prostitution.”

—Engels, Origin of the Family

“Not only have the people in the Soviet Union abolished prostitution, but wherever the people have become the dominant economic power, even in part of the country, they have abolished prostitution, for example in the districts in China controlled by the people’s movements.”

—Mary Inman, In Woman’s Defense

Engels was speaking of a hypothetical socialist revolution, but one that would inevitably take place based on a concrete analysis of concrete conditions. This social revolution would erupt in Russia in 1917 and have world-changing consequence:

“The workers’ revolution in Russia has shattered the basis of capitalism and has struck a blow at the former dependence of women upon men. All citizens are equal before the work collective. They are equally obliged to work for the common good and are equally eligible to the support of the collective when they need it. A woman provides for herself not by marriage but by the part she plays in production and the contribution she makes to the people’s wealth.” (Kollontai, “Prostitution and Ways of Fighting It”)

Kollontai—understanding that society maintained much of its old superstructure post-revolution as well as widespread conditions of economic hardship, low productive capacity, and other difficulties resulting from the still-developing economic base—firmly grasped that the revolution, while having abolished the main causes of these things (private property, etc.) still had much to do in the struggle against prostitution that persisted in these conditions.

She took up the charge to lead the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in this effort:

“Some people might say that since prostitution will have no place once the power of the workers and the basis of communism are strengthened, no special campaign is necessary. This type of argument fails to take into account the harmful and disuniting effect that prostitution has on the construction of a new communist society.”

The above quotation should be particularly salient for Maoists who grasp that revolution must continue under the dictatorship of the proletariat to align society with the new socialist base.

She further insisted that the prostitution that persisted under the proletarian dictatorship posed a great risk to social unity, to class unity, and to the economic construction of the Soviet Union. Her position was that prostitution was a private enterprise running counter to the workers’ republic and hence had to be abolished.

And great changes had indeed begun to take place in the workers’ republic, revolutionizing both the base and the superstructure. Merchants of any sort were now considered speculators, and all citizens were to be involved in productive labor. Kollontai writes,

“We do not, therefore, condemn prostitution and fight against it as a special category but as an aspect of labor desertion. To us in the workers’ republic it is not important whether a woman sells herself to one man or to many, whether she is classed as a professional prostitute selling her favors to a succession of clients or as a wife selling herself to her husband. All women who avoid work and do not take part in production or in caring for children are liable, on the same basis as prostitutes, to be forced to work.”

In the period of tsarist Russia, just prior to the revolution, prostitution was regulated but not illegal. There was punishment for procuring and pimping but not for prostitution. The revolution stepped in to shake the world and change everything. This included the lives of women in prostitution, who were now to be provided productive jobs.

Given that the conditions which give rise to prostitution were being combated, and that former prostitutes were undergoing political education and engaged in labor, prostitution could not remain the force that it had been in tsarist Russia. Women were mobilized in Soviet society, and prostitution did not come back in force until capitalist restoration post-Khrushchev.

China, having the oldest brothels in the world, surpassing even those of the Netherlands, had much to accomplish after Liberation in 1949, approaches developed in the liberated areas, where prostitution had been abolished must now be applied country wide. Pre-revolutionary China, like tsarist Russia, had only regulated prostitution rather than legally banning it. In pre-revolutionary China there were “licensed prostitutes,” who were some of the worst victims of social oppression. These were called “mist and flower maidens.” After the victory of the revolution, these women were provided lodging and education in socialist reformatories. Most crucially, these women were liberated and taught the differences between the old and new societies.

One of the first acts of the socialist State in the People’s Republic of China was the abolition of old marriage laws that treated women as the property of their husbands. The overthrow of these laws benefited the former prostitutes, many of whom were women and children sold into lives of sexual slavery by husbands or fathers trying to avoid starvation. The liberation of China from the yoke of imperialist and colonial domination reverberated through all of Chinese society (and in fact throughout the whole world), with Mao’s great declaration that “women hold up half the sky” signaling a new age where women would come to carry out half of production.

