Reflections on Personal Identity

The common Western idea of personal identity has depended on continuity of memory since John Locke and is a central element in English individualism. This was contrasted with ‘mere’ bodily continuity, with mind and body firmly separated, which was assisted by another notion – that mind was associated with a ‘soul’ which had some being or continuity beyond the body after it had died (or even outside the body, while the latter was still functioning separately, in some schools of thought).

This idea of a continuity beyond death, based on a separation of body and mind, is still held by many people as a matter of faith. It gives psychological comfort to some but it has not been demonstrated as ‘true’ (scientifically probable). It is a possibilian concept. Continuity of memory, however, is a different kettle of fish. Since Locke’s day, we have seen ‘scientific’, certainly suggestive theoretical, evidence that conscious memory, accumulated in layers of perception and constantly constructing the ‘self’, is only a small part of the story.

We have Freud’s postulate of the unconscious to contend with but also growing evidence that the historic genetically constructed structures of the brain construct both our perceptions and the selection and holding of those perceptions in such a way that memory becomes a very slippery matter in its relation to what actually happened even in the moments before it is formed. Memory is not just the accumulation of perceptions into a form of identity but the unwitting selection of perceptions, one that relies on discontinuities, redrafts and revisions that are built-in to the ‘person’ by their genetic and experiential history.

There may be an inability to perceive some things or a determination to forget in the context of trauma or some other need. If personal identity is memory then that personal identity is not smoothly constructed in many cases but is a partly wilful and partly unconscious creation which involves as much forgetting as remembering. This is not incompatible with, say, the metaphysics of Nietzsche to the effect that we can be nothing other than we are and that we are doomed to repeat ourselves eternally.

The ‘will to power’ (in his sense) of an organism that integrates body and mind into a being that is also integrated into raw existence can easily accommodate the idea that we are not conscious of the discontinuities as well as conscious of the apparent continuities in our identity. Indeed, the mix of conscious and wilful (or apparently so) change in ourselves with part-conscious (or illusory) and with unconscious (or biological or environmental) changes to the forms by which our perception is structured is in greater accord with Nietzsche’s existentialism than with Locke’s gentlemanly English liberalism.

Modern psychologists are only the professional end of a truth universally recognised by most of us who can see the world in a critical way – that memory is as often false as not and so, by extension, that our personal identities are ‘false’ constructions that: a) depend on our body’s and earlier mind’s determination of what should be perceived and then held for future use; and b) are what that same mind should unconsciously choose to forget or bury deep in the process of creating the present which we can then call our ‘self’ at any one time.

Memory, in short, is not all that personal identity is but is only its expression to our consciousness. Placing the possibility of existence beyond the body to one side, our personal identity may be a memory at each point in our life but that memory is possibly false and our personal identity is probably false if we believe it to be true without further questioning. By a paradox, if we know and believe our memory and identity to be ‘false’, it becomes more ‘true’ (yes, truth can be relative here) because the entry of the thought of a false memory as possibility, even probability under certain conditions, gives us the opportunity to choose to be ‘critical’, that is either to accept our personal identity as ‘true’ for us in its falsity as an act of will and freedom (insofar as we can ever be free) or to investigate, critically, what may be false in order to make ourselves more ‘true’.

We are not valuing the ‘true’ here as the ‘good’ – being ‘true’ is merely defined as according with objective or at least scientifically validated reality. Being in accord with objective reality has no necessary relationship in itself with the value of ‘good’ but that is another debate.  Personal identity, in fact, is never anything other than ‘true’ in value terms because it is ‘true’ to the person that has that identity. The ‘falsity’ arises only when the person perceives a ‘falsity’ themselves in what they had held to be true, hence the argument in this note – that realisation of ‘falsity’ requires a new ‘truth’ or new identity formulation even if this is a reaffirmation of the ‘falsity’ as ‘truth’. In this way, once we understand that Locke’s assertion that personal identity is memory is to be taken as a truism of sorts, but one without much relationship to the objective truth of our condition in the world – that is, that ‘false memory’ means ‘false identity’ in any terms that are not totally subjective to the person and so represents more or less of a disconnect between persons and their world – then we can rethink that position in the world

This must generally result in one of three responses – denial, conscious reaffirmation of the given or critical investigation of the self.  Let us pause here and say that no value judgement can be ascribed to any of these responses. The denial that a person is anything other than memory, even if the memory (say) includes the assertion that the person was once Emperor of France when all the external evidence points to this not being case, is a legitimate human response to their condition in the world.

