Posts tagged politics

There’s a young woman in my class who is both smart and highly motivated. (Actually, there are several people like that.) This last year she led a campaign to make prostitution illegal in Rhode Island, and succeeded. I was always curious about why she was so passionate about it, though. Whenever she talked about it, she rarely spoke about the business/institution/practice of prostitution. Instead, she spoke about Human Trafficking a.k.a. slavery.

While both topics have a connotation of less-than-moral, they’re still quite distinct and I wasn’t quite sure how they overlapped. Certainly, slavery can be used to “employ”** prostitutes, but slavery can also be used to “employ” farm workers. Arguably, the conditions surrounding undocumented immigrant farm workers are just as bad if not worse than those surrounding legal prostitution in Rhode Island. Why campaign just against prostitution? Why not campaign against undocumented/coerced farm workers too?

(Just to be clear, since I do expect to be misunderstood here, I am morally and politically opposed to slavery in all its forms. I believe it to be wrong, I think its already illegal, and I believe that it should be illegal.)

(I’d like to point out that I’ve never interacted personally with the person who prompted this blog entry. I know nothing about her except what I’ve heard from her during lecture discussions or observed visually.)

I think I’ve figured out why. She, like I, is opposed to human trafficking. She is also, separately, opposed to men having sex with women. That sounds absurd, but please read just a few more sentences before you think I’m making an ad hominem attack.

I took a course on feminism during my last semester in undergrad. The professor for that course, who was a fantastic professor, was married and had one child. Her husband and her split the child care responsibilities. She worked Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and he worked Tuesday, Thursday, and either Saturday or Sunday. Or something like that. On days when she was at home with their child, she would make dinner for her and her child. She deliberately would never make enough for her husband to eat when he got home later in the evening. She was already making dinner, and already cooked for two. However, she deliberately never cooked for three. On purpose.

Her husband would come sit with them at the dinner table with a bowl of cereal.

Since she teaches a feminism course, you can probably guess that she is a feminist. Her blind opposition to traditional roles was so strong that she not only avoided the role but avoided the appearance of the role. Since women have traditionally made dinner for their husbands, she now refuses to make dinner for her husband even though she is already in the kitchen making dinner. There’s something not quite right about that. (Her husband does cook for her.)

I think that my classmate’s opposition to prostitution is feminist in nature, and not merely a moral objection to slavery.

Why does the nature of her opposition matter? It matters because of her choice of what to campaign against. She campaigned against one thing, while using rhetoric directed against another thing. The arguments in favour of subjugating men as “pay back” for their historical subjugation of women are completely different from the arguments in favour of stronger slavery legislation. That, in turn, is significant because there isn’t as much support for the subjugation of men as there is for anti-slavery legislation. Not only would virtually all (but not absolutely all) men be opposed to male-subjugation, but the vast majority of women would be similarly opposed.