Nature Always Wins

You want to know the logic behind my actions? 

Here is one explanation:

Call me by a man’s name instead of a woman’s, 

and suddenly every horrific thing I’ve done,

makes me a hero. 

The findings indicate that slaughterhouse employment increases total arrest rates, arrests for violent crimes, arrests for rape, and arrests for other sex offenses in comparison with other industries. This suggests the existence of a “Sinclair effect” unique to the violent workplace of the slaughterhouse, a factor that has not previously been examined in the sociology of violence.

Though few researchers have looked into this phenomenon at length, those who have explored this issue have found that slaughterhouses increase violence in surrounding communities. In particular, they increase male violence against women. 

A majority of these workers are men, at least in the US. Most perpetrators of rape and domestic violence are men, and most victims are women. Did you read the study? The point is that slaughterhouses increase violence in surrounding communities, and that feminists should be having discussions about this when we talk about male violence against women. What psychological effects does killing hundreds of animals a day have on workers, and how does this spill into their personal lives and relationships? How are women uniquely vulnerable to sexual and domestic violence in our patriarchal society? Slaughterhouse work is extremely traumatizing, and it can cause severe psychological issues in these workers, who are then liable to take out their frustrations on those around them (i.e. romantic partners, children). This needs to be studied and talked about, not brushed off.

Vegans and nonvegans alike should be concerned about this issue. Many slaughterhouse workers themselves are harmed by this work, as they are more prone to injury, PTSD, and substance abuse than the general population. Many of these workers in the US are vulnerable immigrants, and those who are undocumented are at risk of deportation. All around, this industry is violent and harmful to those who participate in it. 

Highly recommend y’all listen to their podcast episode where this topic is discussed in further detail, along with the issues surrounding BDSM, kink and polyamory.

Radical feminist writings from female perspective online have saved my life, and my sanity. We are surrounded by male brainwashing and male perspective to the point where many women don’t even realize they have a right to their own perspective, and a lot of them still feel insane for just feeling hurt and upset at how horribly men treat them. Exposing women to female perspective, on a very public, social platform, is a revolutionary. I remember first time in my life when I found a radfem blog, first time I read a post written by a woman, saying we are not bad people for not caring for men’s problems, because males create all of our, and their problems, so why should our activism center them? It light up my entire world,  just that statement that it’s ridiculous to expect of us to dedicate our movement on people who are reason why we have a movement! I kept reading radfem materials every single day for the next 6 months, and bit by bit my sanity was returning, for the first time in my life I was seeing the truth, the actual data of violence, the actual representation of who women are as human beings. I have never before in my life felt proud to be female, but after absorbing radfem writings, I haven’t stopped feeling proud.

Openly writing radical feminist resources has proven to be dangerous and emotionally taxing, every single radfem who stepped forward and started writing her own posts has faced rape threats, death threats, attacks and insults from every single group that isn’t radical feminist, we have been insulted and trashed to death for doing this, do you think this would be the case if our writings aren’t very effective and dangerous to status quo of patriarchy? You think there would be bans on communicating with us and interacting with our resources, if they weren’t extremely effective in undoing the brainwashing inflicted on women? Waking women up from believing in male delusions is essential to the movement, and this is the only safe way to do it. We’re providing each abused and raped and exhausted woman with a place where her experience and feelings matter and are represented within all of us. This is something patriarchy cannot give to any woman. Resources we create are invaluable to women’s sanity, confirmation that her instincts are right, her perspective is right, the way she observes and condemns abusive men is right, the way she feels uncomfortable and threatened in male company is right. Women need to hear this, because all their life they’ve been listening to how they’re not allowed to express or even feel any of that, they’ve been drowned in guilt for even thinking they’re right to condemn those who merrily abuse them.

The Dutch experiment in legalised prostitution has been a disaster

Julie Bindel

2 February 2013

Do you remember the rather brilliant comedy sketch featuring Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse in which they played laid-back police officers in Amsterdam, bragging that they no longer have to deal with the crime of murder in the Netherlands since the Dutch legalised it? Don’t laugh too hard. In 2000 the Dutch government decided to make it even easier for pimps, traffickers and punters by legalising the already massive and highly visible brothel trade. Their logic was as simple as it was deceptive: to make things safer for everyone. Make it a job like any other. Once the women were liberated from the underworld, the crooks, drug dealers and people traffickers would drift away.

Twelve years on, and we can now see the results of this experiment. Rather than afford better protection for the women, it has simply increased the market. Rather than confine the brothels to a discrete (and avoidable) part of the city, the sex industry has spilt out all over Amsterdam — including on-street. Rather than be given rights in the ‘workplace’, the prostitutes have found the pimps are as brutal as ever. The government-funded union set up to protect them has been shunned by the vast majority of prostitutes, who remain too scared to complain.

Pimps, under legalisation, have been reclassified as managers and businessmen. Abuse suffered by the women is now called an ‘occupational hazard’, like a stone dropped on a builder’s toe. Sex tourism has grown faster in Amsterdam than the regular type of tourism: as the city became the brothel of Europe, women have been imported by traffickers from Africa, Eastern Europe and Asia to meet the demand. In other words, the pimps remained but became legit — violence was still prevalent but part of the job, and trafficking increased. Support for the women to leave prostitution became almost nonexistent. The innate murkiness of the job has not been washed away by legal benediction.

