Biting Beaver has another post on sex work(hopefully the permalink will work soon) Amanda tries to make nice about sex work, but I still feel the camps are not exactly on the same wavelength. For example, the biting beaver post linked above says that she doesn't care about how much fun happy hookers are having, she wants that mess stopped, which is totally different from wanting to legalize it and regulate it.

In other news, I would like to note that in Black Feminist Thought, Patricia Hill Collins defined the oversexual black woman as a controlling image, and that for many years, black women have been protesting images that show them as hos and sluts who are completely defined by what sex acts they'll do. The Spelman protest is famous, but even at Emory, we were like 'what does a half naked woman have to do with basketball games"?(a learnlink fight) And feminism is being co opted left and right. Heck, some shitty 'journalists' are acting like that my neck my back chick is a feminist(click on the flickr image to see stupid stupid article. wags from blackfolk mock this idea.(warning some sexism and classism but come on, feminist my ass) I'm just saying that folks shouldn't lump all black women in with all these other folk.

Alt porn is well and good, although the preponderance of pasty asses is always a shock, but that's like 1% of the picture, and less than one percent of the terabyte of porn on your 14 year old's computer. When folks criticize an image for promoting x,y, and z, implicit in that is that there is power in images. I think images do have power, but a problem is that you can't just produce a few images of your own, and then, pow, all the rest of the images somehow lose their power.

Especially if you do the same thing and slap some tattoos on it. It's ripe for co optation. That's why people tend to attribute empowering rhetoric to sex positive feminists. Marketers speak louder than individual women. For example, here's a post about how some alt porn sites were marketed as feminist, although that is dying down now.(the whole community is interesting)(here's a news story about Suicide Girls)

I'm not going to go into the whole thing about the Spice Girls, and how they used the whole girl power rhetoric for marketing, but the general trend is that the message that millions of people are getting is that sex positive feminism is a man's fantasy girl doing all the freaky things your girlfriend won't do.

(In other other sex news, while in the bookstore, I remembered the tale of the most inappropiate reading report ever. This girl in my mama's 8th grade reading class put on her reading report that what had happened was this girl had a train pulled on her. Yea, she was reading Zane. Yea, your 13 year old may be reading her too.)