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Maidinbeirut




This blog is dedicated to women from Sri lanka and Ethiopia working as domestic workers in Beirut, Lebanon. These women take upon themselves great voyages to foreign countries in the hope of a better future. Their courage and endurance is outstanding.

As time passes, the issues covered in this blog have expanded to cover other kinds of specific women's work like sex work, historical ways of describing the plight of women: white slavery, human traffic or modern slavery as well identitarian politics and gender...

If you want to contact us: minainbeirut[at]hotmail[dot]com

 

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This is a blog by Socialautopsy, the visual research collective.

For more information, please contact:
 mina(at)socialautopsy(dot)org
 and we will get in touch with you soon.

 All our work is licensed under:
 Creative Commons Attribution - No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License

 

 

 

4 juillet 2008 5 04 /07 /juillet /2008 09:53

Sex Work is Different from Sex Slavery, aver Carnal Toilers

By MARTHA ROSENBERG

Nicholas Kristof was baffled.
A year after the New York Times columnist rescued teenaged Cambodian prostitute Srey Mom from a Poipet brothel by purchasing her freedom for $203, she was back in the brothel.
Voluntarily.

In fact, she wouldn't even be rescued initially without her cell phone and jewelry which Kristof had to buy back for her. Didn't she want to be saved?

Not necessarily said organizers from Sex Worker Outreach Project-Chicago (SWOP) at a Chicago presentation in June, sponsored by the Open University of the Left and the Chicago Socialist Party.

The right-wing-backed human trafficking movement, part of the "anti-prostitution industrial complex," deliberately blurs the line between sex work and sex slavery to further its moralistic agenda and line its pockets said Jasmine, a SWOP organizer at the presentation called Sex Workers, Criminalization and Human Rights.

It has duped many, including the media, into seeing "sex slavery" where labor, immigration, gender and human rights abuses exist and occluded the plight of both consensual sex workers and women trafficked into household, farm and sweatshop work which is more common, charged Jasmine.

The flip side of the missionary imperative to save--the zeal to glorify the downtrodden-- also infects sex work perspectives said SWOP spokespeople.

Regardless of Heidi Fleiss' escapades, movies like Pretty Woman and college boys' tales of their Cool Trip to Nevada, sex work is not noble, salt of the earth employment that just needs legalization.

As long as sex workers are morally quarantined by illegality and stigma, they risk being robbed, cheated, raped, knifed, shot, beaten up, strangled, abducted, arrested and given diseases said "out" sex worker and SWOP organizer Pussy Willow, 47.
Not only are sex workers devoid of human rights, they can't even recruit community advocates because of the opprobrium, Willow added.

read the rest of the article in Counterpunch

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2 mai 2008 5 02 /05 /mai /2008 14:27

Je te paye tu me satisfais

"King Kong Theory" rocks. One of Despentes only non-fiction accounts, the book discusses controversial issues in feminism like sex, rape or pornography, gives straightforward answers (well, it is Virginie Despentes) and describes her own experience.


Prostitution, a major figure in the lives of women, is stripped to its core. Basically it is described as another form of work (for money), which in cases like hers, lead to financial and personal self confidence.


Despentes cites Gail Pheterson's Prism on Prostitution, which describes the basic paradigm of prostitutional exchange between heterosexual men and women, where men pay for women's services. This might be the regular exchange between a client and the prostitute, but still holds true of bourgeois marriage. The problem of this exchange is that society wants it to rest apparently for free. Just as cleaning and taking care of children and elders, fucking men is a basic woman's instinct. Why would working for nothing in a telephone centre while your boss listens to your conversation be worse than fucking him and getting four times as much?


Women that work as prostitutes are stigmatized, they form a sole variety of women, while men that pay are not singled out, or harassed. The political decision consists in victimising the prostitutes. The reasoning, they would rather be doing something else for money also applies to underpaid cashiers in Carrefour, Despentes argues and they get much less. In this hypocrite society, women are made to seduce since they are children, their body and sexuality is for sale as another standardized commercial object, only they'd better not do it themselves. Money is independence. Masculine sexuality is not violence on women as long as it is well paid. Violence instead is the control on women's life and choices.


Although sex work has in at its core the issue of women sexuality and body, many of the things Despentes argues also hold true for other kinds of services women offer in the world. Mail Order brides, now a flourishing market is a rather crude example: buy a wife. 


Domestic workers also perform chores, which are feminine services and amongst the lowest status works around. Apparently it needs no instruction, as if it was born in a woman (like a man in a construction site, I suppose) and is thus badly paid. It is not even socially of legally considered as work.


Missing in Despentes is a description of the Madames. Most domestic workers, as well as most types of care staff and nannies, relate mostly to women as their superiors, as also do some prostitutes (house moms, madames or mamasans). Despentes depicts women collectively or in comradeship very seldom indeed, it always seems to be women alone faced with a man's world.

