Janice Raymond Quotes

If women really choose prostitution, why is it mostly marginalized and disadvantaged women who do? If we want to discuss the issue of choice, let’s look at who is doing the actual choosing in the context of prostitution. Surely the issue is not why women allegedly choose to be in prostitution, but why men choose to buy the bodies of millions of women and children worldwide and call it sex. Philosophically, the response to the choice debate is ‘not’ to deny that women are capable of choosing within contexts of powerlessness, but to question how much real value, worth, and power these so-called choices confer. Politically, the question becomes, should the state sanction the sex industry based on the claim that some women choose prostitution when most women’s choice is actually 'compliance’ to the only options available? When governments idealize women’s alleged choice to be in prostitution by legalizing, decriminalizing, or regulating the sex industry, they endorse a new range of 'conformity’ for women. Increasingly, what is defended as a choice is not a triumph over oppression but another name for it.

A man who decides to call himself a woman is not giving up his privilege. He is simply using it in a more insidious way.

The claim for tolerance, based on the notion that transgenderism in all its forms is a form of gender resistance, is alluring but false. Instead, transgenderism reduces gender resistance to wardrobes, hormones, surgery, and posturing— anything but real sexual equality.

That two women could mean a great deal to each other while they awaited men to lead them to marriage and the real business of life is negligible; that they could believe that the real business of life is in meaning a great deal to each other and that men are only incidental to their lives—is of course frightening.82

The world is what women make of it. This point is crucial—we must make something of it. This presupposes some kind of location in the ordinary world of human affairs, much of which is male-created. Friendship provides a point of crystallization for living in the ordinary world, not the pretense for exiting from it. Friendship does not automatically convey the means of living in the world or of making women into world-builders, but it does provide a location in that world.

Like “the tyranny of structurelessness,” the tyranny of tolerance has promoted an ethic of value freedom that has been allowed to stand as an unexamined principle among certain groups of women. From an unexamined principle, it is a short distance to an unexamined life.

The sadomasochistic mentality and movement assimilate women into a sexual liberation that is none other than the unrestrained expression of male-defined sexual behavior, where sexual liberation is tantamount to doing whatever one “feels” like doing. We confront again the tyranny of feelings, where feelings are portrayed almost as deterministic sexual drives that must be expressed at all costs. This is a very reactionary mentality which in one sense replicates the cultural conception of male sexuality. Men have always been portrayed as “needing” to express their “natural” sexual urges.

This book is based on the conviction that it is not possible for women to be free, nor to be realistic about the state of female existence in a man-made world, nor to struggle against those forces that are waged against us all, nor to win, if we do not have a vision of female friendship—if women do not come to realize how profound are the possibilities of being for each other as well as how deeply men have hidden these possibilities from us.

In much of the western world, the general effect of the 1980s has been to move back the feminist gains of the 1960s and 1970s. It has encouraged a style rather than a politics of resistance, in which an expressive individualism has taken the place of collective political challenges to power. And in the process it has de-politicized gender by de-politicizing feminism. The new gender outlaw is the old gender conformist, only this time, we have men conforming to femininity and women conforming to masculinity.

In the studies I have directed, and in my international experience speaking with women in prostitution, the majority of women in prostitution come from marginalized groups with a history of sexual abuse, drug and alcohol dependencies, poverty or financial disadvantage, lack of education, and histories of other vulnerabilities. These factors characterize women in both off and on-street locations. A large number of women in prostitution are pimped or drawn into the sex industry at an early age. These are women whose lives will not change for the better if prostitution is decriminalized. Many have entrenched problems that are best addressed not by keeping women indoors but in establishing programs where women can be provided with an exit strategy and the services that they need to regain their lost lives. There is little evidence that decriminalization or legalization of prostitution improves conditions for women in prostitution, on or off the street. It certainly makes things better for the sex industry, which is provided with legal standing, and the government that enjoys increased revenues from accompanying regulation.

