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This tweet is still going, which pleases me greatly, and so I thought I’d provide some personal context for it. https://twitter.com/emilydwarfield/status/1302274601695797254
I grew up middle class, at certain points even upper middle class. I also grew up with violence, both DV and, outside the home, CSA. When I started to develop a feminist politics, I did what a lot of survivors of gendered violence do + projected my own trauma onto sex workers
I was a full-on SWERF, reading Dworkin in high school and writing anti-porn takes from the viewer perspective, where porn is a piece of media and not a site of gendered labor.
Very long story short, I realized a lot of my discomfort around pornography was my discomfort with my own sexually submissive desires and around age 20-21 re-emerged as a sex positive feminist.
But this is also a liberal perspective on pornography that analyzes it as a piece of media and not a site of labor production.
It wasn't until I dropped out of college and had to find a job and could NOT find a job because this was the Occupy Wall Street era and my peers with degrees were struggling to get hired as waitresses...
...and I was about to either have to move back into my domestically violent childhood home or become homeless when I started answering ads in the "Etc" section of Craigslist. My whole fucking perspective on sex work changed once I had to do it to stay housed.
Eventually I went back to school. I was a women's studies major. I am now getting an MSW with a concentration in social policy around violence against women. And the way my feminist classmates and professors talk about women like me when they assume we're not in the room? WOOF
One of the driving forces of my life now is to help women like the one I was see the perspective of women like the one I am now without actually having to trade sex first. And without putting myself at too much risk, e.g. outting myself in my academic program + risking expulsion
Anyway the original tweet is informed not just by my personal experiences but by my extensive familiarity as a feminist scholar with SWERF literature. You will notice the way women like Dworkin (who I will admit is an exception- I'll come back to her) objectify women themselves
I do want to talk for a second about feminists who formerly traded sex, usually under economic coercion, sometimes survivors of trafficking, like Dworkin. I don't think they're driving the discourse, but women like Mackinnon find them very useful.
These women are, again, projecting their own trauma onto all sex workers, and while they are usually not privileged in most senses, they are privileged in one way-- they are not currently trading sex. And so whatever legal policies are enacted will not directly impact them.
They can afford to focus on their desire to punish clients because they aren't the ones who will be collateral damage under the End Demand model.
And to go back to porn specifically, because it is the most visible kind of sex work: you can't analyze porn like you analyze any other media because pornographic labor is not regulated like other labor and porn actors are not treated like other actors.
And if you fail to center porn as a site of production you will miss the ways that gendered violence mostly occurs in relation to pornography: through labor violations on set that are an inevitable consequence of draconian legal regulation combined with stigma.
Sure, a lot of porn is also symbolically violent but that seems quite obviously secondary, an inevitable consequence of how the sex workers who produce it are treated (as well as a consequence of systemic sexism, racism, transphobia more generally)
Anyway the production of pornography has changed so drastically in the last five years we probably need a whole new analytical framework
But it strikes me that when feminists talk about the relationship between violence and pornography they never talk about things like this, largely because they’re responsible for it: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.vice.com/amp/en_us/article/qjdw37/former-porn-star-nicole-gililland-sues-her-school-for-discrimination
They also don’t talk about the very common scenario where, for example, I agreed to shoot for a guy with a clips store and like 1000 customers but then someone ripped it off and posted it on a tube site and now all of a sudden 7 million people have watched it
I knew this was a possibility, and that some of them would call me a whore in the comments, but I still didn’t agree to it! And I don’t own the video so there’s nothing I can do. Never seen a SWERF care about piracy though
Care more about labor protections and access to education, healthcare and housing and I promise the rest will follow
