Hugo Schwyzer

BUMP: I’m thinking that being just about the only registered participant at WAM who is white, male, and over 40 means that I probably ought to have worn something other than a pink Ralph Lauren polo shirt today.

What follows below is a very long post, filled with “live-blogging” from all three sessions I attended today; it was pulled together over the space of nine hours…

I’m walking around this morning absolutely freezing, and with an achingly sore quadricep to boot, having walked into a table last night at a rapid clip.

Underslept but sufficiently caffeinated, I made it in time for Haifa Zangana’s morning key note address. It was a somber, sobering, painful speech; Zangana, one of the leading Iraqi journalists in exile, thoroughly punctured the myth of the success of the “surge” and implored the audience to be still more active, more committed, and more engaged in ending this now five year-old war.

I’m now sitting in the first session of the morning: Breaking the Frame: Revitalizing and Redefining Reproductive Rights Media Coverage. The four panelists are: Emily Douglas, Aimee Thorne-Thomson, Amanda Marcotte, Christina Page. I’m a lousy live-blogger, but I’ll do my best; feel free to skim.

The room is packed, standing room only, WAMmers on the floor and on the window sills. Emily Douglas makes some opening remarks. A key point: the language of reproductive justice in the media, a language that focuses on the dichotomy of “life” and “choice”, is inadequate, particularly because so many women (for financial reasons, for example) lack access to choice itself. Progressives need to do a better job of speaking up for reproductive justice, particularly perhaps to other “progressives” who seem increasingly willing to soft-pedal abortion and other reproductive rights as a political issue.

Aimee Thorne-Thomsen serves as Executive Director of the Pro-Choice Public Education Project. Thorne-Thomsen points out that her organization, with its mainstream feminist name (centering “choice” as the highest value), slowly discovered that the traditional language of pro-choice organizations — “Save Roe”, “Never Go Back”, “Protect Choice” — was failing to engage young women, particularly young women of color. (Thorne-Thomsen relates the story of an older activist with a “Save Roe” button on being approached by a young black woman who asked, “Who’s he?”) Because abortion doesn’t connect with young women as an issue as it might have in the past, her organization has adopted the language of “reproductive justice”. It’s the idea of reproductive rights married to broader social justice issues: reproductive justice exists when women and girls have the economic, social, and political power to make decisions about their bodies and their lives. The mainstream pro-choice movement has failed to link individual choices to larger communal struggles. How we control bodies is linked to how we control populations, Thorne-Thomsen argues.

Reproductive justice fits, Thorne-Thomsen says, with “how we move through the world.” Because it is intersectional, tying together race and class and religion and region, it enables people to have conversations in which talking about abortion — or any other reproductive issue — connects to other aspects of their lives. We can’t fight for abortion rights without talking about health-care access, adoption, and family structures.

Cristina Page, author of How the Pro-Choice Movement Saved America, points out that the lowest abortion rates in the world are invariably found in countries with strong pro-choice policies; the converse is also true. Abortion rates dropped in the Clinton Administration, and are, much lower in pro-choice Sweden than in anti-abortion Colombia, for example. Cristina tells the story of visiting an abortion clinic with a pro-life activist from Michigan, an activist who was five months pregnant. Three anti-abortion protesters, thinking that she was going to get an abortion, harassed her — driving home for her the point of how intimidating and unhelpful it was to have “sidewalk counselors.” She and the activist, Amanda Peterman, produced the New York Times op-ed The Right to Agree, in January 2003 — an op-ed that alienated many pro-choice and pro-life activists. A key part of their brave manifesto:

Both sides must unite publicly against the use of violent measures in the movement and must isolate extremists who employ them. The language we use to argue our positions must change, too. We can no longer tolerate inflammatory terms that serve only to divide us further and create conflict. Doctors who offer safe abortion services are not murderers or butchers. People who engage in peaceful protests against abortion are not fanatics. (Bold mine).

Bottom line: Page argues that the broader policies of the pro-life movement, so closely linked to conservative positions on health care and social justice, drive much of the need for abortion. Most pro-life people, Page believes — and I concur — have a disconnect with their leaders. Most pro-life Americans support the use of contraception as a vital way of preventing abortion; making the case that the Right to Life movement doesn’t reflect the real values of the people they claim to serve is a critical task for the contemporary reproductive justice movement.

Amanda Marcotte bats clean-up. She makes the case — as you might expect — that humor and candor are two vital tools for making the feminist case for reproductive justice. Too often, Amanda suggests, we get stuck in “parsing and caveating everything to death”. Our sense of how important language can be often leaves us incapacitated to engage with those who want to deny reproductive justice. Sometimes, she suggests, we need to “call bullshit” without being anxious about how we’re going to be perceived. “Don’t be afraid of the cheapshot!”

Some good discussion emerges about “post-abortion syndrome”. Cristina’s excellent point: when the anti-abortion movement uses the ‘abortion hurts women’ strategy, it’s no different than arguing that post-partum depression is evidence that God didn’t want the suffering mother to have had the child, or that the ache after giving up a child for adoption is evidence that one ought to have aborted it instead!

I’m running out of battery, so no more from this session, save to link to the premier clearinghouse for reproductive justice activists: EMERJ.

Good vegan wrap at lunch, good coffee, and lousy potato chips.

UPDATE: Second Session

So many good sessions running concurrently in the afternoon. After some agonizing, I picked Beating the Old Boys’ Club. It’s a session for and about women who work in the mainstream media, and it’s chaired by Ann Friedman, who works for Feministing in the alternative media — and the American Prospect. Panelists: EJ Graff, Kara Jesella, Veronica Miller.