An unmentored daughter is an unnurtured daughter, unnurtured in the strength she needs to Survive as an original woman in this world. Daughters, as compared to sons in a hetero-relational family, are more undernurtured in all ways by mothers and pressured prematurely to become nurturers of others—mostly of men. What also happens in this context, as Denice Yanni has pointed out, is “a silencing of woman’s own needs for nurturing by making her the primary nurturer.

Because transsexuals have lost their physical “members” does not mean that they have lost their ability to penetrate women—women’s mind, women’s space, women’s sexuality. Transsexuals merely cut off the most obvious means of invading women so that they seem noninvasive.

Finally, and I think most important, there are more male-to-constructed-female transsexuals because men are socialized to fetishize and objectify. The same socialization that enables men to objectify women in rape, pornography, and “drag” enables them to objectify their own bodies.

Today especially, it is no longer the alliance of church and state that should be feared, that is, theocracy, but rather the alliance between medicine and the state, that is, pharmacracy.51 It is medicine that presently functions as the new secular religion, with the continuous aid of sustained government support.

Obviously, those who take a critical position will be subjected to accusations of dogmatism and intolerance, when in fact those who are unwilling to take a stand are exercising the dogmatism of openness at any cost. This time, the cost of openness is the solidification of the medical empire and the multiplying of medical victims.

My main point is to show how so-called health values of therapy, hormonal treatment, and surgery have replaced ethical values of choice, freedom, and autonomy; how these same “health” values have diffused critical awareness about the social context in which the problem of transsexualism arises; how more and more moral problems have been reclassified as technical problems

Male-to-constructed-female transsexualism is only one more relatively recent variation on this theme where the female genitalia are completely separated from the biological woman and, through surgery, come to be dominated by incorporation into the biological man. Transsexualism is thus the ultimate, and we might even say the logical, conclusion of male possession of women in a patriarchal society. Literally, men here possess women.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the plastic surgery industry, including the association of plastic surgeons, led a campaign to convince women that having small breasts was actually a physical deficiency. According to the American Society of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeons, small breasts are not only a deformity but “a disease which in most patients results in feelings of inadequacy.” Thus millions of women have been led to change their breasts, not their image of themselves.

Andrea Dworkin has written, “Creative intelligence…demands its right to consequence…always it wants recognition, influence, or power; it is an accomplishing intelligence.”54 Women who work day by day in the world with worldly integrity are the living proof that feminist thought, feminist intelligence, has “consequences.” Their work may not be the kind that is explicitly devoted to the teaching of Women’s Studies, to the campaigns against rape or pornography, or to the writing of women’s literature. However, it is work that clearly shows that women can master physical tasks, ideas, culture, and the wider world. It is an accomplishing work that has its creative roots in the world as women imagine it could be because it breaks women out of the world in which men have constricted women’s power and work. It is work that is involved in the complexity of the world through direct experience of it. Worldly integrity meets the world on its own turf, but not on its own terms.

The goal in this “triumph of the therapeutic” is supposedly good “health,” but good “health” achieved at the expense of critical awareness and exploration of the oppressiveness of the roles themselves. This goal of good “health” is particularly ironic in light of the fact that the word health originally meant “whole.” As defined by the medical model, “health” values come to mean partial solutions, which go against total integrity of the body, the individual concerned, and society in general.

Constant and one-dimensional focus on the sharing of pain can drive women away from strong female friendships by obscuring the historical reality that women have been and can be for women in other than sisterly suffering ways. The emphasis on victimism also bolsters the conviction that female friendship can arise only for negative reasons: that is, because men are so bad or in reaction to the atrocities promoted by a misogynist culture. Here female friendship seems spawned by the results of the oppression of women. Thus in a better world, presumably one in which men “behave,” female friendship might not be necessary.

Men have established the patterns of language and of meaning in which acceptance of the present state of affairs is known as “realistic” and efforts to create a more feminist or woman-defined world are pejoratively called “utopian.” Thus, women who emphasize the necessity of vision are vulnerable to charges of distracting other women’s attention away from the real problems of women’s oppression and to accusations of romantic simplification or sentimentalizing. Anyone who proposes to speak about vision, especially that of seeing beyond the ordinary faculty of sight, is temporarily daunted by the “vision,” or should I say the “specter,” of being labeled “soft-brained.