The women’s movement found its continuation and further flourished in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, when Jiang Qing helped to lead an assault on the old culture, which at best portrayed women as little more than accomplices to male revolutionaries—and at worst as property. Notably, this can be seen in the remake of the Chinese classic “The Bride with White Hair,” wherein the heroine, instead of relying on a male soldier as in the original, sees to her own liberation. And the old society’s conceptions of prostitution came under similar attack.

With the persecution of Comrade Jiang and her three comrades, who represented the Communist line against the reactionary line of Deng Xiaoping and his clique, came an assault on the women’s movement of an even greater magnitude than the one that occurred in the US.

Among many other comparable measures, Deng removed women from such jobs as factory worker and train driver and threw them into office administrator positions.[13] Gendered labor that had been combated during the Cultural Revolution found its full expression in the Deng years.[14] Sex-based advertising and prostitution made a big comeback.[15] Female stereotyping made a return even in children’s books, training a new generation for the restored capitalist mode of production.[16] The Japanese film Yearning for Home that depicted prostitutes was aired on state TV and defended by the Dengite-run Beijing Review against critics who insisted that the film harmed young women and ran counter to the revolution. The old operas that had been banned—ones like “The Drunken Beauty,” about an emperor and his concubines—were performed at the Peking Opera. Pornography and prostitution were restored with capitalism.

Of course, the existing People’s Wars in Peru, Turkey, India, and the Philippines provide living examples of how to regard prostitution, how to end it in Communist-controlled base areas, and how to organize women out of the trade and into the People’s Army. Unlike bourgeois or imperialist armies, People’s Armies have no need for prostitution in “boosting the morale” of male troops, and so bands of prostitutes do not follow the soldiers. People’s soldiers are upstanding and fortified against such low behavior.

Before becoming a full-blown revisionist, Parvati described the effect of People’s War on the women peasants of Nepal:

“People’s War has given a revolutionary alternative life to young aspiring men and women. Women’s lives, particularly in rural areas, are so monotonous, set in a repeated pattern of reproductive activities. [With] marriage being arranged at much younger age[s], they have no way of escaping from this beaten track life cycle. For aspiring women to venture out of village means almost getting trapped into prostitution or being trafficked to India (it is estimated that about 150,000 women from Nepal are trafficked to urban centers of India!) or are trapped to [low-paying] sweat shops where sexual harassment is rampant. Thus for such aspiring women, the People’s War offers them [a] challenging opportunity to work side by side with men on equal term[s] and to prove their worth mentally and physically.” (“Women’s Participation in People’s War in Nepal”)

Conclusion

Many apologists for prostitution refuse to hear analysis on the question from anyone who is not “a sex worker.” Others still will claim that they are or have been “sex workers” themselves, and are therefore beyond the need for an objective class analysis. Few have actually studied the economic forces behind prostitution, getting deeper into what is actually being bought and sold, who owns the business, what class forces are in contradiction, and so on. Many still refuse to explore prostitution as an economic phenomenon—one occurring in a world in the thrall of imperialism at that. They have (likely before even reading this article) come to the conclusion that the only possible criticisms of prostitution are moral ones, ones that intend to stigmatize the prostitute for daring to defy the chastity sometimes imposed on women. Like the bourgeois religious hypocrite, they cannot fathom prostitution beyond moral objection—morality is the only framework they can find.

As discussed above, Marxists, unlike any of the above-mentioned camps, do not view prostitution (or almost anything else) in terms of morality, but in terms of class struggle—this means we criticize on the basis of an economic analysis. It is, after all, economic conditions that provide impulse to the trade in the first place. Moral objection does not rate here.

