Like many things in feminist ideology, there is wide spread disagreement about Prostitution.
Some call it the “basest form of slavery” today, while some call it “sex work” and suggest that sex workers should be honored.
These might seem like diametrically opposed ideas until you understand the threads that hold them together.
Women who engage in prostitution are victims of a society that devalues them and the men who engage in it are sick, disgusting, depraved oppressors.
The Puritans had a very similar view of male sexuality and the modern Women’s movement orthodoxy has widely adopted that Puritan view.
Many consider the pathologized view of human male sex patterns as disgusting, immoral impulses that need to be controlled with state force, and/or chemical or physical castration, as new ideas associated with the 2nd Wave Radical Feminists.
The idea that male sexual drive is not a biological impulse or need for human connection, but a perverse, socially constructed drive to sexually oppress women into servitude, sounds like a bio-phobic fantasy that crawled out of a 2013 Gender Studies Lecture.
Dr. Janice Fiamengo again presents an incredibly well-researched video from source material, illustrating these ideas are not new, but these unpitying assaults which dehumanize all men as morally corrupt and diseased sexual abusers is not new.
In her video, Early Feminists Pathologized Male Sexuality, Fiamengo demonstrates these attitudes have been features of privileged women operating in groups for centuries.
She goes into great detail about attitudes of the “Contagious Disease Acts” whose response unjustly and disproportionately affected working class Women accused of prostitution.
This was an injustice toward working class Women. These women could be taken from the street and tested, not unlike today’s Covid19 carriers. The response from early feminists was not just to decry the injustice, but to impune all men.
Josephine Butler wrote that “All men as depravers of society hold the loathsome and deadly doctrine that God has made men for unchastity and Women for his degraded slave.”
Dr. Fiamengo goes on to explain that Butler’s solution was for women to have more collective social power. Men, Butler imagines, only socially construct that they have unmet sexual needs.
Contrary to popular imagination, these attitudes of demonizing, dehumanizing, and derogating men were perfectly acceptable in the upper classes of the 19th century.
Suspected pipe bomber, Christabel Pankhurst, in the Great Scourge of 1913, suggests the existstance of a male conspiracy to cover up that 80% of men had syphilis and gonorrhea.
The pathologizing of men’s sexuality and many other common attitudes seems to spring forth under certain conditions:
- Women wealthy/safe enough to enjoy academic pursuits in Anglophone countries;
- Women wealthy/safe enough to enjoy financial independence from the nuclear family in Anglophone countries;
- Women in groups wealthy/safe enough to openly share and express contempt for men in Anglophone countries;
- Powerful men who see the benefit in agreeing with whatever women in wealthy/safe enough groups say. These men may exist in any country around the world but support the spread of these attitudes in Anglophone countries.
Oppression by men and the universal victimization of Women are not new ideas among Women or Marxist children. I wonder exactly how far back they go?
