Fascinating stuff.

“So I went onto Essex University campus and I meet the pornographer on the train and we politely say hello. This is a man who has produced porn for years, has given awards to porn sites such as ExploitedAfricans.com, which completely pornifies women coming from the Congo on boats, that have to be fucked by anyone because they’ve got no choice, because they’ve got no papers. There is another one which is a parody of the John Worboys taxi rapist… And this man’s given awards to these porn sites and I’m there getting ready to debate him and we are walking through campus and I see this rag-bag group of students who’d obviously got up a bit late to meet me at the actual campus gates, shouting and screaming “transphobe,” “violent,” “phobic” this, “phobic” that, at me. And I thought, well, we are living in Orwellian times as wall as McCarthyite times. Because in what way is this pornographer, walking through this campus, with no dissent and no concern at all from these so-called feminists and pro-feminist students, and I’m being screamed at.

And there you have it. That is the climate in which we are living.

So whatever your view is on the sex industry, on gender, on anything — there’s only one side being screamed down, and that’s the feminist side. I don’t mean the fun feminists — the pole-dancing-is-the-new-way-to-liberation feminists — I mean the feminists like me: miserable, hard-faced, going on about men being abusers all the time…

Now we have an absolute phobia about debate. There seems to be a view that there is a right not to be offended. The fact that we can be offended (which I am at least a hundred times a day) is now being seen as violence, so that we experience it as internalized violence and we are triggered and we are traumatized. In fact, I am my own trigger warning — I found an article with the trigger warning, “Julie Bindel.”

-Megan Murphy – The Feminist Current

   The conclusion of the article below the fold.

So what do we do?

I think that the tide is starting to turn because younger or newer feminists are realizing that they now have no opportunity to learn from the rest of us and we, in turn, are not able to learn from newer and younger feminists. Because we are not allowed to be in each others spaces, each others campuses, even each others living rooms and say, “What do you think about that? Why do you think that sex work can be liberating?”

And they are not able to say to me, “What evidence do you have that the legalization of the sex industry has failed?” And we’re not able to talk about gender any more, which was the basis of socialism and feminism when we looked at how capitalism wielded families and wielded patriarchy. So it’s really harmful to the left as well as feminism, in general.

And the left now has this weird Orwellian view where everything is topsy turvy: The sex trade is empowering to women (in what way does capitalism not come into this?). That obviously there’s a male brain and a female brain… (In what way are you pro-equality if you think that we are different but equal? When people said that about black people and white people there was an outcry, and rightly so.) That the full-face veil is not in any way a symbol of oppression to women, when there are women in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, elsewhere who are saying, “Stop marching with these crazy fundamentalists who are fascists and support us.”

So the left has become, in a way, the new right and that’s why I talk about neoliberalism. We have no consistency within the left anymore because we have been battered down to take the view that anyone who says, “Me, me, me — I’m a Muslim woman and I have the right to do this. Me, me me — I’m a sex worker. Me, me, me — I’m a trans woman who knows I was born in the wrong body.”

We have no right, now, to challenge that orthodoxy. And this is what the left is built on. So unless we actually start to chip away at that — to challenge it and to be brave enough to stand up and disagree with it, then this will effect a damn sight more than me and a few others that are the targets, radical feminism in general, and the left in total. Because the right wing — I see this all online — they are laughing at us. (I mean they are writing some actually quite good and funny stuff about this whole nonsense, you know, “The Stepford Students,” etc.) They are absolutely laughing all the way to the election because we have been disabled by fear and by bullying and by this monolithic, crazy, view that what is actually oppressive is the new liberation.