The assertion that the historic world leader and this person who believes themselves to be (wrongly) that past world leader are different in personal identity terms just because one accords with objective reality and one does not is merely a matter of the degree by which the identity is practically adaptive to the world. All those unaware of their ‘falsity’ have more in common, mad or not, than any of them do with those who are aware of it. Madness and 'inauthenticity' (to use an older and rather value-ridden existentialist term) are far from identical however. 'Inauthenticity' may be a necessary condition for personal survival in the world as it is constructed. Madness is a poor way of physically surviving in the world outside the most caring of welfare states, communities, tribes or families.

Each personal identity in its particular case of unawareness has been constructed to function for that person but both cases, madness and 'inauthenticity', have in common the fact that neither is aware of their condition or, until having become or made aware of it, are able to treat that condition critically. The thought experiment here is of the man who chooses madness in response to conditions and becomes mad - is this possible?  Did Nietzsche do this? Was this his genius? Human society, on the other hand, could probably not function easily without the vast majority of persons not questioning their condition for most of the time. Unquestioning is a necessary element in the construction of the social.

Left critics of the workings of society have been fully aware of this for some time, hence their frustrated assertion of the need to act to raise consciousness in order to effect change because, left to themselves, most people would accept existing conditions as true and construct their personal identities precisely to fit their environment. These people become their world – cogs perhaps but also able to survive where those who question might end up in camps or penury. It is the source of the instinctive conservatism of the mass of the population and the difficulty behind attempts to effect change even when all logic points to it.

But being or becoming aware of the fact that our personal identities are ‘false’ to the degree that our memories are false because we are our memories (albeit embedded first in a body with its memory and a society with its collective memory) creates only persons who are different not better and the uncovering of this truth about identity does not necessarily result in more than marginal change. The conservatism of society is often very logical – just as are the narratives of the great movements that challenge this conservatism.

Our bodies, meanwhile, are repositories of unconscious material memory. Their genetic component (without going down the route of the collective unconscious) means that a proportion of that memory exists from before the actual creation of that body. Societies too are repositories of collective memory. The habits and instincts of persons are easy to transfer from one community to another (certainly under conditions of modernisation) but also respond (without further self-questioning thought) to the ‘norms’ of a particular time and place which then impact on the formation of memory and so identity. Memory is constructed out of continuous socialisation and the relationship between memory and social identity is at the heart of 'tradition'.

To challenge one’s own personal identity may often involve challenging one’s own body image and capabilities, the ‘norms’ of society and the representation of oneself in society – it might even suggest radical action: gender change, migration, abandonment of tribe or faith (or acquisition of one).  The point is that knowing that one’s personal identity as a construct of false memory does not necessarily predispose someone to radical rather than conservative actions.

It enables radical choice, that is true, but radical choices, if based on unconscious reaction to the tension between society and material circumstances and ‘true will’ can be far from conscious. They may derive from a reaction to memory that makes them no more authentic than those of the conservative mind set who determines on full acceptance of his or her condition without further thought. Awareness that memory and so identity can be explored and reconfigured is a-political and even a-social.

The only virtue of awareness is that it does not rely on an unconscious balancing of mind, body and society (which clearly creates contentment for some but not others) but recognises that, where the mind is not in accord with body or society and where personal identity is not in line with something approaching ‘true will’, the person, in that moment of recognition, can make choices and that those choices involve the management of perceptions and the investigation of memory (or the abandonment of acceptance of memories as valid in the rejection of beliefs) in order to realign a person and the conditions of their existence.

In the case of beliefs, memory is certainly slippery. To believe something is a core element in personal identity and the shift of a belief from a present state to a memory of what was once believed represents a major shift of identity in itself. Chaos Magicians exploit this in order to play with their own identities in a way that strikes the vast majority of humanity as wasteful and absurd but these are not idle thought experiments in coming to a view on the stability of identity in our species.

So Locke is, of course, correct that our identity does rely on memory but we must recognise now that memory is constructed and false more often than not so that our personal identities are as much constructs of our bodies and society as of our conscious will and actual experience. Although this is true, this is not an excuse for a valuation of some minds as better than others just because of their awareness of this falseness of identity because no identity can ever be anything but false in an absolute sense. Nor can we necessarily draw the extreme conclusion that we have no selves (which is an entirely different argument, if currently fashionable one, to criticise another day).

Having an identity that is true to itself is still having an identity that is constructed or that has been constructed out of perceptions that can never tell the whole story about external reality (not to mention our ignorance of other minds and the workings of a society where so little can be observed directly by the subject).  An identity expresses the needs at any one time of a person who is made up of a mind set in a body constrained by social and technological reality. Thus, there is never any absolute freedom but nor is there any requirement for total determination of circumstances.

