The “Feminist” Movement and likely some Ignorant Ranting

You’ve read the title—you’ve been warned.

Maybe I do not know what constitutes feminism (this is entirely possibly), but the direction some women are headed in the name of feminism seems counterproductive.

Spring of 2009, in one of my English classes at the junior college, we had a substitute who had no interest in what we were doing in class, but rather sharing her infinite knowledge with us, the uninformed youth. She told us how who vs. whom is stupid to try to figure out, it doesn’t matter, because it has been taken out of textbooks and the worthlessness of semicolons . . . okay, so that preamble may have set my spikes against anything else she had to say, but nonetheless her vast storage of information on prostitution stuck with me.

Feminism, she preached, has shifted gears—we are in the third wave of the feminist movement. She continued to inform us of the great injustice women are fighting to regain control of their bodies, not just via abortion, but the right to self-employ as a prostitute.

As if her rant against the importance of grammar had not confused and frustrated me enough . . .

Correct me if I’m wrong—this is backward. Women fighting for rights once upon a Susan B. Anthony and in relation to the themes of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter were originally fighting for existence as people. Then rights and votes. Women were possessions, commodities. Every man has got to have one. Marriage=poof, gone existence. Muchísmo has taken place between then and now by the women of the feminist movement, and I am eternally grateful.

My problem with prostitution is not solely built on moral grounds—if someone wants to sleep around, no one is stopping him or her; our government does not (yet) regulate all personal choices—but on this woman’s equation of feminist liberty found in selling one’s body. Selling, I do understand, is a biased verb-choice. Opening was this professor’s verb, “giving women the option to open their body as a beautiful, legitimate choice of profession;” something like that. Alrighty. But the body then, again, becomes a commodity. Part of business. Which brings to mind You’ve Got Mail:

           

It’s not personal; it’s business.             [Later] It wasn’t . . . personal.

What is that supposed to mean? I am so sick of that. All that means is that it wasn’t personal to you. But it was personal to me. It’s personal to a lot of people. And what’s so wrong with being personal, anyway? . . . Whatever else anything is, it ought to begin by being personal.

American business, from what I have observed, is decreasingly personal. Which is terrible! But it is a rant for a different day. Prostitution is not personal . . . or is it? The body is very much personal, despite how many divested parts may be found on billboards, and Americans are generally ashamed of sexuality. (My hypothesis for the excess amount of sex everywhere one looks is the product of our immature reaction to this “shame source” and if not that, the unashamed percentage’s attempts to shock the public into realizing and accepting that sex happens; it is not a dirty little joke.)

If I compare renting out sex to renting out a car, keeping both as little people owned personal businesses (the Mom and Pop type businesses), I am still running into issues. Excuse the assumptions in the prostitution department. Both the car and the body lose value the more “mileage” they get. Or maybe the more experience a prostitute has, the more s/he can charge—I really do not know. Cars are insured. People can be, and if there came to be a National Union of Prostitutes (maybe one exists), I’m sure they would have their bodies insured also. But a car can be fixed and replaced. A body cannot, beyond a certain point. Insurance will not eradicate all STDs. If it were kept personal, wouldn’t that just tear the people involved to pieces? Or if it is not personal, is it really possible for a person to remove him or herself from his/her body? Why are there not neuter pronouns in English?

Really, the issue becomes making the body, a person, a commodity again. Something to be sold, rented, leased, something disposable. What, then, is the difference between a person and piece of fruit or a radio? There are sexist aspects of society that could and ought to be challenged in the name of feminism—frankly, I want nothing to do with war, but it is sexist to only recruit males in certain areas and even more sexist that if the draft were reinstated, it currently does not apply to women. If we want a level playing field, we had better buck up and play level; it is conceivable. If people want to promote prostitution as a freeing the self from the confines of conventionality, fine. 

But please, do not call it feminism.