 


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8 avril 2008 2 08 /04 /avril /2008 14:25

More porno, less TV

(a sunday afternoon rant)

Although arguably all tv is comparably rancid, Italian television stands for particularly sexist depictions of women. Back in the beginning of the 90s, when Berlusconi's mediaset arrived in Spain with their Tele 5 channel, the almost naked mamachichos would strut up and down, sing for 20 seconds and disappear. These women were the embodiment of sexy, meaningless adornments, who were there for men to grab (Mama, chicho me toca, me toca cada vez más) and 15 years old boys to jerk off (there was no internet back then).


Luckily I rarely watch tv, which probably explains the surprise and estrangement I feel when I watch. Last Sunday, for instance: an afternoon entertainment show on Italian TV. A  show for an after lunch family audience with the fake cheerfulness of an orchestra playing Karma Chameleon, an audience clapping away and a dancing crowd composed mainly of women.



The masculine gaze of the cameras go up and down these long legged, short skirted, moderately happy women with long hair and deep cleavages who flirt straight at you. They look over made up and sterile, like dolls.  As mindless as sexism can get.


Why get upset about pornography? Seems to me pornography offers more possibilities, sizes, sexes and perversities than these cloned Barbies. Open legs, bare sexes, in twos, in threes, pregnant, pissing, anal or oral. You stare, you cum, you relax.


These high heeled babes allow no relax. The constant bombardment with standardized erotic depictions of women does more harm to women than sex ever could. Their Sunday afternoon normality is obscene. As if good fun was a short dress and a peek into your tits.

  ------------

 P.s. Charlotte Roche whose "Feuchtgebiete" (Wetland) is a bestseller in Germany stands for the same opinion:

 

Im „Playboy“ äußerte sich die Autorin positiv zur Pornographie. Doch im „Spiegel“-Gespräch gestand sie: „Das Pin-up, das ich auf einem C&A-Plakat sehe, wenn ich mein Kind zum Kindergarten fahre, das stört mich auch.“ Roche begründet ihre Aversion damit, dass der in der Öffentlichkeit ad nauseam propagierte Sex „langweiliger, flacher, spießiger und unaufregender“ sei als die Wirklichkeit: „Ich bin für mehr Sex - mehr Schweinereien, keine Tabus. Ich glaube, dass es vom echten Sex, dem Sex, der riecht und schmeckt und schmutzige Geräusche macht, nie genug geben kann.“

(FAZ, 14.04.08)

 

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23 mars 2008 7 23 /03 /mars /2008 20:22

Pute Pride

Once again the Pute Pride took place in march. Meeting under red umbrellas on a rainy saturday afternoon in Pigalle. It's fun to march, not only do they have the best slogans of all, they are all dressed beautifully and the tourists and sunday strollers are more than dazzled.
Here the chants:

Ni coupables, Putepride_2007.jpg
ni victimes,
fières d'êtres putes

 

Plus de caresses,
moins de CRS,
des droits,
des droits,
wawawa

 

de l'air,
de l'air,
ouvrez les frontières

 
où
quand
comment
combien je prends
le choix me reviens
mon corps est à moi

 

vous couchez avec nous
vous votez contre nous

pute, transe, drogué, immigré                       
solidarité des minorités                                     

 
voila la vérité
qui vous fait chier
non seulement on baise
après on se fait payer

 
on n'est pas que belles
on est rebelles
de salauds
professionnelles

 les clients avec nous!!!!


les putes

les panthères roses

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13 mars 2008 4 13 /03 /mars /2008 16:37

The Mann Act

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The disclosure that New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer had been hiring the services of a sex worker has caused a major scandal in the US this week. Famous for heading the State's Organized Crime Task Force and therefore involved in the prosecution of "prostitution rings",  Spitzer who relentlessly expressed his anti-corruption stand and his disdain for prostitution, seems to have been caught in the act. But what act is it really?

Legally, he could be charged with the 1910 Mann act, created in the midst of the White Slave hysteria of the beginning of the century that banned the interstate transport of females for “immoral purposes.” (the national counterpart of the human traffic regulation, which Spitzer helped pass through in NY ).

But in their press statement, a group of sex workers and advocates have denounced how "Laws against inter-state transportation for the purposes of commercial sex are too often used for punishing people working as sex workers and those who work with and patronize them. While Root Magazine has illustrated the troubling history of the Mann Act, which has served to criminalize consenting but unmarried couples.

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The prohibitionist stand on prosititution of feminists like Melissa Farley, the hypocrisy of politicians that fight prostitution while enjoying it, the mediatic presentation of the "prostitution scandal" hits you in the face. Refreshing to surf sexworkers blog, and blogs on sexwork to get a much more critical position.

more:
Bound, not gagged
The Wisdom of the Whore
 Waking Vixen

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