There are those who will say they are Marxists, but that they are “not dogmatists”—thereby justifying their clean break with 200 years of analysis on the matter. They may not be dogmatic Marxists, but they are dogmatists nonetheless: dogmatists of postmodernism, of identity politics, of third-wave feminism, and other degenerate bourgeois ideology. They do not so much object to the conclusions of Marxism (at least not most of the time), and they may even have a strong dislike of capitalism. What they oppose is the Marxist method—the same method that is universal and ever-improving, which has led comrades throughout history to develop clear lines on the matter of prostitution. This method and framework for analysis has been sharpened through discovery and mainly through violent class struggle. It has made new discoveries (a scientific analysis of modern imperialism, an understanding of the necessity and forms of proletarian dictatorship, cultural revolution, etc.) along the way. None of the apologists of prostitution can offer a single development, discovery, or condition that fundamentally alters the historic Marxist analysis of prostitution.

Marxists have never understood prostitution as simply the plight of “fallen women” who were just “raised wrong” in slums or other harmful conditions. Marxism has never sought to blame women for the conditions that force them into prostitution. Yet accusing all critics of prostitution of this thinking is the knee-jerk reaction of the apologist. This is the only response they can imagine from those who do not see the trade as “empowering” or “a job like any other.” No job, legal or illegal in the capitalist system, is empowering; all jobs without exception are alienating.

So how do the sanitizers of anti-woman violence come to their distorted views? Well, when an adventurous and impulsive petty-bourgeois dilettante, like one of Mae West’s characters, willingly chooses “sex work” (as a growing number of petty-bourgeois people are claiming) and finds the “stigma” to be the only uncomfortable part, all while never experiencing the raw and inhuman degradation that is imposed on most women in these trades—her goal can only be to sanitize the whole thing. In their attempts to be seen as better than the majority, they work to rebrand any trade that has to do with sex or that has been sexualized—now framing entertainers and performers and even enslaved women as “workers,” now not only defending prostitution as a trade but even preaching its virtue to anyone they can guilt into listening. Some of them will even insist against all reason that these trades must be allowed to continue under the socialist system. But, of course, a socialist society cannot “legalize” or “nationalize” prostitution without the state becoming a pimp. These women who claim that “sex work” empowers them, at the same time, are acknowledging that regular working-class jobs are disempowering. This speaks volumes about their class stand and ambitions, and their detestation of the working class. They would rather be sexually exploited than engage in production alongside the proletariat—these can only be considered sham Marxists, and likened to compradors among women. For these it is not economic poverty or low social status or colonialism that drives them to the trade—it is the mere threat, faced by all petty bourgeoisie, of forced integration into the proletariat. They are in solidarity with the rest of their class in labor desertion.

Feminism emerged with dual aspects of progress and reaction. It has existed with these contradictions ever since and has principally become a tool of the bourgeoisie, in a buffet of bourgeois feminisms. The worst of these take facets of women’s oppression and simply re-dress them as their opposites, women’s empowerment. Now the most degrading trades imposed upon women are the most championed. The petty-bourgeois sex adventurist will brag about making more than the stupid women at work in maid service, food service, transportation, and factory work. She will say that she is smarter and has managed to get out of the rat race. She identifies her trade as labor desertion, and she is correct. But she is incorrect that this somehow makes her choice the correct one while the women of the proletariat are just sheep. It is one thing to have an incorrect idea—it is another to spread it like gospel.

The petty-bourgeois sex-capitalist has nothing in common with working women. She lives a life of bourgeois decadence and is a commercial for misogyny. She insists that it is a good and normal thing for women to be able to be rented. She gives men a fair price, so as to reproduce the idea within themselves and among men broadly, that women are a commodity. All the women who struggle against this collectively form a sort of picket line, and the petty-bourgeois sex-capitalist gleefully crosses it. She is uninhibited.

For the Communist in the women’s struggle, the line is perfectly clear: we must serve the people. Inman writes,

“The struggle against prostitution is the struggle against the capitalist class. Since prostitution has an economic basis and the woman enters it because of economic insecurity, one form of the struggle must be economic: demands for a living wage for all women who work.

And for those denied a role in industry or social production, either directly or indirectly in legitimate service, demands must be raised that they be given compensation. Social production in general must be made to bear the responsibility of their support until such a time as they can be given a part in such work.

