It’s Women’s History Month: Do You Know Where Your Governor Is?

It’s 3 A.M. The telephone rings. Somewhere a man is paying for sex with his credit card. A middle-aged woman in a business suit moves swiftly to the telephone and answers. “Hello?”

But who is this mysterious woman?

It’s Dorchen Leidholdt, that’s who. Just in time for Women’s History Month. If you are a feminist of a certain age, you must remember Dorchen Leidholdt, who began her public career as a crusader against misogyny by picketing a Jack the Ripper Restaurant in Charlottesville, Virginia. Interestingly, this future anti-sex feminist conceived the campaign to close a restaurant with a serial killer theme in alliance with another young feminist, Lisa Duggan. Duggan later made a distinguished career as a pro-sex lesbian, feminist and queer scholar (buy Sex Wars, a collection of articles that addresses some of the political issues attendant to sexual commerce, all written by Duggan and legal scholar Nan D. Hunter, here.) Duggan, Hunter and others went on to be key organizers of the Feminist Anti-Censorship Taskforce (FACT), which opposed efforts to subvert the First Amendment by another group of feminists called Women Against Pornography (WAP): the history of FACT’s success is partially documented in Sex Wars if you are interested. In contrast to Duggan’s trajectory, Leidholdt got married, and by the 1980′s had become a prominent WAP activist. Various alternative weeklies from the period contain some spicy exchanges between these former friends and allies, in which Leidholdt mischaracterizes FACT as representative of only a few fringe lesbians in the movement.

There is also a terrific backstory here, but as it is not mine to tell I will, uncharacteristically, refrain from doing so. Go research it yourself, why don’t you?

Leidholdt — who never exactly disappeared, at least in the opinion of those of us who are feminists and who study feminism for a living, has re-emerged for a larger public as a commenter on the latest political scandal. On the front page of today’s New York Times she is quoted as one of the political allies who is shocked, shocked that Eliot Spitzer, the New York governor who bragged about being an “(expletive deleted by all media outlets) steamroller” was not just metaphorically, but actually, what the Marines would call a swinging dick.

In Foes Of Sex Trade Stung By The Fall Of An Ally, our heroine expresses her dismay that a former attorney general who really seemed to “get it” that the traffic in women could only be destroyed by punishing men (not the women who, as this fraction of the women’s movement has argued since the 1970′s, are exploited and abused by a criminal sex industry) didn’t, well, actually get it. Or he did get it, but then he went out and got it. Men. Can’t live with ‘em….anyway, to quote the story:

“It leaves those of us who worked with his office absolutely feeling betrayed,” said Dorchen Leidholdt, director of Sanctuary for Families Legal Services, one of the leaders of the coalition that drafted the legislation.

Well, yeah. And imagine how Mrs. Spitzer feels. Better yet, read Dina Matos McGreevey’s Op Ed request to lay off poor Mrs. Spitzer and not judge her at a moment where she has to respond publicly to a situation most people don’t handle so well in private. The former first lady of New Jersey includes a short account of her own difficult press conference in August, 2004, when Governor of New Jersey Jim McGreevey admitted to an affair with a male staffer – which was news to her:

“For me, I was essentially in the dark about what my husband was going to say. He never told me he was gay; he simply passed me a copy of his speech an hour before the press conference. I was in a fog. I certainly didn’t volunteer. I was in no emotional state to make a rational decision, and there simply wasn’t time. He asked me to stand next to him, and I did.”

Ouch. If you are considering becoming a political wife, read the above paragraph a couple more times.

But to return to Dorchen Leidholdt, it isn’t just that I find it fascinating that she is still working to suppress the sex trade after all these years (I last encountered Leidholt, not as a person but as a source, during my current research on the feminist anti-pornography movement in the Women Against Pornography collection at Radcliffe’s Schlesinger Library.) I also find it fascinating that some feminists still see various acts of heterosex (or simulacra thereof performed by those not heterosexuals) as the critical location for activism. Is the sex trade still so central to women’s oppression at a moment when the economic options available to the poor are perhaps as bad as they have been since 1941? I wonder. And when the movement against pornography and sex trafficking initially coalesced back in the 1970′s, it was conceived as part of an activist women’s agenda that included healthcare, child care, wage parity, a decent minimum wage, slashing the military budget, access to higher education, legal abortion and safe, affordable birth control. In the absence of these things, never fully achieved or consolidated by the women’s movement in almost half a century, how well does a campaign against sexual commerce, feminist or not, really stand up as a truly relevant political movement?

Leidholdt and her allies are not wrong that prostitution is often itself a dead-end rather than a source of power; that women are often beaten, killed and economically disempowered by pimps* and their clients; and that most women (and men) who sell sex do not have the glamorous lives that are portrayed in movies like Pretty Woman. But we are reminded by the discussion about escort services that has been stirred up in the last few days that, while many feminists still claim to do battle and speak for women that they claim are victims of the sex industry, they are usually unwilling to let these sex professionals speak for themselves. If they did, they would have to tell a more nuanced story about female agency than the one they wish to tell. The radical anti-pornography narrative more or less substitutes the concept of “gender” for “class” in an analysis whose geneology goes back to the early 1970′s Marxist-feminist position that women, once they overthrew the patriarchy, would be the vanguard of what we used to call “the revolution.” As it turned out, that theory and a pair of Birkenstocks got you to the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival and not much farther. The fact that this feature of the anti-pornography argument has been buried in other issues, but hasn’t really changed, in almost forty years really makes you question the old (patriarchal) saw that history = change over time. For an illustration of this ideological divide between actual sex workers and the movement that claims to defend and represent them, go to this article by anti- trafficking crusaders Melissa Farley and Victor Malarek; and a second, cleverly chosen Op-ed by Tracy Quan, former sex worker turned author.

*who are themselves sometimes women, something this branch of the movement doesn’t highlight because of it undermines its emphasis on men as the sole agents of sex oppression.