Liberation is merely a cast of mind, a calibration of society, body and mind and so a calibration of perception, of memory and of identity. The constant struggle between the psychological and physical continuity theories of identity thus rather misses the point. What might be better considered is a theory of constant discontinuities in which a body (and a society) and a mind with only apparent continuity are both required but in which the ‘normal’ integration of the two can be discontinued without either mind or body ceasing to have some ‘memory’ of itself.

A body without a mind is still the body of the person and can be reactivated as such under certain conditions (as after a coma) and that body would influence a new mind that entered it through its biology and brain structure. Perceptions and capabilities would change identity – we only have to consider the male/female difference and the effects on a mind with memories of another gender in a body swap to know how identity would adjust with biology. Continuity perhaps but also a recasting of memory to fit biology would be likely.

A mind might be reloaded or transferred or duplicated in a machine or another body but, from that point, the new material conditions would create new ways of perceiving and thought that would create a separate identity from any identical mental clone in another body, whilst still showing continuities with the past through inherited shared memory. In the memory clone case, each ‘person’ has a separate identity based on possibly small changes in material circumstance despite shared memories – reproducing the ‘I’m Sharon but a different Sharon’ problem of Battlestar Galactica.

Identity is not fixed but changes and shifts in relation to the environment. It is fraught with discontinuities even when simplified down to one mind in one body. The recognition of this complexity should make the psychological-physical debate redundant. It should also help us to be suspicious of the truth-claims made about ourselves by ourselves and by all other persons of themselves and create a scepticism about claims that any single mind can have the answer to any social problem without the help of other minds or that any person can have the ultimate solution, if there is one, to one’s own problems except oneself.

On Pole Dancers and Others ...

My last blog posting on the May 13th Conway Hall Debate on Sex Work reminded me of a piece I wrote for Facebook connections five years ago and not published more widely at the time. I reproduce it here with my usual technique of adding notes where I have something to add or I have changed my mind.

May Day 2010

Some weeks ago, there was a thread debate on feminism and I was asked to reproduce, in a more considered format, the general thrust of my argument. The origin was a difference of opinion, largely amongst women, on sex-positivity and its role in liberating women - some might say from the historic dominance of men and others might say from their own self-imposed and inherited limitations in the face of the world.

Could a pole dancer be more fulfilled than a woman who had taken up the law? Not a silly question when a political lawyer, Harriet Harman, Deputy Leader of New Labour, has declared war, according to the Times of September 18th, [1] on the culture of corporate entertainment linked to lapdancing clubs.

Pole Dancing & Physical Intelligence

Even a cursory review of the 2010 US Pole Dancing championship's video shows women at the peak of physical performance to the extent that we might say that these women were showing levels of physical intelligence that easily matched the legal intelligence of Ms. Harman. [2]  One female respondent [3] noted that pole dancing itself isn't very sensual --- but I am in awe of the strength and control these dancers have over their bodies. Precisely. I was just immensely impressed with the strength and assuredness ... She added:

I arranged for a group of my girlfriends to do a pole dancing workshop a few weeks back (all of us self-described feminists - and most actively involved with woman's rights movements ... and they all found it an incredibly enriching (albeit somewhat painful) and liberating experience. I think the assumption is that its done by women for men. False. Unless of course that is your choice. It certainly wasn't any of ours."

It is not just poledancing that has been taken up by sex-positive women. There is also the capture of burlesque by arty girly girls for girls and the global girl power of belly dancing.

Progressive Feminists Just Don't Get It

But some progressive feminists just don't get it - you take what was a male demand and subvert it into female choice and empowerment and, above all, sheer fun. The splits, of course, are something that no man can do safely and not end up with a squeaky voice. All men are astonished and not a little envious at this ability ... c'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas sexe. But even if it was 'sex' - what is really so very wrong with that if it is consensual and non-exploitative or at least no more exploitative than any other activity in late capitalist society. If men and women mutually enjoy and play with forms of 'objectification', then why not?

Impressive in skill terms, pole dancing always get this faint sense of censoriousness from some feminists ... someone has 'issues' and it ain't me or my sex-positive female friends. It is always a woman's right to choose and that, in my view, includes a choice between stacking shelves in a supermarket and expressing physical intelligence before an appreciative audience ... the progressive feminist aesthetic must not be imposed on others, men or women.

The Psychology Of The Industry

Now, let's take the view of another woman on the thread ...

... you'd be surprised how many of those panty stuffing bills can add up by end of the night. You won't get rich, but you'll make more than you would answering some dentist's phone and filing his insurance claims. And you get to drink and stare at hot naked chicks all night. lol I've had far worse McJobs ...