But an effective struggle against prostitution must also attack and expose the whole cynical, decadent moral structure that supports sex-subjugation, and the role of sex vigilantes who then dog the footsteps of subject women.” (Inman, In Woman’s Defense)

Thus our aim is not to stigmatize the women forced into prostitution but to justify their liberation from slavery with a Marxist class analysis.

Article by Kavga

Notes

Sarah Handley-Cousins, “Prostitutes!” National Museum of Civil War Medicine website.

Melissa Gira Grant, “When Prostitution Wasn’t a Crime,” AlterNet.

rights4girls.org, “Racial & Gender Disparities in the Sex Trade.”

Devon D. Brewer, John J. Potterat, and Stephen Q. Muth, “Clients of Prostitute Women.”

Matthias Gafni, “Oakland Police Scandal: How Often Are Cops Having Sex with Prostitutes?” Mercury News (Bay Area).

Jo-Anne Madeleine Stoltz, Kate Shannon, Thomas Kerr, et al., “Associations between Childhood Maltreatment and Sex Work in a Cohort of Drug-Using Youth,” Social Science & Medicine 65, no. 6, 1214–21.

Janie Har, “Is the Average Age of Entry into Sex Trafficking between 12 and 14 Years Old?” PolitiFact; Emi Koyama, “The Average Age of Entry into Prostitution Is NOT 13,” eminism.com.

Howard N. Snyder, “Arrest in the United States, 1990-2010,” U.S. Dept. of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Erin Fuchs, “Atlanta’s Underground Sex Trade Is Booming,” Business Insider.

Melissa Farley, “Risks of Prostitution,” Journal of the Association for Consumer Research 3, no. 1, 97–108.

Meredith Dank, Bilal Khan, P. Mitchell Downey, et al. “Estimating the Size and Structure of the Underground Commercial Sex Economy in Eight Major US Cities,” Urban Institute.

Barbara Kavemann, “Findings of a Study on the Impact of the German Prostitution Act,” Social Science Women’s Research Institute at the Protestant University of Applied Sciences Freiburg.

Hong Guo, “The Impacts of Economic Reform on Women in China,” MA thesis, University of Regina, 1997.

New Vistas Publications, Women in the Chinese Revolution (1921–1950).

Elaine Jeffreys, China, Sex and Prostitution.

New Vistas Publications, Women in the Chinese Revolution.

[alatismeni-theitsa]

Do you have any sort of, words of encouragement, for a Greek-American who is struggling to learn Greek? My family is pretty connected to our heritage but I was never taught to speak Greek. I am an adult now, and I know I'm at an incredible disadvantage trying to learn a new language. The most discouraging thing is when I try to pronounce a word with a sound that isn't really in English (like γ) and I KNOW I am not saying it right, but no matter how hard I try I can't pronounce it correctly.

Hello! I'm very sorry for delaying this answer for some days, but as we see here, Zeus was fucked this week 😅

I will pin my answer so you can see it when you return, and the rest will be under the cut.

I believe there are MANY reasons for hope in this situation. Of course it feels very discouraging that you don't know the language already and you might feel left behind in this process. Plus, learning a new language is not an easy thing to learn. But worry not!

You are grown, and that means you can learn a language better and with more consistency and discipline. Have trust in your skills as an adult. What is more, you have grown up around Greek speakers and you will pick up certain things faster.

You are not alone in feeling this way. Most of the world has to learn a second language (and a third, as it's usual for many) and that would be the language most dominant in the wider area. Almost every person in the West who is not an English speaker has to learn English and learn it well, otherwise we feel embarrassed every time we try and form a sentence. For example, we apologize to each other about our accents in English German and French, even though we speak Greek.

