On the other hand, we do seem to be running towards another re-run of the porn wars. There’s other little things that alarm too, like the Sex Education Show on Channel 4 that one of the commenters on that Guardian article mentioned. It had a huge amount of dubious parent-oriented fearmongering around porn – I mean, taking the 2 Girls 1 Cup phenomena and concluding that’s the kind of sexual act kids will want to do? Really?

Hopefully this time around will involve less violence by anti-porn feminists towards lesbian BDSMers than the last one did, but I’m not holding my breath.

sad to be so wrong. the Guardian was just getting lucky.

@jenn, yes, I did not do my usual unpacking of the bullshit on the Dines argument. I love that so many people enjoy my work because of the way I do takedowns and structure arguments. Phil Bronstein said one of my greatest skills is the way I fight. I could easily dig into the meat of the piece and pick and choose among the many problematic statements and cornerstones to the points and arguments presented by Dines, Bindel and by extension by the sad old Guardian. a lot of people could.

the whole article is a three-legged stool. and it does not actually help the anti-porn argument.

my take in this round was astonishment at the Guardian for being so cheap and out of step, and for being shilled in a total Jan Moir fashion. even Penn and Teller have gone a hilarious round with this woman (back in 2008 — that’s how retro the Guardian is marching here). I’m guessing that if Brooker wasn’t on the Guardian payroll we might see something as insightful as this in reaction:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/oct/16/stephen-gately-jan-moir

there is indeed money to be made all around this debate. and I’ve written extensively on Dine’s argument tactics — as I casually and slowly completely take down the Dines’ brand of anti-porn, week by week.

Dines and Bindel’s organization Stop Porn Culture:
http://ourpornourselves.org/stop-porn-culture/

Dines tactics:
http://ourpornourselves.org/a-look-at-war-on-pornography-and-shock-and-awe-tactics/

Dines arguments:
http://ourpornourselves.org/a-look-at-war-on-pornography-and-shock-and-awe-tactics/

I am not done with this. I’m just laying strong foundations.

But then, in the face of so much stupidity and anti-sex, anti-human attitudes, I remind myself that there are intelligent, articulate people such as yourself making thought-out, reasonable arguments and I feel just a little bit better.

In particular, Julie Bindel’s no right-wing astroturfer. She has strong roots within feminist academia and a long history of espousing political lesbianism that’d be entirely unacceptable within the right wing. (Have you read her thoughts on heterosexual relationships and especially marriage?) Her primary sphere of political influence is the center-left Labour party, which contained quite a few MPs similar to her. Basically, her feminist credentials are impeccable.

Also, if you normally respect the Guardian, you can’t have been paying that much attention to trans* issues. They still haven’t really apologised for Julie Bindel’s horrible transphobia, or indeed Germaine Greer’s. They were finally pressured recently into publishing a response piece to some particularly odious claims that trans* women were censoring Bindel, which is very much a first, but that’s all. (No, this hasn’t affected Julie Bindel’s level of respect within the feminist community, even though she’s still publishing similar stuff; why would it? Also notice that the response is by a US feminist – there’s no similarly prominent transfeminist figure in this country.)

Similarly, the Guardian has always had links to Julie Bindel, to the anti-porn movement, and to its close relative the anti-sex trafficking movement. In particular, after academics studying sex trafficking made some rather important criticisms of Julie Bindel’s claims on the number of trafficked women, the Guardian quite helpfully published a link to Bindel & co’s response (which all but implies that said academics are funded by pimps) but were pressured into not linking the criticism and carefully don’t describe the actual issues with the report. (One huge issue was that Bindel’s reasearch assumed that (a) every sex worker from certain ethnic groups was in the country illegally, (b) all of these women were forced into prostitution, and (c) phoning up brothels and asking about the ethnicity of their workers would give honest answers. That’s problematic in many ways.)

This research was being used to justify laws that many sex workers felt would endanger their safety, and there was a fairly unpleasant subtext in a lot of the organisation’s reports about evil prostitutes turning men into monsters who’d rape nice middle-class women. Was nearly an unqualified success too – groups like Eaves were apparently very effective at shutting out undesirables from the political process.