My view is that, using Woodhouse’s own words, the male-to-female transsexual is a “fantastic woman, ” the incarnation of a male fantasy of feeling like a woman trapped in a man’s body, the fantasy rendered flesh by a further male medical fantasy of surgically fashioning a male body into a female one. These fantasies are based in the male imagination, not in any female reality. It is this female reality that the surgically-constructed woman does not possess, not because women innately carry some essence of femininity but because these men have not had to live in a female body with all the history that entails. It is that history that is basic to female reality, and yes, history is based to a certain extent on female biology.

The female-to-constructed-male transsexual is the token that saves face for the male “transsexual empire. ” She is the buffer zone who can be used to promote the universalist argument that transsexualism is a supposed “human” problem, not uniquely restricted to men. She is the living “proof” that some women supposedly want the same thing. However, “proof” wanes when it is observed that women were not the original nor are they the present agents of the process. Nor are the stereotypes of masculinity that a female-to-constructed-male transsexual incarnates products of a female-directed culture. Rather women have been assimilated into the transsexual world, as women are assimilated into other male-defined worlds, institutions, and roles, that is, on men’s terms, and thus as tokens.

Be’... – disse lei, rigirandosi compiaciuta sulla schiena. – Mi piace mangiare roba buona, bistecche e patate rosolate, cose cosí. Mi piace leggere libri e riviste, viaggiare in treno di notte e quelle volte che ho viaggiato in aereo –. Fece una pausa. – Naturalmente non sto elencando le cose in ordine di preferenza. Dovrei pensarci meglio per elencarle in ordine di preferenza. Però mi piace, viaggiare in aereo. C’è un momento quando ci si stacca da terra in cui hai la sensazione che qualsiasi cosa succeda, andrà bene –. Gli passò una gamba sopra la caviglia. – Mi piace stare alzata fino a notte alta e poi restare a letto fino a tardi il giorno dopo. Vorrei tanto potessimo farlo sempre, invece che una volta ogni tanto. E poi mi piace il sesso. Mi piace essere toccata di tanto in tanto quando non me l’aspetto. Mi piace andare al cinema e farmi una birra con le amiche dopo. Mi piace avere amiche. Janice Hendricks mi piace un sacco. Mi piacerebbe andare a ballare almeno una volta a settimana. E avere sempre dei bei vestiti. Mi piacerebbe poter comprare bei vestiti anche per i bambini ogni volta che gli servono, senza dover aspettare. Per esempio Laurie ha bisogno di un vestito nuovo adesso per Pasqua. E mi piacerebbe comprare a Gary un completino o qualcosa del genere. Ormai è grandicello. Vorrei che anche tu avessi un completo nuovo. Anzi, tu ne hai veramente piú bisogno di Gary. E mi piacerebbe che avessimo una casa tutta nostra. Vorrei piantarla di traslocare ogni anno, due anni al massimo. Ma soprattutto vorrei tanto che io e te potessimo vivere una buona vita onesta, senza doverci sempre preoccupare dei conti, dei soldi e roba del genere. Ma tu dormi, – disse. – No che non dormo, – disse lui. – Non riesco a pensare ad altre cose. Ora tocca a te. Dimmi che cosa piacerebbe a te. – Non so. Un sacco di cose, – bofonchiò lui. – Be’, dimmele. Si fa tanto per parlare, no? – Vorrei tanto che mi lasciassi in pace, Nan –. Si rigirò dalla sua parte e lasciò penzolare il braccio oltre il bordo.

The central issue is, as Janice Raymond pointed out already in 1989, that what is provocative, rebellious and subversive is now found within the status quo, not outside of it. And, more importantly, that the notion of what needs to be transformed is left out of the conversation. Usually, rebellions are about saying: We are sick of the way things are— we want to create something new! What happens here, though, is: let’s accept the prevailing order— since we have suddenly realized that it is already subversive. If you feel uncomfortable about the state of things— just keep quiet! As it turns out, things are organized so rationally that resistance happens to be built into the status quo— all we have to do is realize it! Accordingly, pornography will do its own fighting for us since, in and of itself, it challenges the masculine hegemony, transforms society and reshapes our desires! (We must read at least one academic dissertation in order to understand this, however.) The purpose is not to initiate a revolt, but to legitimize the status quo. Saying that something has ‘subversive potential’ in this context is to give it a stamp of approval— not to demand action.

