By Helen Lobato

Last week I caught up with the movie Careless Love. Written by John Duigan it’s about a Sydney university student called Linh played by Nammi Le who works at night as a sex worker to help her immigrant family with their mortgage. Basically it’s just a contemporary expose of a university student/prostitute’s life without any analysis of the institution that is prostitution.

John Duigan decided to write Careless Love after reading a series of reports on how university students were turning to prostitution to cope with the rising cost of living and university fees. Duigan  says that he didn’t set out to write a story about sexual slavery or drug abuse, or to depict sex work as glamorous. He was equally  determined that Linh wasn’t regarded as a victim. Careless Love presents prostitution as a choice for young women to make; delivering greater income than the usual part-time work available for university students such as waitressing. 

Last week there was a plethora of stories in the media about sex work with workers and their supporters arguing for the practice’s legitimacy. The first of these articles concerned the Melbourne Festival of Sex Work.  To note the occasion, local sex workers intent on demystifying their profession appeared on a panel open to the public. The Age reports that at the Secret Society Bar in Bourke Street a porn star, an escort, a tantric practitioner, a dominatrix and a rent boy invited members of the public to ask any question about their sex work in exchange for a gold coin donation. Then there was an opinion piece written by Wendy Squires. In Selling your body, not your soul, Squires  defends her prostitute friend whom she says is ‘not manipulating affections or promising more than can be delivered.’ Rather she’s ‘a businesswoman exchanging sex for money in a legal and safe environment. 

In Careless Love, Linh is an intelligent and beautiful young woman who chooses to do escort work in an effort to pay for her family’s mortgage. Linh is portrayed as strong and in control of her life and her clients. For her, the process of moving into prostitution and exiting happens seamlessly. She is not a victim, for the idea of the prostituted woman as without ‘agency’ is no longer politically correct. According to Ekman, author of Prostitution, the abolition of the victim and post-modernism’s defence of the status-quo, to be a victim is now regarded as shameful. Referring to someone as a victim, according to the post-modernists, is to deny them their ‘agency’.

To be able to defend that women sell their bodies (and that men buy them) one must first abolish the victim and instead redefine the prostitute as a sex worker, a strong woman who knows what she wants, a businesswoman. The sex worker becomes a sort of new version of the ‘happy hooker (Ekman).

But a ‘happy hooker’ is not the experience of prostitutes who don’t have this so-called choice. In reality, prostitution is a job where 71% of women have been subjected to physical violence; 63% have been raped while in prostitution and  89% want to leave and would do so if they could. Women in prostitution have a death rate 40 times higher than the average and are 16 times more likely to be murdered.

If the only information about sex work is obtained from our current media then the purchase of women’s bodies for sex will continue to be regarded as normal. But rather than prostitution being inevitable and unstoppable, it is  ’socially constructed out of men’s dominance and women’s subordination’ (Jeffreys 1997, 3).

When Linh’s double life is finally revealed there is disapproval mostly from her family but also from her boyfriend. Her parents are ashamed that they have been rescued by prostitution money and her boyfriend tries unsuccessfully to forgive and forget. But why is it that the prostitute, and in this case Linh, who is condemned for her part in the prostitution contract? What about the men who use her and the millions of other women who are trafficked and prostituted.

These recent media depictions of sex work leave so much to be desired.

References: Jeffreys, S 1997, The Idea of Prostitution, Spinifex Press, North Melbourne.

First published: http://allthenewsthatmatters.wordpress.com/

 

By Helen Lobato


For some women, the news that Hormone Replacement Therapy is OK, has come 10 years too late. According to the host of 3AW’s Talking Health, Dr Sally Cockburn; “those of us who have borne the hormonal burden for our families all our adult lives and who are now in our 50s deserve better.”

Cockburn’s lament comes on the heels of a report discrediting a previous study’s finding that HRT for menopause raised the risk of blood clots, breast cancer and strokes. In July 2002, the publication of the first Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) report caused a dramatic drop in HRT use throughout the world. Now a major reappraisal by international experts, published in the peer-reviewed journal Climacteric (the official journal of the International Menopause Society), shows how the evidence has changed over the last 10 years, and supports a return to a “rational use of HRT, initiated near the menopause”.

When Jenni Murray heard that women in their 40s and 50s can now safely take HRT to help cope with their symptoms, she became very concerned. The 62 year old author thinks that HRT gave her breast cancer. At the age of 45, Murray began HRT and the various symptoms that plagued her such as the hot flushes, the night sweats and low moods miraculously disappeared. While enjoying her symptom free life, Murray managed to ignore the warnings that came from the Million Women Health study and after ten years of using HRT, she was diagnosed with breast cancer.