Something to consider: there is a difference between athletic displays of pole dancing in a "non-sexualized" context outside of a stripclub environment [...] and how it's rendered in a club.

In a club, there is a lot more raw sexuality being generated from the dancers and the patrons. These currents are both harmonious and chaotic, given that so many different psychologies are bringing their lot to the table. It keeps things interesting.

There is also tons of pseudo sexual posturing and sheer hubris, in place of (or along with) technical skill. When it's done properly, by reasonably well integrated people, it's sensual and 'sexual'.... And if anyone is left feeling a bit sheepish, it's usually the onlookers. ;)

'Progressives' always look for the worst cases of exploitation and then extrapolate backwards to limit freedoms for the rest of society ... like the prohibitionists in America worked back from the drunkeness and corruption of Tammany Hall in New York and banning drink for everyone, resulting, unintentionally in the creation of American organised crime as a political force.

More Positive Approaches

Referring to, say, conditions in, say, Uzbekistan [4] is no help in referring to conditions in London or San Francisco. On the contrary, the Uzbek case also argues for economic development, regulation and normalisation, certainly the end of stigmatisation within the sex industry. The positive policy aim should be to ensure that maximum labour value is transferred to performers/workers rather than the capitalists and that the supply of sexual services (and drugs and risk games such as gambling) is in the hands of legitimate business and not organised crime.

Apart from anything else, the 'respectable' (actually rather self-centred) middle class' refusal to understand how human drives and wants must and can be met legitimately permits the large-scale accumulation of capital by organised crime. This eventually destabilises their sweet cosy world of armchair disapproval. Mexico, for example, is about to plunge into an anarcho-criminal civil war for precisely this reason [5]. I would not fancy being a 'respectable' bourgeois when that happens.

My objection to aggressive policy progressives (especially a certain sort of feminist who claims to speak without authority for all women) is that they are not merely unpleasant and authoritarian but profoundly and deeply stupid.

The Real Rights Of Non-Respectable Women

Men often hold back from comment out of a culturally determined fear of feminist reproach (I do not) and it is women themselves who come slugging back to assert their rights to make their own choices and exploit legitimately the drives and wants of men. In this context, it is women who are being deprived of the right to do what male-dominated business does in exploiting the desire and wants of women for retail therapy and cosmetic improvement. The 1970s feminists rightly demanded that women's desire to look good should not be dictated by male requirements.

Economic liberation has, nevertheless, increased fashionable and cosmetic expenditure because it is women who want to look and feel good for themselves and each other (men really don't notice quite as much as they would think). Same with sexuality - 'progressive' feminists consider all sexual objectification and performance as patriarchal. They are idiots.

Sexual Game Play

Many women, maybe most women when liberated, love sexual objectification and performance (by men for their pleasure as well) so long as they are in control of the image and the play, including games of submission and domination that are safe, equal and consensual. Many feminists are thus not feminists at all, just a-sexual or repressed or ideologically tormented or filled with 'ressentiment' or unable to play the game and don't want others to either. But it is still their right to be as they are.

My only objection is the role that they play in public policy as 'respectable' but ignorant oppressors of others, male and female, in close alliance with male moralists [6] and, dare I say it, sexual neurotics and wimps.  Most educated men have more than adapted to this new game play - the best of them play as equals, the weakest simply act as pawns shelling out their cash for temporary if necessary gratification.

The liberatory process now requires that men and women understand and respect each other's natures and adapt without abuse or exploitation in their personal relations and, if necessary, accepting mutual exploitation on equal terms with full information. Here is the place to refer to Elizabeth Pisani's TED lecture on sexuality and health care - a brilliant exposition of a scientific approach to human rationality - the brief interview with the Indonesian transgender prostitute captures the point perfectly. Sexual services are rational on all sides.

The analysis by my friend (above) of what actually goes on in a Western 'establishment' is spot on. There is a sort of controlled sub-Dionysiac erotic tension that is just play-acting in which both sides get something out of the exchange. Included in this exchange is a powerful sense of domination from the performing side over men in a position of unfulfilled desire - the classic 'tease', only controlled and within bounds. Burlesque once had the same function.

There is a type of person who cannot comprehend the powerful cathartic effect on this play-acting which is certainly not orgiastic, is a game between moral equals, is carefully calibrated and which ends when the performance ends. Men are still often pigs but in real life far more than in the theatre. Personally, I don't get it 'in situ' but then the theatre to me is a relatively uninteresting experience. I am not one ever to suspend disbelief. My reaction is the simple pleasure of observation without any sense of power or control on either side, an erotic voyeurism best appreciated without the audience.

