Michael Kimmel, #MeTooSociology and Feminist Betrayal of Sex Workers in Academia

Juniper Fitzgerald writes: I’ve made an entire alter ego out of the things people hate most about women: bodily autonomy and self-determination in the form of sex work and body modifications, among other things. The recent allegations against prominent sociologist Michael Kimmel, a man known for his scholarship on masculinity and masculine entitlement, unveil the things people love most about women—complicity in the form of apologetics and silence, among other things.

As a former sex worker and sociologist, the allegations against Kimmel sent me spiraling in ways I did not anticipate, and not just because I have repeatedly experienced sexual harassment in my academic career. I am particularly revolted by the allegations against Kimmel because I disavowed my hard-earned sex worker gut feeling in order to elevate his career.

[This article was first published online at Tits and Sass.]

The lauding of Kimmel as a feminist hero and the white, cis women who still defend him, are particular kinds of institutional, personal, and professional betrayals. Black feminist sociologists like Patricia Hill Collins have, for years, pointed to the “insider within” position of marginalized people, explaining how social, racial, and sexual marginalization contributes to a clearer vision of society (a fish doesn’t know it’s in water, after all).

Despite my sex worker red flags going off every time I used to show Kimmel’s TED Talk in the college classes I teach, titled Why Gender Equality is Good for Men, I’ve used his work for years. I’ve assigned his books. I’ve suggested him for paid lecturing gigs. More than anything, that’s how the “game” of academia works—in order to succeed, one must deny the knowledge gained as an “insider within.” Having played the game of sex work and the game of academia for quite some time, I always suspected that Kimmel was the kind of man who’d believe that fucking him was its own form of liberation. But I pushed that feeling to the side because YAY FEMINISM!

The allegations against Kimmel produced the hashtag #MeTooSociology, which is teeming with horror stories of sexual assault in higher education. Relatedly, after experiencing sexual harassment as an undergraduate and graduate student, I decided to do my Ph.D. dissertation on the sexual harassment that sex working femmes in academia experience.

In my dissertation, I interviewed 20 sex workers who were either students or faculty at an accredited university in the U.S. or U.K. Every single one experienced unwanted sexual attention in intellectual spaces—classrooms, offices, conferences, etc.—because of the lingering perception that sex workers are perpetually available. I also included my own experiences in academia as a once current, now former sex worker. I have been sexually harassed, sexually assaulted, and propositioned by no less than nine cis men in academic positions of power.

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The Rise of Socialism in the United States

Striking teachers occupy the state capitol building in West Virginia, March 2018

Tabitha Spence writes: The American electoral field is witnessing a leftward shift not seen in at least the past four decades. Bernie Sanders’ 2016 bid for president on the Democratic Party ticket sent shock waves throughout the country, as he openly identified as a (*gasp*) socialist, opening up possibilities for the American Left that had been hitherto foreclosed. [This article was first published in the Daily Times in Pakistan.]

To understand the resurgence of the American Left, one needs to look to the country’s largest socialist organisation, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which is rapidly growing. The group’s membership has ballooned from a paltry 5,000 members in November of 2016 to nearly 50,000 members today. Last year, fifteen members of the Democratic Socialists of America won seats in local elections in thirteen different states, in addition to the 20 members already holding elected office nationwide. This year, dozens of DSA members are contesting in the midterm elections, some of whom have already cleared the Democratic primaries and will be facing Republican opponents in November.

The successful victory in the Democratic primaries for congressional seat of a New York district by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is indicative of this trend. The 28-year-old waitress from the Bronx led a remarkable grassroots campaign to unseat 20-year incumbent Jim Crowley, a seasoned congressman with the backing of corporate donors and the political elite within the Democratic Party. A similar campaign is being run in Delaware, where Air Force veteran Kerri Evelyn Harris is challenging sitting Democratic Senator Tom Carper, known for serving the special corporate and military interests that have bankrolled his campaigns over the past fourteen years.

Given the Cold War nostalgia regarding socialism that continues to haunt the narratives of history in public school curricula and the framing of politics by the mainstream media, this is an unprecedented turn of events. Personally speaking, growing up in central Texas and rural Nebraska I had never heard the idea of ‘socialism’ being invoked in a positive light, as it was widely considered to be a dirty word associated with authoritarianism, famine and gulags. Yet a month ago while visiting my family in Texas I became a proud, card-carrying member of the DSA, and many of my family members (the Trump supporters as well as Hillary supporters) are engaging in discussions and debates about democratic socialist policies in a serious way. How did this incredible reversal of possibilities unfold?