Friendship that is characterized by thoughtful passion ensures that a friend does not lose her Self in the heightened awareness of and attachment to another woman.

There is no such thing as pure relativism. Anything is seen from the eye of the viewer, from one of many angles or frames of reference. The fact that truth may be relative should not lead to the judgment that all values are on the same scale.

While many feminists - especially those who came of age in the 1980s and '90s - recognize that trans women can be allies in the fight to eliminate gender stereotypes, others, particularly those who embrace gender essentialism, believe that trans women foster sexism by mimicking patriarchal attitudes about femininity, or that we objectify women by trying to possess female bodies of our own. Many of these latter ideas stem from Janice Raymond's 1979 book 'The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-male', which is perhaps the most infamous feminist writing on transsexuals. Like the media makers discussed earlier, Raymond assumes that trans women transition in order to achieve stereotypical femininity, which she believes is an artificial by-product of a patriarchal society. Raymond does acknowledge, reluctantly, the existence of trans women who are not stereotypically feminine, but she reserves her most venomous remarks for those she calls 'transsexually constructed lesbian-feminists', describing how they use 'deception' in order to 'penetrate' women's spaces and minds. She writes, 'Although the transsexually constructed lesbian-feminist does not exhibit a feminine identity and role, he [sic] does exhibit stereotypical masculine behavior.' This puts trans women in a double bind, where if they act feminine they are perceived as being a parody, but if they act masculine it is seen as a sign of their 'true' male identity. This damned-if-they-do, damned-if-they-don't tactic is reminiscent of the pop cultural deceptive/pathetic archetypes.

Many African American commentators view Dolezal’s claim to be both arrogant and insulting. African American artist and writer Pippa Fleming argues, “Imagine if white folks ran around claiming they were black or demanded access to our affinity spaces. They would be called deluded racist fools” (Fleming, 2018). Unfortunately, with the transgender intrusion into women’s spaces, reality is reversed, i.e. those who ‘run around’ claiming they are women and demanding access to women and women’s spaces receive accolades and public approval, including the approval of many women.

Simone de Beauvoir gave us the insight that woman has been fabricated by man as “the other, ” the relative being—relative to himself as the norm. So it should not be surprising that men, who have literally and figuratively, constructed women for centuries, are now “perfecting” the man-made women out of their own flesh.

We might say that the body is part of the creative ground of existence, but we are not bound by that structure in the full creative sense. Our spirit is bound to our bodies, as its creative ground, but surpasses it through freedom and choice. The body is present in all our choices, but as total persons, we have the freedom to be other than what culturally accompanies a male or female body.

However, the other side of fetishization is worship or reverence for the fetish object. In primitive religions, fetish objects were worshiped because people were afraid of the power they were seen to contain. Therefore primitive peoples sought to control the power of the fetish by worshiping it and in so doing they confined it to its “rightful place. ” There was a recognition of a power that people felt they lacked and a constant quest in ceremonies and cults to invest themselves with the power of the fetish object. Thus to worship was also to control. In this way, objectification and worship are two sides of the same coin.

[...] The deceptiveness of men without “members, ” that is, castrated men or eunuchs, has historical precedent. There is a long tradition of eunuchs who were used by rulers, heads of state, and magistrates as keepers o f women. Eunuchs were supervisors of the harem in Islam and wardens of women’s apartments in many royal households. In fact, the word eunuch, from the Greek eunouchos, literally means “keeper of the bed. ” Eunuchs were men that other more powerful men used to keep their women in place. By fulfilling this role, eunuchs also succeeded in winning the confidence of the ruler and securing important and influential positions.

Para Janice Raymond, el borrado histórico de la amistad femenina proviene, de entrada, de la falta de autoestima que genera el patriarcado en la mujer. «La mujer que no se ama a sí misma no puede amar a otra».