by Mickey Huff
This is the amount of respect these public servants have for the public.
BEAU HODAI is the author of Dissent or Terror: How the Nation’s Counter Terrorism Apparatus, in Partnership with Corporate America, Turned on Occupy Wall Street. The report was published jointly by the Center for Media and Democracy and DBA Press. Hodai is a regular contributor to the Center for Media and Democracy and is publisher of DBA Press.
STOP PATRIARCHY: SOCIAL JUSTICE CONFERENCE USES
POLICE AND THREAT OF ARREST TO SUPPRESS AND
CENSOR ANTIPORN VIEWS
Sunsara Taylor
On April 12, 2013, eight members of End Pornography and Patriarchy: The Enslavement and Degradation of Women (StopPatriarchy.org) were evicted, under threat of arrest, from the annual conference “From Abortion Rights to Social Justice, Building the Movement for Reproductive Freedom,” sponsored by Hampshire College’s program for Civil Liberties and Public Policy (CLPP).
Our alleged crime? Peacefully advocating antipornography and anti-sex industry views at our own officially registered organizational
table.
According to Mia Sullivan, director of CLPP, our political opposition to the sex industry had made a few pro-porn conference-goers feel that the conference was no longer a “safe space.”
However, just this single, uninvestigated complaint is all it took for Ms. Sullivan to bring police and insist that we leave immediately or be arrested for trespassing. And, to be very clear: the police were with Ms. Sullivan from the very first time she or anyone else from CLPP approached us.
This outrageous act of political suppression is a dangerous escalation in an overall growing trend toward a pro-porn, pro-”sex work” hegemony within academia as well as large sections of the so-called “women’s movement.” Not only is there an increasing embrace of pornography and the sex industry, but critiques focusing on the violence and degradation, the dehumanization and commodification of women’s bodies and destruction of millions upon millions of real women’s and young girls’ lives through these industries is being shut down as “beyond the pale”—and in this case, even criminal.
Reversing this growing political suppression is essential. It is always wrong to call in agents of the highly oppressive and reactionary state to suppress the political views of fighters for liberation. It is also critical to women everywhere that the debate over, and opposition to, the truly monstrous crimes against women in the global sex industry deepen and spread.
What Exactly Happened at Our Table that Merited the Police?
A group of vociferous pro-porn people approached our table to argue in favor of porn and the sex industry, citing their personal experiences with the “sex industry,” with sexual violence, and with bondage, domination, and sadomasochism (BDSM). As we are not in favor of intruding into people’s consensual sexual behavior, we argued the larger point: sexuality is not formed for anyone in a vacuum. In a world that is saturated with violence against women, a world that sexualizes degradation and humiliation, it is not surprising that those ideas get reflected in people’s genuinely felt sexual desires, including by victims of sexual violence.
But, the “right” to market yourself as a sexual commodity has no meaning outside of a world that gives rise to the idea of women’s bodies as commodities, as things to be used, tortured, degraded, and hurt for the sexual pleasure of men. And in that kind of world, this real world is littered with the bodies of millions of women and very young girls who have been kidnapped, pimped, beaten, tortured, sold by starving families, drugged and tricked, and repeatedly raped and sold and then discarded as nothing more than unthinking flesh.
While this debate was passionate, we were calm, substantive and principled. We repeatedly refocused things on the need to look at all these phenomena from the vantage of the liberation of women, not from one’s own narrow experience, and on the possibility and necessity of opening up space for truly liberating personal and sexual relations, based on equality, mutual respect, and a shared desire. We also drew attention to our call to action, which explicitly states that we are not seeking to enact laws to ban pornography, and that we oppose the criminalization of women in the sex industry; rather, we are challenging individuals to reject this culture of degradation and commodification of women.
For this the police were called, and we were escorted off campus grounds under threat of arrest.
A Little Background
Stop Patriarchy attended the CLPP conference due to our opposition to the war on women, especially as a result of the extreme escalation of attacks on abortion rights across the country. Today, abortion is more difficult to access, more stigmatized, and more dangerous to provide than at any time since Roe v. Wade.
StopPatriarchy.org sees this as the “mirror opposite” of the increasingly degrading, cruel, brutal, humiliating, and mainstream nature of pornography, and was eager to get into all this with conference participants. Within this, some members were bringing the view of all-the-way revolution and communism as it has been reenvisioned by Bob Avakian.17
It came as no surprise that people had strong reactions—positive and negative—to our politics. Some loved that we challenged the feelings of shame and guilt many women are made to feel about their abortions, while others claimed it was wrong to “tell women how to feel.” Some appreciated that we called out President Barack Obama for conciliating with restrictions on abortion, for his drone program, for assassinating US citizens, and for continuing torture at Guantá-namo. Others insisted that Obama is “our friend.” Some loved our opposition to porn and began wearing our stickers (“If you can’t imagine sex without porn, you’re fucked!”), others got into thoughtful discussion, and still others strongly disagreed.