Menopause occurs when menstruation stops and fertility ends. Common understanding of the process is that the menopausal ovaries are useless and defunct and that diminished and inadequate oestrogen levels need to be supplemented in the form of HRT to ward off the terrible ravages of ageing such as osteoporosis, heart disease and lack of sexual libido. However this is incorrect for our ovaries do not shrivel up but continue to produce
hormones, including oestrogens throughout the life cycle.

According to Sherrill Sellman author of Hormone Heresy:

Millions of menopausal women flock to their doctors’ offices each year seeking relief from such complaints as hot flushes, night sweats, bloating, indigestion, allergies, headaches, insomnia, fatigue, depression, high blood pressure, weight gain, head hair loss, facial hair growth, mood swings, aging skin, irritability, foggy thinking, lack of concentration, anxiety attacks, heart palpitations, bone loss, and heavy bleeding. The common panacea prescribed for all these symptoms is usually HRT. All these presenting symptoms are lumped together into the menopausal pigeonhole, oestrogen deficiency is the diagnosis and synthetic estrogen replacement becomes the cure. An obvious and simple solution for hormonal imbalance! Or so we are led to believe.

It was after the Second World War that doctors first began to argue for the maintenance of high levels of hormones for menopausal women and by the 1960s pharmaceutical companies began to spread the myth that menopause was a medical condition. Prior to this time menopause was not a disease but a welcome stage in women’s lives that signalled the end of fertility.

Sellman claims that it is not a lack of oestrogen that is causing the ‘menopausal symptoms’ but an excess.

Unfortunately, women have been intentionally led on a merry hormone goose chase. While medicalizing and pathologising of menopausal women with potent, carcinogenic and dangerous steroid drugs has filled the coffers of the drug companies and doctors alike, the real cause of these health problems has been ignored. The World Health Organization has found that an overweight post menopausal woman has more oestrogen circulating in her body than a skinny pre-menopausal woman!!

Western women now have some of the highest oestrogen levels ever recorded in history due to exposure to medications such as the Pill and HRT along with estrogen mimics found in pesticides, herbicides, and plastics, as well as the hormones injected into feed lot cattle and farmed fish.

In HRT Licensed to Kill and Maim, author and investigative journalist Martin Walker introduces his readers to a little known world of women severely damaged by hormone replacement therapy prescribed for them by their trusted medical practitioners. When Ros, a busy wife, mother and carer told her doctor she was experiencing hot flushes and dizziness, he diagnosed the menopause and prescribed hormone replacement therapy. Six months later with Ros’s periods becoming heavier, her breasts enlarging and her moods worsening, the HRT dose was increased and at the age of 42 Ros had her uterus and ovaries removed. Her doctor had failed to tell her that her symptoms could have been caused by high, not low levels of circulating oestrogen and it was only on Ros’s insistence that her levels were finally tested and found to be extraordinarily high – measuring 2110 with normal around 400.

Over the past few decades HRT has become a drug for which the need has been created, rather than it being a therapy for a legitimate ailment. Menopause is simply the cessation of the menses, rather than some pathological condition for which we must be treated. In spite of the fact that exogenous oestrogens have been linked to cancers and other health conditions for many years, profit-hungry drug companies have continued to market HRT for the most trivial of reasons with major long - term side effects.

Following the publication of the 2002 Women’s Health Initiative study 65 per cent of women on hormone therapy stopped taking HRT but two years later the message had faded and one in four women were back on the therapy. Now that this latest review recommends that the “classical use’ of hormone therapy be initiated near the menopause benefitting most women who have indications including significant menopausal symptoms or osteoporosis, it will be interesting to see how many women return to the HRT fold.

http://allthenewsthatmatters.wordpress.com/

 

 

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     For more on anti-prostitution, read these Spinifex titles:

                 

 
                 

By Pauline Hopkins


On morning radio this week, the presenters ran a quick radio telephone poll asking whether female listeners would rather be Craig Thompson’s wife or Peter Slipper’s wife. (What a choice, indeed, you may ask!) The verdict was that women would rather be Peter Slipper’s wife because “it wouldn’t be their fault.” Fault, you ask?

Well, the thinking went like this. If your male partner has an affair or liaison or tryst with another man, that means he is a closet gay. So no matter now pleasing you are as a woman, you would never satisfy him because his “problem” was him, not you or your sexual appeal or lack thereof.

With Craig Thompson, however, and his purported use of the services of female prostitutes, there is an implicit responsibility on the wife for his unfaithful behaviour because, to put it bluntly, she obviously wasn’t hot enough. Or so the morning radio theory went.