Surely there are some differences between your situation and ours, but I mentioned this to show you that most people will be very understanding with accents because they have the same struggle. I mean, I'm not going to make fun of someone for having an accent in Greek when I sound like a demented chicken in German, despite taking years of lessons 😵 I have more confidence in my English but even now that I'm writing to you in this language I have to quadruple-check my sentences and phrasing. The amount of times I apologized in advance for my accent to English speakers is higher than my credit.

I relayed your situation to other Greek speakers and non-English speakers, and ALL agreed the accent is not anything they would pay attention to and told me to write you that you shouldn't feel bad about that. I did that because I knew they would have words of encouragement for you. And it turns out they believe exactly what I'm writing in this answer.

Accents are natural. You cannot expect not to have an accent when you have been speaking a different language all your life. Beating yourself up for having difficulty with the Greek pronunciation is like beating yourself up for something normal like walking or laughing when hearing something funny. You lack practice with the pronunciation due to circumstances beyond your control. You are doing what you can to change that, and every small win is worth celebrating!

I found this post the other day:

The notes? The likes?

And NO disagreements in the comments and reblogs for OP’s statement! Look how many thousands are supportive in this! (And that’s a small fraction of people who understand accents are natural.) And some of the responses:

Sure, some mention they have met native speakers who made it more difficult to feel comfortable with their accent and phrasing. But those people are assholes in general, and not the people you want to surround yourself with. If a relative expresses disgust about your accent remind them you didn’t have any control of how much and how well you were taught Greek when you were a kid, and then tell them that if they are a true friend and relative to you, they should support you in your journey. And even if you had some control and chose not to learn, you are learning now. So they should leave their resentment behind because, honestly, what do they have to lose from you learning the language better??

For the embarrassment you feel for yourself: you wouldn't make fun of a Greek for having trouble with the “r”, "s", “ch”, and possibly the "h" when speaking English, so extend that kindness to yourself when you speak Greek. Not to mention that with enough practice and time you can nail the accent!

Worst case scenario, if the accent never leaves, that's no problem whatsoever. Anyone who thinks badly of you for your accent is probably a PoS and they don't deserve your time. No matter where you are from, if they make you feel bad for having an accent in Greek, block them from your mind forever.

But chances are that (from experience) if anyone laughs with how you said something, I guarantee they are not laughing at you but because of how strange the sound or phrasing was. The person doesn't think badly of you because of this. Making mistakes of any kind when learning a language is very natural and it's something everyone must accept. If you are not willing to make mistakes and expose your language vulnerabilities to people who know the language better, might as well not try improving at all.

If anyone corrects you, they are not doing it out of pity. The majority of Greeks do it because they are very happy you speak the language and want you to be even more fluent. Like, they are doing it as an act of backing you up, they are feeling like they are giving you that extra XP to reach the next level! Others - like me - get that rush of happiness when they get to share their language with others 😁

I remember a guy on Tiktok who was learning Greek and ordered a coffee "without sugar" in a Greek cafe but instead of saying σκέτο ("without") he said σκατά ("shit"). I mean damn that was funny! I remember it weeks after I saw the video of him telling that story and it always cracks me up. Do I still appreciate him the same as before and follow him? Absolutely! He just had an unfortunate - and funny - incident, not something that lessened his integrity as a person.

From tiktok again: An American girl wanted to pronounce γύρος correctly when ordering it, and she was mumbling to herself on camera: “yeero, yeero, yeero!!” When her time to order came she shouted “May I have a gairow? FUUUUCKK FUUCK FUCK I SAID IT WRONG” 🤣

Another example is Athena from the Bachelor 2! She has given some gems throughout the show because she doesn't know the language that well, but everyone still loves her because she spreads positivity and is so cute!! If we, as viewers, disliked her it would be because of her character, not because she doesn't know the language well. And if some of the other girls in the show don’t take her seriously is because she laughs too much and mentions feta too often, not due to her Greek level of literacy. Athena, even when she is hurting someone else’s feelings, is always so genuine and you just can’t be mad at her!