We welcomed this. Isn’t one of the purposes of a conference on social justice to make opportunities for people to hear different approaches as they are put forward by those who share a commitment to defending the lives and rights of oppressed people?
However, we cannot dismiss that these political differences may have played a role in the CLPP organizers’ eagerness to seize on the opportunity to remove us from their conference.
One Final Irony
We sent an open letter to the CLPP organizers and the Hampshire community:
Finally, it is a bitter irony that your conference included numerous workshops on “state violence,” “racial justice,” and the “prison-industrial complex” yet one of the people you called the police on is a young Black man who has been Stopped & Frisked growing up in Brooklyn more times than he can remember. This young man decided to put his body on the line and face up to a year in jail when he joined in the campaign of mass civil disobedience against Stop & Frisk last year together with Carl Dix, Cornel West, and dozens of others. It is a further bitter irony that your conference held workshops and gave voice extensively to concerns about making the conference welcoming and safe for LGBT people, yet one of the people you called the police on is a transgender person who (owing to the obvious dangers which face transgender people particularly at the hands of police and in jail) has judiciously calculated which political activities to take part in specifically to avoid the risk of arrest. Neither of these people imagined that a conference on “Abortion Rights” and “Social Justice” would be the place where they faced the greatest threat of being imprisoned!
For more information about this use of police by Hampshire College’s program for Civil Liberties and Public Policy, visit our website at StopPatriarchy.org/opposesuppression.
SUNSARA TAYLOR is a writer for Revolution Newspaper (revcom.us) and the initiator of the movement to End Pornography and Patriarchy: The Enslavement and Degradation of Women (StopPatriarchy.org).
THE WEAVE
John Collins
The Weave: Mediocracy Unspun (WeaveNews.org) emerged out of a seminar on global news analysis that I have designed and taught since 2000 in St. Lawrence University’s Global Studies Department, one of the first degree-granting undergraduate global s
tudies programs in the United States. The seminar sought to use analytical tools associated with political economy, ideology critique, and discourse analysis to help students engage critically with mainstream news media texts while also examining the mass media’s broader social role. In keeping with the intellectual orientation of global studies, the course placed significant emphasis on how news media help create and reproduce power/knowledge regimes that are grounded in pervasive global hierarchies. As the course evolved to take into account the rise of the Internet and the proliferation of web-based independent and alternative media outlets, however, students decided that rather than simply engaging in the detached analysis of CNN and the New York Times, they wanted to be part of the solution.
Discussions around these concerns became the catalyst for the transformation of the seminar into a more praxis-oriented course. Students in the 2006 seminar developed the idea of creating a blog-based website that would attempt to provide the kind of context that is often lacking in mainstream news reports. One student came up with the project’s name after researching the etymology of the word “context”: from the Latin contextus, meaning “to weave together.” An-other student built the initial Weave website, and each member of the seminar worked on researching and blogging about a particular underreported story. Some of the topics covered during the project’s early stages included the US practice of so-called “extraordinary rendition,” threats to the world’s oceans, and the rise of private military companies.
The current Weave website, launched in 2011, continues to feature blogs focusing on underreported stories. Many of these are created by students who take the news analysis seminar now titled “Blogging the Globe: News Analysis and Investigative Journalism.” In the seminar, students are trained in basic media analysis, investigative journalism, and blog-style writing. Some notable topics in recent years include the global politics of trash, internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Colombia, legal and jurisdictional politics on Native American reservations, and underreported aspects of the environmental movement.
According to its mission statement, the Weave
seeks to contribute to positive social change and the cultivation of an informed citizenry by providing critical perspectives on important stories, voices, and processes that are not receiving sufficient public attention . . . [T]he Weave is a small but determined response to media consolidation (the concentration of more and more media power in fewer and fewer hands) and the failures of the mainstream media to provide the depth of information and the breadth of perspectives that are crucial to a healthy democratic culture.
This core mission is supplemented by a series of five overlapping commitments to public intellectual work, responsible representation, citizen journalism, democratic dialogue, and social justice.
A second type of content found on the Weave website is the Big Questions project inspired by the example of Dropping Knowledge (DroppingKnowledge.org). Weave staffers have developed a series of broad questions that concern people in all parts of the world (e.g., “What comes after capitalism?” or “What is today’s most underreported story?”) and have developed a growing archive of video responses to these questions. The responses are gleaned from interviews conducted both on the SLU campus and beyond, such as on study trips or at national conferences. Examples of interviewees who have responded to the Big Questions include prominent scholars (e.g. Dr. Linda Alcoff), journalists (e.g. Amy Goodman, the late Anthony Shadid), public intellectuals (e.g. Dr. Vandana Shiva, Bill McKibben), community activists (e.g. Ruben García), and artists (e.g. Staceyann Chin). Participation in the Big Questions project helps students gain valuable training in techniques of basic media production as they work to record, edit, and upload videos, and circulate them through social media.
