This Week In Porn Hysteria: The Shame Merchants

VB – the Guardian never ‘hired’ Margolis as a staff writer; they’ve simply published a number of articles by her. Bindel, by contrast, gets a far more regular gig both online and in the print edition, which suggests that one or more people in the editorial chain is at least happy to publish her work and at most is broad agreement with either it or the dated radical separatist feminism which underpins it. Moreover, Bindel only ever interviews people she agrees with (Sheila Jeffreys, Gail Dines, men who are anti-porn). I see it as an attempt to act as ‘gatekeeper’ on a whole range of feminist and sexuality debates (especially when it comes to policy-making), not least anything that suggests that feminism can’t explain sexual choices and practices (anal sex is neither feminist nor a sign of the eternal misogyny of ‘The Patriarchy’). Likewise with Belle de Jour/Brook Magnanti: the paper has gone from awarding her ‘Best UK Blog’ to using her as a means of attacking any debate about decriminalising prostitution. At the moment, it looks like contemporary UK feminism is gearing up for a rematch of the ’80s ‘porn wars’ – and will make the same mistakes all over again.

While i am in agreement on your general views on sex and pornography, i strongly disagree with your argument here. Bindel absolutely should have disclosed her connections/affiliations. However, you would’ve done better to actually confront the claims in the article (why is anal sex innately vile, degrading, and abusive???) rather than relying on a basically ad hominem argument. Bindel and Dines’ connections to the right, while interesting, do not provide us with good reasons to dismiss their claims. (Let’s not forget that there’s money to be made on both sides of this equation!)

This is very much normal for the Guardian. What you have to bear in mind is that unlike where you live, our local feminist movement is generally very much anti-porn, and since the Guardian is the paper of the left wing it reflects that. (Yes, I did say left wing. Bindel’s not quite so far left as some of the more obscure anti-capitalist feminist groups here, who are generally opposed to her anti-porn stuff, but that’s where the traditional ties lie and a lot of the arguments are very much inspired by Marxism.)

In particular, Julie Bindel’s no right-wing astroturfer. She has strong roots within feminist academia and a long history of espousing political lesbianism that’d be entirely unacceptable within the right wing. (Have you read her thoughts on heterosexual relationships and especially marriage?) Her primary sphere of political influence is the center-left Labour party, which contained quite a few MPs similar to her. Basically, her feminist credentials are impeccable.

Also, if you normally respect the Guardian, you can’t have been paying that much attention to trans* issues. They still haven’t really apologised for Julie Bindel’s horrible transphobia, or indeed Germaine Greer’s. They were finally pressured recently into publishing a response piece to some particularly odious claims that trans* women were censoring Bindel, which is very much a first, but that’s all. (No, this hasn’t affected Julie Bindel’s level of respect within the feminist community, even though she’s still publishing similar stuff; why would it? Also notice that the response is by a US feminist – there’s no similarly prominent transfeminist figure in this country.)

Similarly, the Guardian has always had links to Julie Bindel, to the anti-porn movement, and to its close relative the anti-sex trafficking movement. In particular, after academics studying sex trafficking made some rather important criticisms of Julie Bindel’s claims on the number of trafficked women, the Guardian quite helpfully published a link to Bindel & co’s response (which all but implies that said academics are funded by pimps) but were pressured into not linking the criticism and carefully don’t describe the actual issues with the report. (One huge issue was that Bindel’s reasearch assumed that (a) every sex worker from certain ethnic groups was in the country illegally, (b) all of these women were forced into prostitution, and (c) phoning up brothels and asking about the ethnicity of their workers would give honest answers. That’s problematic in many ways.)

This research was being used to justify laws that many sex workers felt would endanger their safety, and there was a fairly unpleasant subtext in a lot of the organisation’s reports about evil prostitutes turning men into monsters who’d rape nice middle-class women. Was nearly an unqualified success too – groups like Eaves were apparently very effective at shutting out undesirables from the political process.