So let’s get this straight. Men behaving badly, whether allegedly fraudulently with credit cards or in breech of their marital pledges. And whose behaviour also comes under scrutiny? The not-hot-enough wife who “drove” him too it? Pleeeeease!

Anyone who doubts the need for feminism or the existence of misogyny just needs to look at this example. When women are held to account for the bad behaviour of their male partners, it is clear that there is still a need for ongoing scrutiny about the norms that operate in our societies, including free democracies.

 

By Kathleen Barry


The work of the US military is to kill, its pretext – defense of the homeland. It has succeeded in training soldiers, mostly young men, to kill without remorse, that is until they leave the military with flare-ups of psychological trauma or PTSD. But neither the military nor the White House has convinced a war weary American public to accept men returning home from war in caskets or deeply wounded physically and psychologically. Americans’ increasing distaste for war presents serious problems for a state committed to on-going, unending war which includes feeding military industries, a mainstay of the American economy. What to do?

Drones to the rescue! With drones, unmanned aerial vehicles, Americans need not worry about their own soldiers being killed. Those who drop the bombs do so from any one of a number of military bases somewhere in the United States. Research and common sense show that the further away soldiers are from those they kill, the less likely they are to feel guilt or remorse. Drones, it seems, solve the PTSD problem.
Since so many Americans now turn off the news of war, they will not know of how, as they do not know about combat on the ground, of the many civilians killed in drone attacks – most are women and children. But those victims are not Americans, specifically, they are not American men. So who cares? As John Brennan, Obama’s counterterrorism chief, in the cold sociopathy of an increasingly US militarized stated, “Sometimes you have to take lives to save lives,” and I would add, as long as most of the lives you take are of brown people and are not American men. War is, after all, gendered and racist violence.

The day after Brennan announced that the USA is conducting CIA drone warfare, on May 1 President Obama spoke to Americans in what most pundits agreed was a campaign speech from Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan where he and President Karzai had just signed a Enduring Strategic Partnership Agreement. So you might wonder what is all the fuss about drones anyway. Aren’t Americans on our way out of Afghanistan? Looking closely at the details of the agreement that Obama did not mention in his television broadcast, we find that it actually “commits Afghanistan to provide U.S. personnel access to and use of Afghan facilities through 2014 and beyond. … for the possibility of U.S. forces in Afghanistan after 2014, for the purposes of training Afghan Forces and targeting the remnants of al-Qaeda.” (White House, Office of the Press Secretary. May 1, 2012.)

There is every reason to believe that not only the US war in Afghanistan, but the US policy of ongoing, unending war is, under Obama’s leadership, morphing into a drone war. For years the USA has been launching drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia even though the US Congress has not declared war on those states. Since 2002 the CIA has conducted up to 321 drone strikes in Pakistan, killing up to 3,100 people. In December, 2009 US drones dropped cluster bombs on a village in Yemen and killed 40 people, 21 children and 14 women, 5 of whom were pregnant were killed.

Killing women and children and killing brown people intersects misogyny and racism upon which the military is built. A few weeks ago, a case opened in British courts of a CIA drone strike in Pakistan in March 2011 which killed up to 53 people in an open air meeting of the local jirga (parliament) in that region. US intelligence that directs drone strikes is focusing not on specific people anymore. Rather as journalist Jeremy Schahill exposes, they study the “pattern of life” of groups of people who gather in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. That is exactly how the CIA defended its drone strike: ‘The fact is that a large group of heavily armed men, some of whom were clearly connected to al Qaeda and all of whom acted in a manner consistent with AQ [Al Qaeda] -linked militants, were killed,’ even though Al Qaeda’s not known to hold its meetings in public, open air places.

Drones are a growth industry but the chief companies are familiar in the military industrial complex: Northrupp Grumman, Raytheon, and General Atomics with a powerful lobby in Washington. In February, 2012, Obama, the President most responsible for escalation of drone warfare, brought war home when signed into law a Federal Aviation Reauthorization Bill. Heavily lobbied by the drone industry which stands to gain between $12 and $30 billion in sales, 3,000 drones for surveillance will within a few years be filling the skies of the U.S.A.

For years Americans were told that drones were only used for surveillance, for intelligence gathering, in places like Pakistan, all the while the US military is making enemies they then have to kill and labels them insurgents or Al Qaeda when the CIA drones bomb them to smithereens. Now the CIA turns its drones on us. So Americans (or anyone anywhere on the earth) watch your “patterns of behavior” for on our home ground, ‘we have met the enemy and they are us’. 

Kathleen Barry, Sociologist and Professor Emerita of Penn State University is the author of Unmaking War, Remaking Men (2011)