Amananta: “Marginalized Feminist Bloggers Oppressing Billion-Dollar International Industry, News at 11”

Really good response to the Bussel article by Amananta at Screaming Into the Void. Below is an excerpt:

…little did we know, oh radical feminist bloggers – who probably make up something like 0.5% of the entire blogosphere, if that much – that merely making such a statement on our personal blog is enough to oppress women everywhere! Because we all know there’s simply no place a woman can find approval for serving men sexually, ha ha ha ha ha. No, there aren’t thousands and thousands (millions?) of websites devoted to female submission and BDSM and fantasies about rape, forced fellatio, and the like. Poor oppressed Bussel can only have her praise of be published in a widely read publication like The Village Voice, with a monthly reading list of over 2 million.

But for some reason, Bussel can only come up with one woman’s blog and two books as evidence for her assertion that sex is under siege from prudish feminist man haters. The other person she cites as an anti-sex feminist prude is an anti-feminist rabbi, which lends questionability to the rest of her research. She has plenty to say throughout the article about how bad all those sex-hating feminists are, but only two tiny quotes which don’t say anything about women being bad for liking sex. What are these other books about? I had to look them up, having not read them, to see what kind of man-hating prudery was going on there. What I found was a criticism of a sex saturated culture – something I have been hearing about America for years, and for which many foreign people despise us. I don’t see anything in any of the brief reviews I read that suggest these books attack women. Bussel doesn’t provide any such quotes either – I guess I am supposed to take her word for it. …

…Then we get into the joyous fun of major hypocrisy. Like the commenter on Witchy-woo’s blog who tells her,”You have absolutely no right to say something like that.”That is very funny coming from someone who states that she is a porn supporter, since the porn supporters are always talking about free speech. Isn’t it funny how free speech only applies in their minds to porn? All critics of porn must be silenced to protect free speech! Or something.

But my favorite hypocrisy of the day is this – that all the”sex positive”crowd talk about how meeeeaaan all us radical feminists are to them, talk about this ENDLESSLY, as if we are the one force keeping them from enjoying their sex lives – with absolutely no back up to show that even radical feminists hate women who have”politically incorrect”sex. That’s right, no back up at all. No one has come up with one verified quote from one single feminist in all this brou-ha-ha that shows even one single woman feels this way. Yet Bussel claims”they see us as airheaded sluts”without reference, and a popular”sex positive”blogger, Mistresse Matisse, makes a histrionic post about how she gets attacked by”outraged feminists”and provides a link as proof – problem is, I can’t find one single comment of an outraged anti-feminist disagreeing with her rudely – in fact, the majority of the posters agree with her and give her verbal pats on the back, and the few dissenters are quite polite – hardly the treatment she says would be worthy of someone who”performed recreational vivisection on puppies and kittens”. Yet Matisse, in her several times of talking about it, only manages to specifically mention 2 occasions on which anyone was rude to her because they were a feminist and she is into S&M – and this somehow indicts an entire movement; meanwhile, Bussel has the following to say about feminists – in just one article: Calls feminists”well-intentioned prudes”, accuses us of”Holier-than-thou pronouncements of sexual superiority”, claims we don’t want to treat her”as an intelligent human being”, says we consider men”brutish horndogs”, claims that”women continue to battle each other over what we do in bed”, and that feminists are guilty of”excoriating other women and berating them”.

So who is really fighting the”sex wars”- a small handful of little-read feminist bloggers who dare say abusing women is wrong? Or a billion dollar porn and prostitution industry which enslaves women and girls around the globe, does its best to squash any dissent, can get a well-placed article in a widely circulated paper any time they like and insult the sexuality of all who oppose them; and that industry’s supporters, who apparently spend their days looking for little corners of the blogosphere for a feminist with an unpopular opinion to shout down? It’s funny that the”sex posititve”crowd feels they are the ones who are oppressed, since starting a”sex posititve”blog means you are almost guaranteed lots of approval, readership, and praise – yet the handful of blogs made by women who stand up for women and stick to their principles get so burned out by the constant nastiness directed their way that I’ve known three alone who stopped posting or changed their name within the last three months because they could no longer deal with the steady barrage of hate mail and even threats. That’s awfully one-sided for a”war”. …