saltyC: I agree, once you are aware of the degree of violence against women you can begin to feel a little like the only one who can see the Emperor’s bare arse. Especially when so many other people will tell you you’re imagining it or taking things too seriously etc. etc. ad infinitum. When I read Marilyn French’s “the war against women” I was seething for months.

And they wonder /why/ we’re always on the rag!!!

Is NY Times a Murdoch rag, by the way? Murdoch seems to be the Great Satan of feminists. Well, possibly the Great Satan of all things civilised really.

“Hysteria seemed to be a vanished 19th-century extravagance useful for literary analysis but surely out of place in the serious reaches of contemporary science.”

file:///c:/Documents and Settings/jrkainz/Desktop/NY Times/Hysteria Makes A Comeback.htm

Or, to summarize, we’re all just on the rag.

But back to the topic.

Melissa Farley’s article is brilliant. It makes the connection between acceptance of prostitution and acceptance of violence against women. Once a you open your eyes to violence against women, you see it all over the place, especially television. It is invisible to people who accept prostitution, the way air is invisible.

It’s the unholy trinity of phallic, father worship: The Pimp, the john and the holy ho. Provider, chump, and the invisible ghost.

Omitted from the trinity is, of course, mother, enemy of father worship. Mother Mary, and all the rest of the creators of life, that one silly little thing women can do but men cannot, are only as good as their silent, suffering martyrdom.

It’s the Church of the Sacred Motherfuckers.

By the way and OT, brace yourselves women. The good doctors have decided to review the “opinion” that hysteria is an antiquated, misogynist and unscientific concept.

He says he has never, that’s NEVER, encountered one of these girls without a history of rape, incest, molestation, abuse.

“Prostitution has much in common with other kinds of violence against women. What incest is to the family, prostitution is to the community. Prostitution is widely socially tolerated and its consumers (commercial sex customers who are called johns or tricks by women in prostitution) are socially invisible.”

“Prolonged and repeated trauma precedes entry into prostitution, with most women beginning prostitution as sexually abused adolescents (Bagley and Young, 1987; Belton, 1992; Dworkin, 1997; Farley and Barkan, 1998; Silbert and Pines, 1983b, 1981; Simons and Whitbeck, 1991) (Table 1). Homelessness is frequently a precipitating event to prostitution. Women in prostitution are frequently raped and physically assaulted (Farley et al., 2003; Hunter, 1994; Miller, 1995; Parriott, 1994; Silbert and Pines, 1983a).”

And the nail in the coffin:
“Certainly there is an urgent need to address the mental health needs of women during prostitution and after escape. However, it is equally important to address men’s demand for prostitution. Acceptance of prostitution is one of a cluster of harmful attitudes that encourage and justify violence against women. Violent behaviors against women have been associated with attitudes that promote men’s beliefs that they are entitled to sexual access to women, that they are superior to women and that they are licensed as sexual aggressors (White and Koss, 1993). Customers of prostitutes strongly endorse these attitudes toward women.”

I agree with Mar Iguana. Pimps and Johns should be put in stocks in the town square.

My commute takes me along Seattle’s most notorious prostitution street. I didn’t see them, for a long time. Not that they weren’t there, but I didn’t recognize them. Now I do; nearly every day I see a very young woman in uncomfortable shoes walking alone. They always look so very young and so very alone. Sorry to get sentimental, but I’m not one of those fun feminists who can say “but maybe this is their choice” when I know damn well it isn’t.