Ann asked the panelists to take on the question of when — and how — their employers (all in the mainstream media) have made them proud, or not so proud. Veronica, the one black woman in her Associated Press office, talks about being stunned when the Don Imus story broke, and no one bothered to ask for a black woman’s perspective on that particular controversy. The AP puts out 130 word stories, but those stories come out every hour; Veronica talks about the challenge of phrasing news about women and race in such a short space.

Kara, who worked for Teen Vogue, talked about writing terrific body image stories for her magazine — and then having the story “undone” by the pictures that accompanied it. (This led to a tangential discussion on the Vogue cover story, so well covered earlier this month by Feministe.) Journalists don’t always get to pick how their stories are edited or how they are framed with photographs; good feminist writing, placed in the hands of insensitive or market-driven editors, is often sabotaged before coming to print. She also talks about the strong responses she got to this major story in the Times: Mom’s Mad and She’s Organized. Her editor insisted on describing a current generation of activist mothers as “post-feminist” — Kara had to fight to get it changed to this: “largely perceived as postfeminist in every way”.

EJ Graff talks about the occasional triumph, such as the piece she wrote on the sexual harassment of teens in the workplace which was published in, of all places, Good Housekeeping. Nonetheless, the editors at Good Housekeeping stripped the policy language out of the piece, keeping the warnings but not the larger prescriptions for change.

Veronica talks about being the only black woman in a newsroom filled with middle-aged white men, a larger number of whom are apparently named “Bob.” Ann asks Veronica if she ever gets tired of being the only “non-Bob” in the newsroom; Veronica says, “No, because if there were more people like me I’d get too comfortable.” There’s some discussion of how being the only one — the “token”, as it were — can create a profound sense of responsibility, both to represent an entire community (or two communities) and to mentor other young feminist journalists.

EJ Graff points out that women reporters don’t ask often enough for what they want. She estimates, based on her years in journalism, that a typical female reporter pitches one story to an editor for every FIVE that a male colleague will pitch. Ask for what you want!

Ann makes the vital point that as long as the launching point for mainstream media jobs remains unpaid internships, women and people of color will face a particularly difficult time getting a toehold in that world.

Third Session: Sex Workers and Media Representation, with Audacia Ray. Audacia has been in the “industry” for seven years in a variety of capacities. She starts today by talking about the breadth of the “sex worker” category, and moves on to classic media images of women who do sex work. Clearly, since the Eliot Spitzer case broke, the media’s interest in reporting on prostitution and other categories of sex work has cycled back up. Audacia reads aloud from this blog post of hers: Why sex workers aren’t represented in the media. Excerpt:

We exist. In growing numbers, there are sex workers and allies of sex workers who have a critical and political take on how our bodies and our labor are legislated. Not to mention, we are well aware of and constantly struggling with the ways our stories and our work are grossly exploited by the mainstream media in an attempt to get a juicy story. You want to talk about exploitation of women, media? Look at your own goddamn questions, the exposure you ask us to engage in, the personal questions you want us to answer. Look at the sexy container you put us in, all sultry bad girl secret story, no room for brains with the boobs. We don’t want to tell you our naughty secrets. What’s in it for us? You won’t give us the space and air time to talk about issues that matter to us, we won’t give you the dirt.
Sex workers aren’t represented in the media because the media does not create space for us to talk intelligently about the issues that face us. Like I said in my post last night, we are being cast into roles, roles that are nearly impossible to break. We’re afraid of being abused and manhandled by a media that has no interest in our well being, only in our cunts and the details of how we got to be so bad.

Mainstream media, if you’re so concerned about the exploitation of sex workers - stop perpetuating the exploitation with your own tools.

Bold emphasis is mine.

Audacia makes the case that media coverage of sex work is scandal driven; this means that the media wants “dirt” and they want it quick. The research protocol for stories on sex work also makes getting the real story more difficult; the New York Times and the Washington Post, for example, insist on full legal names for all their sources - making it obviously difficult to bring authentic perspectives to a story. When the media were calling for some back story about prostitution in the aftermath of the Spitzer debacle, one reporter from MSNBC (whom Audacia won’t name) asked: “So, have you ever been a whore?” She didn’t continue the interview.

An audience member gets us to the heart of the discussion: the ways in which the feminist community frames sex work, and what Audacia calls the “forced dichotomy of empowerment versus degradation.” Another audience member connects the anti-sex-industry forces within the feminist movement to traditional white paternalism. Audacia points out that the converse is true, and that the relatively few voices within the feminist sex worker community are white and middle-class — and not particularly representative of all those in whose name they speak.

I throw out a question: can we stigmatize those who buy sex without in some way stigmatizing those who sell it? I mention, probably ill-advisedly, the Swedish model (which busts johns but not prostitutes). Audacia and Amber Rhea, who is also live-blogging the workshop, reject the model. From Amber’s feed:

Hugo Schwyzer talking now. Uh-oh he brought up the Swedish model and said there’s a certain amount of healthy stigmatizing of buying sex. OMG OMG OMG. Hello, the Swedish model DOES NOT WORK.

So he thinks it’s ok to take a strong stigmatizing approach to the “johns.” WTF. How the hell can you do that, and *not* stigmatize the workers in the process. You are basically trying to take away their means to making a living.

Well, yeah. As a vegan, I want folks to stop eating meat. But I also, as a progressive, support unionizing efforts for meat-packers, even as I want to put them out of business. That’s part of the incremental approach towards transformation that I think is most effective. I have no trouble honoring sex workers while condemning those who buy their “product.” Look, we don’t say “don’t fight cancer because it will put oncologists out of business.”

Sigh. I no doubt annoyed some folks, but I’m learning a lot about how to frame the language around sex work. I can be better in how I frame things, no doubt.

Audacia makes the case — and I am grateful to hear it — that the sex industry cannot be the answer to poor sex education; it cannot be the main locus for healthy, feminist sexual expression.