Left: Renegade Evolution, best sex-worker blogger in all of Blogdonia, ready to debate.Colleges are known for serious drinking and hardy partying, right? Fraternities hire strippers and varsity athletes hire sex workers for private parties, as we learned during the educational Duke Lacrosse case. Just don't let the stripper come in through the FRONT DOOR.
Octogalore, being all lawyerly, offers these facts:
Our friend Renegade Evolution was asked to speak Monday, April 21st, at 5:30 pm, in the Andrews Building on the Campus of William and Mary College on pornography and sex work, in a debate alongside with Jill Brenneman. Debating Ren and Jill will be John Foubert, a professor at the college, and Samantha Berg, who started and runs genderberg.com.(Read more of Octo's smart-lawyer comments here.)
Read more about it here and here.
Unfortunately, Sam has apparently complained about comments Ren made and is attempting to get her disinvited. While these comments were clearly dramatic and not at all serious, Sam is attempting to piggyback on them to hide other, less sympathetic reasons for stifling the First Amendment...
Ren's actual post (that Sam is currently yowling about) was something along the lines of, I wish Sam would fall under a truck. Sam is hyperventilating that the mean stripper might hurt her and push her under a moving vehicle. She is pretending that the Blogdonia hyperbole of several "fuck-yous" exchanged on blogs in the past, is the equivalent to a real threat.
Indeed, this sums up Sam.
If you've ever read Sam's pedal-to-the-metal hysterical writing (she refers to our kind of feminism as "spreademism"--do I need to say more?), you know that she is given to major hyperbole also. But even more than that, she seems to believe that pornography is "real"--that simulated rape-movies are actual rape, that all women who perform in pornography are hoodwinked, ignorant gals who blundered into it, just as most of the flimsy story-lines would have you believe. Sam has blurred the line between fantasy and reality for so long in her politics, she seems to have forgotten that things we say online are quite often not "serious"--thus, "fall under a truck" translates as "I think what you are saying is pernicious and you have bad politics"... but alas, puritan hysteria and censorship are Sam's stock and trade.
And so, we see which side favors freedom of speech and open debate, and which side would shut it down.
Not for one second do I believe that Sam is truly physically "afraid" of lil ole 5'2" Ren. What I believe she is afraid of is not being able to debate her. And she has every reason to be afraid, because Ren will clean the clock of ANY puritan censor, particularly one disguised as a feminist.
If Sam IS afraid of Ren, all I can say is, she ain't gonna be much for taking on the REAL patriarchs, you know, the big boys with guns? Yeah, the patriarchy must be a-quakin in their boots, when they see Sam approach!
Other folks have written about this situation, too. Galling Galla asks "Who is feminism for, anyway?" and ties this incident to other recent skirmishes in Feminist Blogdonia, and rightly so:
when [feminists] engage in the silencing tactics that they have against sex workers, exactly how are these “radical feminists” any different from religious fundamentalists?Good question. Any takers?
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Listening to: Sugar - A Good Idea
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