The Dutch government hoped to play the role of the honourable pimp, taking its share in the proceeds of prostitution through taxation. But only 5 per cent of the women registered for tax, because no one wants to be known as a whore — however legal it may be. Illegality has simply taken a new form, with an increase in trafficking, unlicensed brothels and pimping; with policing completely out of the picture, it was easier to break the laws that remained. To pimp out women from non-EU countries, desperate for a new life, remains illegal. But it’s never been easier.

Legalisation has imposed brothels on areas all over Holland, whether they want them or not. Even if a city or town opposes establishing a brothel, it must allow at least one — not doing so is contrary to the basic federal right to work. To many Dutch, legality and decency have been irreconcilably divorced. It has been a social, legal and economic failure — and the madness, finally, is coming to an end.

The brothel boom is over. A third of Amsterdam’s bordellos have been closed due to the involvement of organised criminals and drug dealers and the increase in trafficking of women. Police now acknowledge that the red-light district has mutated into a global hub for human trafficking and money laundering. The streets have been infiltrated by grooming gangs seeking out young, vulnerable girls and marketing them to men as virgins who will do whatever they are told. Many of those involved in Amsterdam’s regular tourist trade — the museums and canals — fear that their visitors are vanishing along with the city’s reputation.

I was last there with Roger Matthews, a professor of Criminology at Kent University and a renowned expert on the sex trade. The politicians he spoke to confess that the legislation has made a total pig’s ear of an already unsavoury situation. So the repair work is starting — for what good it will do. Women who rent the windows will soon be obliged to register as prostitutes. This will be as ineffective as the obligation on them to pay tax. When the fake and government-funded union supposedly representing those involved in prostitution did a massive membership recruitment post-legalisation, only a hundred joined, and most of those were strippers and lap dancers.

Rather than remove the sleaziness of the red light district, it made the area more depressing than ever — full of drunken sex tourists who act as window shoppers, pointing and laughing at the women they see. Local women pass the streets with their heads down, trying not to see the other women displayed like cuts of meat in a butcher’s shop. Men can be seen entering the brothels, trying to barter down the price. Others come out zipping up their jeans. Many of the women look very young, all of them bored, with the majority sitting on stools in underwear playing with their phones.

Nowhere else in the world is street prostitution legal, because people do not want it in plain sight. Where there is a street sex trade, women are accosted on their way home by punters, and often condoms, drugs paraphernalia and pimps are visible. But the Netherlands decided in 1996 that street prostitution was a decent way to earn money and created several ‘tolerance zones’ for men to safely rent a vagina, anus or mouth for a few minutes. Cars drive into cubicles. This being the Netherlands, there is a special section for cyclists. Keep prostitution green.

Currently, yes, a few places have shut down over the last couple of years, but prostitution is still completely legal and seen as a job as any other, especially under the public. As a woman against prostitution in the Netherlands, I have been treated like a prude, a controlling douchebag and an obsessive religious person whenever I tell about my views and the millions of troubles in the world of prostitution.

In this country we work by an indirect democratic party system. As far as I know, all parties, except for some extremist Christian ones, are pro legal prostitution. This is why I’m not expecting anyone to shut down these brothels and streets any time soon.

However, the government made a few new rules to ‘ensure safety’ in the last few years. These are utter bullshit:

If you visit a prostitute and she’s completely beat up, apathetic and obviously abused, you must cancel your visit and report her to the authorities. No man does this. No man is being educated about how to spot an abused person, other than ‘she has a lot of being beat up spots I guess’. 

If you continue to visit and use the obviously abused prostitute, you can be punished with a very short jail time. However, this is not being done, because everyone keeps whining ‘ah but how could HE know?!’, ‘this is such an unfair law, it’s not obvious that they’re being abused, it’s not our fault!’. Besides that, who’s ever going to report such a man… the prostitute? Some people walking by? Yeah, right.

The Netherlands keeps sweet-talking about how well they take care of their prostitutes, how slavery and trafficking isn’t that big of a problem. About how many rules and laws they’re making to keep all the women safe, about how they help women leave the scene so it’s 100% their free will and choice if they keep doing it. About how someone needs to receive these men, how it’s so good for export and tourism. About how we shouldn’t be worried: it’s just a job like any other.

The worst maritime animal welfare tragedy in history could, by now, be unavoidable, says Gabrile Păun, the EU director for Animals International, an NGO.

There are 16 ships taking live animals from the EU to the Persian Gulf which have been stuck for several days behind the stranded ‘Ever Given’ cargo vessel in the Suez Canal.

Even with the Ever Given now slowly moving again, the live animals inside the blistering cargo containers, which are quickly running out of feed and water, are now nearing an even more tragic end than that which awaits them in the slaughterhouses at their destination.

Even if the ships were to resume full course today, the water and food would not last until their sea journey is over.

Romania is the source for the 130,000 of the 200,000 live animals now caught in the Suez bottleneck.

A woman is a person with female biology, and ascribing any other characteristics to her on that basis is sexism. For example: "she is biologically a woman -> all women are submissive -> she is submissive." That is sexism.

The following is not sexism: "she is biologically a woman -> that doesn't tell us anything about her as a person."

Saying women are female has never been about reducing women to our vaginas. Tho vaginas and uteruses are often talked about in these discussions because they are how men/what men use to oppress us. The fact that it’s assume we can provide reproductive labor, provide male heirs/children. Men use our bodies as “proof” we are subhuman, secondary class citizens. Girls are kept out of schools, sent to menstural huts, being victims of FGM, being married off as child BECAUSE they are female. Because they have a vagina. Our bodies are the reason why these things happen. Not any sort of worldwide shared gender identity that we’re questioned about before being denied rights.