I much prefer a conversation with the person and, if it leads to consensual pleasures, they are, for me, non-commercial. I sell only my alleged charm and genuine interest. I buy with that currency only appreciation and the sensuality towards which a conversation may lead. I truly love and like women even when they mystify and confuse me. I would rather spend my evenings listening to women talk than getting my pleasures from a gang of men watching but not participating in sports or the strip. But then I always was a bit different :-)

The Criminalisation of Pleasure

Some women once earned substantial sums and gained significant social respect in underworld societies through the sex industry before progressives and fundamentalists began to undermine the economic base of that community in the 1920s and 1930s in America. Although this began with Comstock and was represented by the Hays Code's deadening effect in a later period, puritanism just drove women underground, lowering pay levels and increasing abuse and exploitation and control of the 'trade' by larger-scale criminal enterprises.

The war on sexuality is a sociopathic war, an exploitative war against the human spirit and, above all, a war on the weak by the 'respectable'. Our biggest child abuse scandal is not in lap-dancing clubs but inside the Roman Catholic Church amongst 'Christians'. Since the 1970s, the emergence of soft visual 'porn', the feminisation of burlesque, stripping as a legitimate business and pole and lap dancing has created a middle way. Good business ensures [7] that the girls are protected (and not as well as they would be if they were recognised and unionised instead of stigmatised) as the best means of getting some men to pay for the yachts of other men through indulging their pleasures and weakness.

The 'harder' end of the industry has a much tougher time now as a result - the internet 'gives away' much material and the new 'soft' industries give outlets for beautiful women with no other prospects the chance to make money without actually selling use of body. Of course, they may choose to sell direct sex and there are still serious issues to do with exploitation but those who do know what they are doing can do so at higher prices with more protection.

The Price of Stigma

Intelligent regulation and enforcement would help stabilise wages but only where the industry is not stigmatised, staffed with migrants and pushed underground under the patronage of criminals corruptly suborning law enforcement, all thanks to the 'respectable' society of feminism and christian moralism. Again, the problem is one of economics, stigma and idiocy ... there is a lot of research that is inconvenient to progressives and feminists on this. There is not only Pisani's common sense approach.  Laura Maria Augustin's book on 'Sex at the Margins' looks set to demonstrate what most researchers know - that the sex trade represents rational choice in a world of globalisation and poverty.

Other British research is conveniently never referred to by organisations like the Fawcett Society when they slip from campaigning (rightly) on equal pay and rights into feminist ideology on matters of sexuality. My sex-positive friend added in my defence as the thread progressed that:

I think Tim (and I know I can say this for myself) would like to see women and men culturally and socially situated where they are being nurtured in all ways that will produce the healthiest and happiest people ...

...who are truly free to make the choices that will please them, armed with the basics of educations, options for earning decent livings.

I agree with her. She added that we were in a time of radical cultural flux:

People are experimenting with different religions than the ones they were raised, or not raised to adhere to. The sexual revolution has it's most recent incarnation in the gay rights movement, which is in full swing, and is no small challenge.

Communication has provided the means for "regular" people to conduct intelligence gathering, which has resulted in the Catholic Church, for instance, being cornered on their numerous, planet wide, long standing pattern of child abuse.

[...] In any thriving society, the able help the able to thrive and conquer. That which is crumbling and falling is in that condition for a reason, and (under many circumstances) should be allowed to continue to deteriorate. I do not mean people. I mean conditions.

[...] on the subject of exploitation. Some of the women you would meet in that industry who have the biggest personal problems would not argue the case that they were being exploited.

In fact, they'd very proudly tell you that they were the exploiters, and having been closer to some of them than I'd ever like to be again, I can confirm that some deeply antisocial personalities who, like other criminal types, are outcast by personality default from "normal' society, wind up in sex work.

So much for the myth of the "sad, forlorn hooker with a heart of gold." I've never met one. They are survivors. And survivors tend to be grazing at the low end of the human spectrum.

They are not living in any sort of constructive way, and they don't want anyone else to be either. Soul crushed people. They get fired a lot, even from strip clubs. ;)

A Hard Realism Required

That hard realism is part of the point. The 'survivor' has a distinctive psychology, one that passes by the armchair ideologist and the theoretician, incomprehensible to the comfortable lives of the middle class winner whose own resentments underpin an essential cruelty towards those struggling below them. The question [8] often is: what are we going to do with the sociopath?. The authoritarian instinct is to contain or militarise, the progressive is to pretend that they do not exist or that they can be 'reformed'.