Pence, Trump and Evangelicals

Mike Pence may well be the next president of the United States. Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale explain the relationship between Trump and evangelical Protestants like Vice-President Pence.  [This piece was first published in Turkish in Cumhuriyet ,August 12, 2018.]

For thirty years, the right wing of the Republican Party in the United States was dominated by politically organized evangelical Protestants. Their politics rested on three pillars. First, they were for sexually conservative ‘family values’ and against abortion, lesbians and gays, adultery and sex workers. Second, they were racists, especially towards black people, Muslim and immigrants. Third, they were pro-business and anti-tax.

Evangelical (‘fundamentalist’) white Protestants are only 17% of Americans. By contrast, more moderate white Protestants are 13%, Catholics are 18%, and 24% of Americans now say they have no religious affiliation. So evangelicals could never dominate politics. But they could dominate the right of the Republican party, using racism to appeal to a wider audience.

Then came Trump. He is different. In the last 40 years of neoliberalism, the US has become the most unequal of the rich countries. To understand his appeal, you have to understand the bitterness among ordinary Americans. In real terms the pay rate of the median man now is the same as it was forty years ago, in the time of his grandfather.

Sexual politics and Trumpgate

Students in Concord, California, breaking out of their high school to join gun control protests

The balance of power has shifted and Trump is going. Sexual politics has been central to this, Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale write. The turning point, the hinge of history, is Michael Cohen’s guilty plea over payments by him and Trump to two sex workers. That is not a sideshow.

When Trump was elected, the left, the feminists, the anti-racists, the liberals, the Democrats were in despair. Then came the women’s march on 21 January 2017, the day after Trump’s inauguration.

Everyone, on all sides, was astonished it was so big. Two things made it big: Trump’s anti-abortion politics and that the president was a pussy grabber (his words). They made it big because a third of Americans have had an abortion, the great majority of Americans love someone who has had an abortion, and every woman has been insulted or groped by a pussy grabber.

Before the march, many Democrats were inclined to follow Obama’s advice and try to work with Trump and influence him over the next year. The march stiffened them. Then, almost immediately, the occupations of the airports to defend Muslim immigrants made the politicians braver. And #metoo has meant a crucial shift in power at work. Pussy grabbers, rapists and abusers are losing their jobs. 

Far Right Racism and Gang Abuse

By Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale.

Three years ago we posted an article about gang abuse of young women in Oxford. This article is of national relevance now, because the fascist and hard racist right is making hay with campaigns against Asian and Muslim abusers. Two weeks ago 15,000 people marched in central London calling for freedom for Tommy Robinson. There were 500 anti-racist counter-marchers. Things are getting serious.

Covering up abuse – We are all gymnasts

 

Rachel Denhollander at the trial of Larry Nasser

Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale write: In the wake of metoo, collective movements are now exposing cover-ups from the top. The target is no longer just one individual, a Strauss-Kahn, a Bill Clinton or a Clarence Thomas. These movements are shouting: it’s a whole system. The class inequalities that protect abuse are being exposed. This is cause for joy, and hope.

The Larry Nasser case provides a brutal example. At Nasser’s trial last month more than 160 survivors of abuse testified about what he had done to them. Nasser was a doctor for the athletics department at Michigan State University, and for the United States national Olympic team in gymnastics. The stories the survivors told were moving, and horrific. Nasser abused thousands of girls, some as young as six, by fingering them vaginally and anally for his own pleasure, over a period of more than twenty years.

Nasser was only able to do what he did because dozens of people  covered up for him. This fits with what we have seen in the many cases the Metoo movement has begun to expose. Only a minority of men abuse. Most men do not do those things. But the men who do it, do it over and over again, so almost every woman suffers.

Fresh Apricots – A Prison Story

Saydnaya prison, Damascus, Syria

Nancy Lindisfarne writes:

For forty-six years the Assad regime has ruled Syria with murderous brutality. A measure of this brutality was the quelling of a popular uprising against the regime in the city of Hama in 1982. Assad (the father) bombed and killed some 20,000 Syrian citizens. Or perhaps 40,000 – the violence was so comprehensive and effective that it has never been possible to establish exactly how many perished.

The massacre in Hama and the violence of the Assads’ secret prisons served to terrify the population and kept people quiescent. Until 2011. In the Arab Spring hope was contagious. Syrians rose up to rid themselves of a tyrannical regime.