Materialism Inevitably Destroys Feminism It Destroys Human Freedom and Dignity

Last month Katha Pollitt got around to the immoral and most definitely illiberal acceptance and promotion of prostitution on the alleged left, an issue that was the topic of a line of posts I did last year.  She said

On the left, prostitution used to be seen as a bad thing: part of the general degradation of the working class, and the subjugation of women, under capitalism. Women who sold sex were victims, forced by circumstances into a painful and humiliating way of life, and socialism would liberate them. Now, selling sex is sex work—just another service job, with good points and bad—and if you suggest that the women who perform it are anything less than free agents, perhaps even "empowered" if they make enough money, you're just a prude. Today's villain is not the pimp or the john—it's second-wave feminists, with their primitive men-are-the-enemy worldview, and "rescuers" like Nicholas Kristof, who presume to know what's best for women.

The hot new left-wing journals are full of this thinking. Right now on the New Inquiry website, for example, you can take a satirical quiz called "Are You Being Sex Trafficked?" Of course, if you are reading the New Inquiry, chances are you're not being sex trafficked; if you're a sex worker, chances are you're a grad student or a writer or maybe an activist—a highly educated woman who has other options and prefers this one. And that is where things get tricky. Because in what other area of labor would leftists look to the elite craftsman to speak for the rank and file? You might as well ask a pastry chef what it's like to ladle out mashed potatoes in a school cafeteria. In the discourse of sex work, it seems, the subaltern does not get to speak.

I will begin with the most obvious point,  the porn-prostitution industry has exploded in the last two decades with the introduction of the internet.  It was always filthy rich it has become Big Bank level rich and, as a media business, is even better situated to hire scribblers, both professional and blog troll level, to push its messaging.   There is no area of writing more susceptible to that kind of push than those anxiously eager to be in line with the up and coming, the very kind of folks who write for the trendy sites and magazines.  The media is in the business of getting attention to sell itself, it has that much in common with both of the major forms of turning people into objects of commerce.

That Pollitt is mystified by the attempt to turn women into objects of commerce AS A LEFTY CAUSE CÉLÈBRE is bizarre, considering her position in the promotion of atheist materialism.

What the hell does she think it means to believe that people are material objects?   Does she think that her ideology doesn't really mean it when they promote the idea that people are objects?   I doubt that at her age, with her investment in that ideology that she is likely to seriously address the problem of trying to locate where women are supposed to find rights to demand and the moral obligation of men to respect those within materialism.  But that same materialist milieu is what pervades today's scribbling class which is the source of her puzzlement.   When I saw her mention of "The New Inquiry" I had to go look to see if it was yet another of the Paul Kurtz organizations, perhaps related to the "Center for Inquiry" that is sponsoring the conference she's participating in. Maybe, while she is at it, she should contemplate the non sequitur  of "free thought" being applied to an ideological position that typically denies the very possibility of free thinking.  She could get into that with several of the participants who, I seem to recall, have said that there is no such thing as free thought due to materialist determinism.

Perhaps she should seriously consider all of the implications of her ideology for feminism. Materialism is a monist ideology that doesn't allow for exceptions.   And if people are objects then they are objects that can be used.   When materialism is the ideological basis of any political action then the inevitable identification of people as objects, of minds as determined and morals as the product of social consensus without objective reality, there will always be a reversion to the kind of vulgar materialism that is the basis of all human oppression.   It is the way animals have been treated, as objects and the history that feminism arose to fight was an opposition to that view of women.   For crying out loud, Katha, didn't you take the struggle against the objectification of women seriously enough to recognize that it is an inevitable result of the very ideology you are promoting later this month?  That was one of the greatest lessons of second-wave feminism, it had a profound effect on my thinking.  Do you think its truth is mitigated by the drift of social consensus under the influence of porn money?


I am pressed for time today but here's what I had to say a year ago, January.

The Curious Blind Eyed Liberal Acceptance of Objectifying People

There's really nothing complicated about it,  prostitution turns the bodies of prostitutes into a commodity for sale and since the body of a living person is inseparable from the person,  it turns people into object of commerce.   Prostitution turns people into a thing that is rented out to be used by men - almost always - and like any rental appliance, the prostitute is injured in use.   Pornography is just prostitution filmed or photographed, sometimes paid for by the photographer, sometimes not.   That isn't when it's not actually filmed rape or gang rape, which it so often is.

But people are not objects.  Unlike furniture or appliances you can use through Rent-a-Center, prostitutes can be infected with pathogens that will injure and kill them.  Prostitutes also feel pain, which makes more than a few of those who rent them able to find sexual satisfaction by hurting them.   This is, of course, gratifying to the customer because it is related to a feeling of power over another person,  something that in our incredibly twisted sexual culture is a predominant trait of a large number of people.   That twisted sense of entitlement to treat people as objects, to dominate them and to use them, especially against their will,  is what prostitution is really all about.  You can use a prostitute without any obligation to care for them or risk legal obligations to them.  Men who use them not infrequently lie to them and cheat them, refuse to pay the agreed to rental fee and prostitutes are usually powerless to do anything about it.