But there is no evidence that sociopathy can be fully contained or reformed out of society (it even has species-survival benefits) - and it certainly needs to be recognised. This fact really upsets liberals who persist in thinking that 'bad behaviour' can be corrected through imposed love and education. Sociopathy and other inconvenient behaviours (like sexual enthusiasm, gambling, addiction, drugs and so on) need to be noticed as real (the first failing of 'nice' society) and then engaged with and socialised.

Only then can we contain harm, not through idiot prohibitionism or burdensome and moralising regulation but through practical and rational incentive-based policy, much as Pisani suggests. This seems to be impossible for the limited brains of politicians, churchmen or liberal ideologists to comprehend. The middle class liberal often cannot face the extremity of evil to be found in the world. So they cannot punish serious harm. Serious sociopathy is just 'understood' and killers roam the streets within a few years of acts that cripple and destroy the lives of others.

It is axiomatic, for example, to these 'wets' that the death penalty is always and absolutely wrong. Those on the margin have no such illusions. They know there are tolerance boundaries and they set them firmly. For the liberal, there is no margin because of the silly belief in absolute equality and in redemption - stupid inheritances from Christian theory - and a genuine fear of 'struggle', the necessity for persons to make mistakes, take risks, gamble, to get out of Hell and into the 'Community'.

Most people's experience of Hell is romanticised and mediatised through film and television. It is sanitised through the portrayal of extreme horrors when the reality is far more grinding than anything these 'nice' people can contemplate. The high point of this romanticisation of Hell is that filmic work of genius Sin City where the heroisation of Hell is cathartic and given an almost Soviet realist feel by the end. It is not like that.

It is about hundreds of thousands of people living in mental states that require drugs, who seek transcendence through risk and where sexuality is part currency, part creation of identity. My point is terribly simple - these people are people. They are not objects [9]. Their struggle has to be respected. They also have to be shown routes that they can take out of Hell. They need protection from their own worst cases - the exploiters, the abusers, the killers, the authorities' own corrupt agents in the field. It is not sexual objectification that is the crime but liberal objectification of persons!

What Is To Be Done

The first stage is to remove stigma, accept a greater degree of risk in society, integrate. The second stage is to regulate, educate and guide. But the second stage is dependent on the first - it depends on risky and sociopathic behaviour being out in the open, observed, with boundaries drawn that are realistic and not based on the latest idiot contribution of anal obsessives in the health and safety culture. If it was good enough for Christ to include hookers in his Heaven, it is good enough for us to have a drink with a lap-dancing single mum who is making a rational economic choice in working in a club.

Furthermore, she might get to enjoy her work and turn a necessity into an art, an affirmation that she can do some things well on her terms and can accumulate her small bit of capital to open up her own shop, cafe or dance school (as one bright lapdancer I met clearly intended). This woman (so she said) went to a major charitable trust(perhaps naively) and asked for the same sort of help that they give freely to young toughs in Lewisham but was rejected. Why? Was it because it was helping a young woman move from lapdancing to owning a dance studio, making best use of her physical intelligence (and a lot more intelligence than that, much more than I have experienced amongst the cliche-spouting university-educated hausfrauen of Middle Islington)?

Maybe not. Perhaps the Business Plan was just not good enough. But I suspect that she was stigmatised - our whole culture is stigmatising the rational choices of working class and vulnerable women because it cannot face the truth that, out there, life is not only not perfect, it is not perfectible.

Standing Up To The Bien-Pensants

If 'progressives' were truly serious about climate change, they would raise petrol and airline ticket prices to astronomical levels. If they were serious about 'exploitation' they would undertake a massive tax-based redistribution of capital. Instead they tinker at the people's expense. Life is a struggle but struggle is good and many of these strugglers do, eventually, not end up in the gutter but with good and productive lives. There is the instructive tale of the Russ Meyer starlet who became a grade school teacher and spent her life fearing that her past would be exposed. When it was, it was no great deal - she was a good teacher. That's all we need to know in common humanity.

So why make it so difficult for these people? Why not encourage them to see their lives as way stations to something better instead of marginalised holding pens for those who have no voice. Where were these 'liberals' and churchmen when they were first abused? Nowhere. They have no right to judge. Only these women have rights. Any decent feminist would respect them and their choices - and only seek to get them out on their terms from under the heel of their own pasts and the gang bosses that the establishment effectively hires though neglect to run these inconvenient industries. I have nothing but a profound contempt for the feminist hausfrau's obvious disdain for the most vulnerable simply because they use their few assets to give themselves a decent living.