I really can’t stretch enough how people laugh at the mishap, not the person! Please don’t feel discouraged if you ever see a Greek laughing with the pronunciation of an English speaker when it comes to Greek words (which I have done as well) because we never laugh at the speakers. We don’t even know them! We might laugh at one mistake but then instantly want to become this individual’s friends because we think they are amazing (see the three examples I mentioned above, the sugar guy, the gyro girl and Athena). Because that’s the normal thing to do; laugh at fun stuff and not judge people for their small mishaps. (In a casual setting, and not to an uncomfortable degree ofc!)

There are so many things to a person other than their accent and the accent becomes old news really fast. What remains is how the presence of a person makes you feel and if they are a good individual. If an English speaking friend says yatakai instead of γατάκι that opens the way for sooo many jokes! Greeks will laugh, do some YATAKAAIIII screams - ninja style, and then continue being friends with that person!

Greeks makes these mistakes as well... A Greek once said "arrive arrive" (φτάνει φτάνει) instead of "enough" when an English speaker was filling his glass. A Lower English degree caught fire that day 🤣 I have many bad examples of Greeks’ mistakes in English but I can’t remember a lot. But I’ve seen many videos of Greeks mocking themselves for how they sound in English. You can take a look at Tsipras’ (our former prime minister) mistakes on youtube if you are feeling brave 😂 (Ο Τσίπρας μιλάει Αγγλικά)

So, own your possible mistakes, laugh at them and move on because everyone makes them and we better have some good while we are struggling!

(( For the record, we are not making fun of Tsipras because of his accent, but because 1) he doesn’t know γρι English and yet he rarely brought a translator with him in international meetings with world leaders, 2) he could absolutely not hold a conversation with negotiating or discussing 3) he didn’t take steps to improve or fix the situation (like bring a translator). 4) Instead, he chose to torment us all with mind-numbing hours of reading English texts and making other world leaders struggle to explain to him what they meant for the nth time and meetings move at a snail pace.))

Alright, now that I cringed with the memory of Tsipras speaking English, I’ll go though the recommendations for improving the Greek pronunciation.

1) Go to my resources for learning Greek (#learn greek) where I have many videos where you can hear the sounds individually or withing other words very clearly. Easy Greek on youtube has excellent videos about pronunciation!

2) Seek practice as much as possible. Some Greeks switch to English when they hear an English accent to make the conversation smoother for the other person. If Greek speakers insist on talking with you in English tell them that you would wish to speak in Greek. I've seen that people often mirror the accent of the native speaker when they speak to one, so this might work for you as well with hours of practice. If no Greek speakers are available to you now, you can find Greek Americans online – or go to their festivals – and start talking to them.

3) Listen to Greek podcasts, songs and shows. (In my blog you’ll find them at #greek youtuber #podcast #greek tv #greek movie #short film #greek music). You know when you hear a catchy foreign song and then it’s stuck in your head and you say all the words perfectly without even knowing what it means? Well, this helps with pronunciation!

4) If you had Spanish in school or have Spanish friends mimicking the Spanish accent might help you. (Our accents are extremely close! The Spanish are the best at Greek pronunciation, and vice versa!)

5) Find sounds in your native language that sound close to the sounds you want to say in Greek. In German lessons I had trouble with “ch” in certain words because I made it sound like χ and it was horrible. My Greek teacher told me to remember how χ sounds in χήνα (it sounds a bit flatter) and make that sound when I encountered “ch”. It worked actually!

To people who have English as their native language I often suggest they remember the sound of w for γ because, although not used the same in the word, at times they have the same intensity. Γ is pronounced more “to the front” of the mouth, so if you can bring that sound forward in your mouth you’ll be very close, if not accurate, to γ. (But don’t bring it too much forward, sometimes it can sound like a “y”, unless you are saying a word where γ sounds like “y”).

Greeks pronounce σ more closely to “sh” than to “s”, so you also might want to keep that in mind since σ often distinguishes the Greek accent in English for me :p

That’s all! If you have more questions or want to tell me anything else about your experience with learning Greek, feel free to send another ask or a DM!