If a boss in a factory or  on a farm treated workers like objects for use, exploitation, abuse, and disposal like that, liberals would be expected to see exactly what the situation was and they would champion the workers.   The objectification of prostitution and pornography isn't restricted to mental cruelty and disrespect, it turns people into objects as surely as the Nazis did the harvested hair of those it murdered or the corrupt officials of the Chinese government does those from whom it kills to sell their organs.  When it's prostitutes and porn actors turned into objects for use and sale, they go all libertarian, pretending that prostitutes are in some position to set the terms of rental. They might point out to some accounts, generally unverifiable, of elite prostitutes who claim to have had that kind of power but the vast majority of women, children and men who are prostitutes, that story is a total fiction.  That is the case in countries where prostitution is illegal, it is the case in countries where prostitution is legal.   The claims made about legal prostitution being some kind of guarantee of the safety and dignity of prostitutes is dependent on the most careful of choices of stories to tell and, in some cases, is based on leaving a lot of that story out.

What is it about prostitution and its flip side, pornography, that makes liberals go all stupid, supporting industries that violate their most basic metaphysical foundations, equality, an assertion of inherent rights and dignity, and the moral obligation to respect rights equally and entirely.   Without those liberalism is meaningless, it devolves into something little different from right wing libertarianism pretending to be liberalish.

I've thought about that question a lot over the past decade as the gay porn it's impossible to avoid online has grown increasingly a celebration of all of those things mentioned above and more.   Online porn is an open invitation to use and destroy women, children and men in increasingly violent and destructive ways, to rape them and degrade them, to turn them into objects to be used like a bratty little boy would gleefully destroy a doll and deface an image.   And liberals, championing that feel a sense of virtue due to their superior free speechiness.   That idiotic, preening sense of virtue at enabling some of the most degrading and destructive use of real human beings is a symptom of a fatal flaw that was introduced into post-war liberalism.  As it has taken hold liberalism has become ineffective and has failed at the polls.   We are in a time when the the liberal presidents,  Clinton, Obama, have been less liberal than President Eisenhower was.  That is more than a symptom, it's a crisis of liberalism that has destroyed it.

There is something downright prissy about the demonstrations of virtuous free speech absolutism on the left today, an inversion of a theatrical stereotype of a purity campaigner as seen in comedies of the 1950s.    There is an unthinking assertion of an official virtue, a self-righteous demonstration of an opposition to any kind of criticism of the industries of prostitution and pornography that would be comical in itself it it wasn't such a serious lapse of morality and reason.  It is a bizarre thing to recognize for what it is.  The insistence among the self-appointed free-thinkers that everyone ignore what they can see clearly and get in line with the official line.

A lot of it is based in a rejection of traditional morality, it being sex, blinds liberals.   They idiotically miss that the "sex" involved with prostitution and pornography comes with an objectification and commodification of people, something they can usually not miss when "sex" isn't a part of it.   Many liberals have an easier time seeing the moral atrocity of the abuse of animals in farming than they can of people as horribly abused in porn and prostitution.   The secret videos of chickens and pigs released by the animal rights people get a reaction that the thousands of times more numerous videos and photos of women, children and men that they can hardly avoid in a day of google searches don't.

This is a situation that can't continue if there is to be a left.  There is no coexisting with an industry that does what porn and prostitution do,  the championing of the "rights" of those industries is destroying the left.  The pornographers buy off the left at times with "free speech" awards.   They co opt the media which sees the benefit to them of the same "free speech" language and legal framework.

Either the left acts as if people are more than merely objects of commerce, or it doesn't exist.  It can't pretend what is really happening in pornography and prostitution isn't real.  Today, online and off, "liberals" conform to a rigid line of free speech absolutism that sees the use and destruction of women, children and men by industries that destroy them as a price worth paying so they can ply their trade without having to wonder if they're crossing a line hardly any of them ever would cross, anyway.   They see any restrictions on the most extreme and depraved pornography, of prostitution as it really is in the real world instead of in their fantasies,  as a slippery slope.   Well, there's another side of that slope from the inability to use casual profanity in a feature story or showing a married couple with a double bed on TV and it is into the kind of pit of depravity that is a websearch away.   The pro-porn, pro-prostitution side, which has developed into an industry in itself, will mock the phrase "pit of depravity" but that's what so many of the pornographers advertise their product as being.   The same people would jocularly gloat in the same terms if someone hadn't brought up these issues and ruined their boy bonding fun, delighted in their puerile wickedness.