Our first commentator above noted that ...trying to oversimplify the sex industry and paint everybody's experience as the same is extremely myopic Indeed - so you must remove the stigma AND the abuse: two sides of the same coin. And you do this through the integration of this community into society and economy and improving the conditions of 'white trash' (as they are sneeringly considered even as they are being 'reformed') instead of leaving them to fend for themselves. 'White trash' are people too. They have rights to free choice.

To summarise, sex positive approaches to feminism are not substitutes for economic equality or basic rights but they are a corrective in two directions against the tendency of progressives to drive essentialist feminist ideology in directions that are, bluntly, anti-human. At one level, sex positive feminism permits women to make their own choices about pleasure and objectification that best suit their economic conditions as they really are. It allows them to make rational economic choices without stigma.

At another level, sex work helps many of the poorest and most vulnerable in society to find routes out of social and economic marginalisation through making use of their limited assets, ultimately accumulating sufficient capital or connections to become the social equivalent of the grade school teacher. In the former, we are talking about mental, social and emotional liberation against the preconceptions and demands of mother and big sister as much as, probably more than, those of men. Getting it right about sex-positivity is also about self-confidence and getting it right about family and marriage.

In the latter, we are talking about removing the block on mobility from below created by an excessive reliance on education and 'respectability' and an opportunity to help the process of turning back the tide of social misery that progressivism and churches have done nothing to reverse. Sex-positive feminism is not the be-all or end-all of human liberation but it is an important component of it, one in which women themselves decide what is acceptable in the use of their own bodies at the time when they hold maximum market value in an imperfect world.

I suspect that women will feel very free to respond and with some vigour but I hope that this time we get a few brave men to say something intelligent and not behave like fearful self-censoring liberal whiteys at a black power meeting.

Notes

[1] This would presumably be September 18th, 2009, when New Labour was still the Government of the country. This now seems like aeons ago. We breathe easier in many ways despite the excesses of Theresa May. 

[2] In the original there was a link to a remarkable performance on YouTube. Some copyright troll appears to have taken exception to the music and the world is now deprived of the experience ... the effect of copyright trolls on simple pleasures over the last half decade is incalculable. Naturally, subsequent references to the video have been removed. 

[3] This refers to those women commenting on the hidden Facebook thread and they are not named because they do not have their consent to be named.  However, it is I who am being discreet, not they. They were frank and open and I admire them for that.

[4] This perhaps obscure reference has sex work in Uzbekistan stand for all emerging world sex work as different from sex work in the West because of the different social conditions. I count pole dancing as a form of sex work not in order to diminish it but, on the contrary, to describe it. It is the use of sexual allure or attraction to part others from their cash. Much of Hollywood's acting is sex work in this sense. 

[6] Mexico still teeters but has not yet fallen. Meanwhile we have a quasi-organised crime state in Islamic State and Europe is being destabilised by the mergence of organised criminal smuggling rackets out of Africa and through the Balkans. Add the emergence of similar racketeering corrupting the South East Asian states and we see the situation is getting worse on a global scale without actually tipping over yet to system collapse in the West - but maybe it is just a matter of time.

[6] The links between contemporary ideological feminism and faith-based religious fundamentalism are particularly disturbing and were raised at the Debate on May 13th. 

[7] I should have written 'should ensure' - it cannot be 'good business' at this present time because it remains stigmatised and unregulated.  

[8] I was not, of course, meaning to suggest that pole dancers or, indeed, sex workers are sociopaths. What I was trying to say is that sociopathic behaviours as defined by conventional morality are often rational situational responses to social conditions and that moralising about them is meaningless since many moralists would behave in precisely the same way if they found themselves in those same conditions. In some ways, I approve of sociopathic responses in some extreme conditions of socially generated poverty and exploitation as necessary checks and balances on those who turn a blind eye to such conditions. The organism must survive and reproduce ... it is possibly the only human right that is not invented. 

[9] One of my frustrations is that feminist objectification theory is selective and false in two senses. First, that it fails to recognise the normality and 'rightness' of general objectification as a general means of surviving in the world (which I have discussed elsewhere). Second, that the anti-objectification camp themselves treat their enemies - males and sex-positive or vulnerable females - as objects. The first is stupidity and the second is hypocrisy.

The Sex Work Debate

On May 13th, I was in the audience for the misnamed 'London Thinks' debate at Conway Hall on sex work. There was precious little thinking going on as two sets of allegedly empowered females went hammer and tongs at each other from fixed positions. There was certainly no serious representation of the male point of view, barring an excellent call from the floor for positive unionisation of sex workers by a representative of the TUC. The audience was quite factionalised and often aggressive (despite some very able chairing by Samira Ahmed).

