there's our catastrophe: ryrysparkleby: apparently sheila jeffreys’ new thing is she thinks...
apparently sheila jeffreys’ new thing is she thinks that sex workers spend all day getting their head bashed against the bedhead in time with the thusting motion…and when she is giving talks she acts it out with her head banging rythmically against her hand.
my friend wanted to tell her, ‘just move down the bed, Sheila.’
ourcatastrophekind of lol
but also, seriously, this is an example of how sheila jeffreys and her ilk literally make their living off graphically detailed depictions and descriptions of violence against women that are really triggering to a lot of people
it is sensationalist, exploitative, and vile
Reminds me of my reaction when I heard Flava Flav was rumoured to have done porno, which was “hope he took his clock off!” - for reasons related to the workplace safety of his colleagues.Joking aside though, it is, for various reasons, vile and exploitative. I wouldn’t trace the exploitation back to Sheila herself though, or I’d hesitate to. She doesn’t exactly come out of this looking like a reasonable person. She has a following it’s true, but they don’t come off looking good either. It’s more like, they’re women, they’re feminists, they’re batshit. This kind of thing contributes to the marginalisation of the whole idea of women’s equality… and Sheila’s marginalisation along with it. It’s like it’s easier and more respectable for women to come out with this shit, precisely because expectations in terms of women’s respectability and, um, in terms of us not being hysterical, are lower.
Yes, Sheila makes her living off this. What if she changed her mind though? I mean she’s basically a zoo exhibit. She can’t change her mind on anything or she loses her following and probably her living. Does a bear change its mind about being a fucking bear? It better stand on its hind legs once in a while and do bear-type things or else visitors stop coming to the zoo.
But yeah, bearing in mind I’m pretty down with most forms of porn, I usually steer clear of radfem stuff because it’s too strong for me. It’s the old conundrum of having a stand in main street on heavy shopping days with cut-outs from lads’ mags all “this *filth* is at eye level in our news agents!!”.
Factor in the proportion of abuse survivors in radfem circles and… it’s a pretty gross industry. Although that’s another reason why I’m unwilling to call them out as though they were just having informed opinions on stuff, cause that’s clearly not the case.
Though in this case, it’s good to see a feminist give a fuck about health and safety issues in the workplace, that’s not something that happens very often!
I’m going to talk about some of the horrifically transphobic things Jeffreys has said for a second because I think it’s necessary, but they’re pretty awful.
I literally don’t understand what you’re saying here about Sheila Jeffreys. but the fragments I can grasp are wrong and you need to stop.
Is it your position that Sheila Jeffreys has little choice but to say wacky sociopathic shit because that’s what people expect of her as a woman and a feminist? because that’s ridiculous, plenty of other nuanced, compassionate feminists give it the lie. plus we do at some point have to actually hold women responsible for awful things they do. that’s not, like, liberal choice feminism or something. it’s pretty basic.
is your position that we can’t hold her responsible because her career depends on being a provocateur who cannot change? because that’s far from a good reason, and not even true.
jeffreys’ position at the university of melbourne is utterly secure. her work is published widely. she is very famous. she is supported on international tours. she has, as you say, a gaggle of mindlessly devoted fans everywhere she goes. she has a lot of power in this situation. she is not a victim here. nobody is holding a gun to her head forcing her to say that trans women’s hormone treatments are getting into the water supply through their urine, causing an overbalance of oestrogen in cis women’s bodies, and fostering breast and ovarian cancer. she doesn’t have to say that trans women experience violence because they are men with such a desire to perpetrate violence on women that they transform their own bodies into simulacra of women’s bodies to be raped. these are things that I heard from her actual lips, not third-hand garbled reports. and nobody is denying her a platform, although they really should. do not indulge this woman’s sense of victimisation.
also, if you want to stand in solidarity with Jeffreys as a woman even as you disagree with her, or whatever, you need to know that she is not standing in solidarity with you. I spent six years studying at the University of Melbourne and taking a lot of Gender Studies classes. I was very, very active in campus feminist organising for most of that time. Jeffreys and her fans were conspicuous in their absence from almost everything we did, judging it too queer and third-wave and sex-poz to sully their hands with. Jeffreys didn’t even support the campaign to save the Gender Studies major because she’d washed her hands of the discipline as soon as it changed its name from Women’s Studies, and transferred to the super-woman-friendly discipline of Political Science. As a prolific author with a big fanbase, she kept her job when a lot of much smarter feminist academics lost theirs, and she didn’t say a peep about the cuts. She and her tutors also had a reputation for publicly humiliating young women in her classes who questioned her analysis, even very tentatively and in good faith. I experienced this myself and so did many of my friends. it makes sense — her most vituperative attacks are against other women.
like, I am all about pointing out the misogyny implicit in many critiques of radical feminism — sometimes people don’t actually know what they’re talking about and it’s just another way of saying “don’t you hate those crrrrrrazy hairy-legged feminists, amirite?”. and I know this wasn’t all your post was about. but you gotta draw the line somewhere and by this time, the line is several parsecs behind giving sheila jeffreys any benefit of the doubt at all.