A notable recent addition to the Weave project was the creation of a credit-bearing internship course in 2011. Weave interns study the history of independent and alternative media, read about and discuss some of the particular dilemmas confronting such efforts, and work on collaborative projects designed to move the Weave forward. The projects help them develop a range of practical skills—fundraising, public relations, community outreach, media production, grant writing, event planning, professional presentations—that will serve them well in a variety of post-graduation career paths.
Lukasz Niparko, a global studies major from Poznan, Poland, was a Weave intern in 2011 and subsequently created a blog titled Solidarity Avenue. “When I heard about the Weave, I decided to make it my ‘little solution’ to the world’s problems,” he recalled. “After all, the Weave embraces Gramsci’s idea of organic intellectualism, understands the ideological apparatuses of Althusser, promotes the self-empowerment and social organizing found in Freire, and is a form of praxis that comes from Marx. The Weave became my ultimate answer to ‘what I can do as a student,’ but also to what can I do as a citizen who is striving to understand this globalizing world.”
Given the ongoing realities of media consolidation and the erosion of the core investigative role of professional journalism, there is an urgent need to develop opportunities for the next generation to fill in the informational gaps left by the mainstream media—and to build new alternatives that can contribute to positive social change. With this in mind, the Weave is looking to expand its reach and impact by creating collaborative relationships with other colleges and universities, working with professors to build investigative blogging into their courses, providing more in-depth training to its staff members, networking with other independent journalists throughout the United States and beyond, and expanding its roster of bloggers and videographers.
JOHN COLLINS, PHD, is professor and chair of the Global Studies Department at St. Lawrence University, and director of The Weave.
IT’S TIME TO FIX THIS MESS: WHAT THE WORLD COULD BE
Ken Walden
What the World Could Be is a series of short movies meant to empower people by helping them access and understand often difficult information regarding the problems we face, to help transcend these problems with achievable solutions in effort to make the world, well, more of what it could be—a better place for all. What the World Could Be focuses not just on problems, but how to work through them in creative, often simple ways. So, I want to talk about more than problems, something that will make you smile: solutions.
We face many problems as a species, but since that is a pretty large topic I’m going to start with one example we deal with in our film shorts: global warming. The best part is that the solutions are really easy to implement, they will save you tons of money, and improve your health. Yes, it sounds like and cheesy sales pitch . . . but it’s very true. Read on!
First, if you want to know more after reading here, please watch videos we produced about these troubling issues by visiting our site at WhatTheWorldCouldBe.com. Our goal is to provide assistance through learning about these complex issues and then show how you can become an active part of solving these issues. This article is an example of how our series of film projects works, and all of the resources for this article and our project are listed on our website.
Problems vs. Solutions
Most people get a knot in their stomach just hearing the word “news.”
Have you ever noticed how a lot of “journalism” or “news” is based on reporting a problem and then leaving you at this point?
You are left to figure out what, if anything, to do about what you just read or saw, and that can be a very difficult task. In fact, after going through this process ourselves for years, we can tell you that it is. Feeling ill about reading news is a major reason why 30 to 40 percent don’t read news at all. Our goal is to make that easy. Let’s get to our example, the key issue of global warming.
Global Warming and Climate Change
For many, the discovery of the very problems we face as a society is the scary part. But once we understand a problem, we must move to the solutions, and that doesn’t have to be an immobilizing process.
Yes, global warming is real and it’s very dangerous, as in “extinction-level” dangerous.
In short, we are putting too much carbon into our environment, and most of it is from coal power plants and transportation. Let’s look at a few main areas of concern with doing this.
Melting Ice Caps = Rising Seas
One problem is that this carbon is heating up the planet’s oceans and atmosphere, which in turn melts our ice caps and glaciers. According to National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) satellite photos, roughly one-third of our ice caps have melted since around 1980. When we melt too much ice, the oceans rise, which makes a mess of our coastal cities . . . and most of our major cities are on the coasts. The result would be like a disaster movie—or worse, like a real disaster, like Hurricane Sandy.
Crazy Weather and Droughts
The other tricky thing to understand is that this slight increase in temperature makes the weather more erratic and unpredictable. We have bigger big storms, colder cold weather, hotter hot weather, and bad droughts. Droughts interfere with our ability to grow food. Yes, food . . . that yummy stuff we eat every day. We’re already having major drought problems.
Also, water from glacial runoff supplies water to hundreds of millions of people. So if we melt the ice caps, there goes the water supply.
Carbon in Oceans Kills off Food & Oxygen
Now hang tight because this is the super scary part, but then we get into the fun “fix it and save you money” part, so please keep on reading.
Much of this excessive carbon gets absorbed into our oceans, making the oceans more acidic. This is the kind of acidity that burns the coral reefs and kills shellfish and shell-like life-forms. Coral reefs and planktons are the bottom of the food chain so if you fry them, you fry our fishes’ food supply and that’s not good . . . at all. Fish are a major part of the world’s food supply.