The most useful intervention, other than the TUC speaker, came from a pleasant young female and black Londoner (again from the floor) who refreshingly rose above a sea of identity politics to talk in a matter of fact way about the sexual culture of young males in her circle with tolerance and openness. If this is the young today, roll on time so that they can run the country!

On the one hand, we had representatives of the anti-sex work lobby who seemed to rely on dubious statistics, ideological formulations that stereotyped males (such as the villainous and insulting term 'rape culture' and the absurdly simplistic 'patriarchy') and the extrapolation of horrible personal experiences into general public policy,. This is never ever a good idea. Their final position was the Nordic Model - the criminalisation of male customers and (allegedly) social services support for vulnerable women, although how the hell that latter would happen, in an age of austerity and all-round administrative incompetence and authoritarian malice in the lower reaches of our system, beats me.

On the other hand, we had what amounted to a small business lobby speaking the language of quasi-Thatcherite economic rights set in a stone of centre-left theory about exploitation. Ideology again - almost pat out of a lobbying text-book. They seemed to see the male as little more than (ironically) an object - the customer or 'punter' to be fleeced of his funds. However, their solution to a social reality was far more sensible - the so-called New Zealand model of decriminalised but regulated sex work designed to ensure health and safety and legal protection for the workers.

I was persuaded that this latter model was the right one although I have been struck by the comments of a friend about German decriminalisation which seems to have solved the problem it was designed to solve - taking organised crime out of the game much as the legalisation of betting did in the UK many years ago - only to entrap women in classic large-scale capitalist enterprises where the conditions are better but not good.

There is damn-all for sex workers if big capitalists skim off the earnings of labour on the standard capitalist model and nothing is done about stigma or the wider social conditions that lead to vulnerable or poor women being directed into this work reluctantly because there are no alternatives. One suspects the Germans are simply trying to corral their vulnerable migrants and underclass into manageable units rather than invest in policies that might raise questions about the single market, incompetent pan-European law enforcement and the costs of transforming the conditions of the lower decile in any society by bringing to bear the resources and skills of the upper decile.

The point is that our society should cut through all this nonsense and get down to basic principles. The problem of sex work is lack of consent on the one hand - which the sex workers themselves point out can be handled with improved and better financed law enforcement that respects the sex workers as persons - and general economic conditions on the other. If a sex worker actively chooses sex work, then this is her or his business and as he or he is right that the alleged prostitution of the body is no worse (subject to health and safety considerations) than the alleged prostitution of the mind by a corporate lawyer (under some circumstances). There is also many a male trapped in a loveless marriage and a dead-end job whose liaison with a sex worker is the only thing between him and suicide - the girls in such cases should be trained as social workers, be considered economic assets and get a regular living wage.

Issues of consent can be handled by sound policing while those of reluctance and poor choice by decent social policies that educate and help people out of poverty, alongside regulation for health and safety, and, above all, the elimination of the vicious stigma applied to these people and their dependants. What is not helpful is driving this trade underground so that the nice people cannot see it (oooh, look the law is working! like hell!), creating the illusion that there is no problem by having periodic show trials of punters or (on the other hand) banging up the girls (in particular) in cattle farms albeit with human resources departments and regular visits from government inspectors.

We need reforms not to the behaviour patterns of women and men (we are dealing with human beings here and not Kantian saints-in-waiting) but to the behaviour patterns of bureaucrats and policemen. We still do not have, as the Rotherham abuse cases have shown, social strategies for investment in the most vulnerable people in the care sector aged between 12 and 18 nor do we have a strategy for handling the massive flow of economic migrants which feeds the sex trade's worst aspects.

Instead, the moralists and fools simply want to throw those women and men who have reached some form of stability in life and have made choices as human agents, no different from those have others stacking shelves or waiting at table, into the hands of the criminal classes. They also clearly want to have males who purchase sex treated as if they were paedophiles, humiliated in show trials. We are still not dealing with the central causes of paedophiliac exploitation as Government works hard to evade its historic complicity in its criminal networks, so it is scarcely likely that the same people will get much of a handle on migrant and underclas exploitation without revolutionary change in our national political culture.

Everyone evades what is necessary - national investment in bringing the most vulnerable to the point where they can make sound and healthy decisions for themselves and the encouragement of conditions for sex work in which the sex workers themselves own their own businesses and bodies and law enforcement actively protects them from bad customers and the underworld alike. There is much to be said for the New Zealand approach in this context - as a start. Above all, if sex work is to continue at all (and it will, regardless of governments) it should be under conditions where the price goes up and the sex workers get the profits precisely because the only people doing it are the people who want to do it rather than because they have no choice in the matter. The moralists and seventies radicals should back off now and leave it to the socialists and trades unionists ...