There is some controversy over the Bay Area Anarchist Book Fair this year, specifically the change in location from the increasingly expensive County Fair Building (which also must include payment for armed members of the state to access) and its new home this year—the Armory Community Center. The Armory is now owned by the people who bring you kink.com.
So there are a number of issues. Within the radical milieu, of course, there are people fundamentally opposed to pornography and sex work, and the sort of videos produced by kink.com especially. (But not everythingbutt.com, right? Nobody could possibly have any criticism of that...as long as you like watching women take enemas in dirty bathrooms.) This has led to what all controversies in the Bay Area lead to these days—enormous Facebook threads. It's extremely difficult to be sympathetic to the anti-crowd as they tend to lecture people on how exploited they are—sex work is apparently hyper-exploitive because it is of "the body" (...unlike other work?) which should clue any reader in someonehow rarified and middle-class the milieu is. The antis also like insisting that anyone with kinky tastes has learned this preference from early abuse. Even as an abstraction that's both distateful and entitled as it presumes a privileged position from which one's own sexual aesthetics were formed, but in the concrete, when you inform someone in particular to his or her virtual face that he or she is an abuse victim and just doesn't know it, that's beyond the pale.
All that aside, the antis have a compelling point: lots of women, anarchafeminists, and young people either cannot or will not attend because of the location. And do you want women, anarchafeminists, and young people to come? Of course you do.
There are also issues particular to kink.com, which like virtually every _____.com sells in town sells itself as somehow progressive/disruptive while actually being aenema douchebag factory. King Douchebag was recently arrested for cocaine possession after videos of someone firing guns at his private, secret shooting range in the Armory surfaced. Regardless of whether you're pro-porn or anti-, clearly management snorting lines and firing guns in the workplace makes it an unsafe one—even if they weren't doing both at the same time. And what are the chances of that never having happened? If you already own a sex castle and have a firing range and love cocaine, the cocaine will convince you to mix it with the guns and sex. I mean, this is likely why the Pope had to resign; what willpower can a mere CEO bring to the battle against Go! Powder?
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I am full of cocaaaaaine!
More specifically, sex worker/activist Maggie Mayhem has an extensive array of complaints against kink.com, where she has done some vids: sweatshop/assembly line conditions for live cam performers, buttplugs washed in the wrong sinks, unpaid "extras" in one of the scenario events, etc. Local scuttlebutt (butt!) has it that these issues are stated fairly and are accurate. Whether or not sex work is a raw deal (see what I did there?) kink.com is an awful place to work, and doubly so because of its faux progressive claims.
Oh, and the CEO basically snatched the Armory in the first place away from a primarily Latino community group that was raising funds to purchase it, bought out a local bar to turn it into the kind of place he wanted to go to, and is basically a gentrification-pus-filled boil on the ass of the Mission District. So not that, anythingbutt that!
But, is this actually worse than a bunch of anarchists simply giving money to the state, which is what the fair did in prior years? Or to the universities, which are also heavily enmeshed with the state (even privates are), and which are the locus of ideological production of statist propaganda, imperialist military research, and the like. And finally, the book fair committee has a bit of a trump card—find us a better place if you don't like it. It needs to be cheap, have a big room for the vendors and a little room for the speakers; close to mass transit; ready to put up with anarchist book fair shenanigans which might include nudity, unofficial vendors, and pie fights; and it must be ideologically cleaner than the kink.com armory.
Compelling, but only almost. One of the tenets of anarchism is that one should be very suspicious of institutions as institutions tend toward an interest in their own reproduction aside from any other goals the individuals who created and maintain the organization might have. The sad no-fun solution to the problems of finding a place for the fair is the easiest and most politically astute one: don't hold it this year. Take a year off. The world doesn't need a book fair, it (supposedly) needs anarchy. But handing money to either the state or a gentrifying pimp is hardly going to get you there. Or have four smaller anarchist bookfairs, on a quarterly basis, in an affordable venue. Or put the speakers/readers on Skype or YouTube for the world to see. Or or or...anything but privileging the institution over its goals.
So I am out this year. I have a specific interest in the fair, as PM Press, the publisher of Sensation takes a fair amount of organizational responsibility for the fair. (And yes, I still encourage you to buy PM books, especially mine, from the PM site.) I've spoken there; I've given up some of my speaking time there because I thought Daphne Gottlieb should have a slot and for whatever reason she didn't get one that particular year, and I've sold (and bought) plenty of books there. I like the fair, and think it's great. But I am not going this year. Pimpy the CEO has enough money; he doesn't need mine. And I'm an autonomist, not an anarchist—I don't have an aesthetic revulsion toward the county fair building or UC Berkeley or anything like that.
So I hope to see my smelly, black-clad pals and eat vegan doughnuts with everyone in 2014, when the fair is somewhere else. But this year, I'm staying home. I'm not calling for or joining a boycott—if your personal Algebra of Revolution is different, cool, go. I get that one cannot boycott capitalism or the state. I'm only speaking personally, and like I said I hope to see you all next year. Thanks.
So there are a number of issues. Within the radical milieu, of course, there are people fundamentally opposed to pornography and sex work, and the sort of videos produced by kink.com especially. (But not everythingbutt.com, right? Nobody could possibly have any criticism of that...as long as you like watching women take enemas in dirty bathrooms.) This has led to what all controversies in the Bay Area lead to these days—enormous Facebook threads. It's extremely difficult to be sympathetic to the anti-crowd as they tend to lecture people on how exploited they are—sex work is apparently hyper-exploitive because it is of "the body" (...unlike other work?) which should clue any reader in someonehow rarified and middle-class the milieu is. The antis also like insisting that anyone with kinky tastes has learned this preference from early abuse. Even as an abstraction that's both distateful and entitled as it presumes a privileged position from which one's own sexual aesthetics were formed, but in the concrete, when you inform someone in particular to his or her virtual face that he or she is an abuse victim and just doesn't know it, that's beyond the pale.
All that aside, the antis have a compelling point: lots of women, anarchafeminists, and young people either cannot or will not attend because of the location. And do you want women, anarchafeminists, and young people to come? Of course you do.
There are also issues particular to kink.com, which like virtually every _____.com sells in town sells itself as somehow progressive/disruptive while actually being a
I am full of cocaaaaaine!
More specifically, sex worker/activist Maggie Mayhem has an extensive array of complaints against kink.com, where she has done some vids: sweatshop/assembly line conditions for live cam performers, buttplugs washed in the wrong sinks, unpaid "extras" in one of the scenario events, etc. Local scuttlebutt (butt!) has it that these issues are stated fairly and are accurate. Whether or not sex work is a raw deal (see what I did there?) kink.com is an awful place to work, and doubly so because of its faux progressive claims.
Oh, and the CEO basically snatched the Armory in the first place away from a primarily Latino community group that was raising funds to purchase it, bought out a local bar to turn it into the kind of place he wanted to go to, and is basically a gentrification-pus-filled boil on the ass of the Mission District. So not that, anythingbutt that!
But, is this actually worse than a bunch of anarchists simply giving money to the state, which is what the fair did in prior years? Or to the universities, which are also heavily enmeshed with the state (even privates are), and which are the locus of ideological production of statist propaganda, imperialist military research, and the like. And finally, the book fair committee has a bit of a trump card—find us a better place if you don't like it. It needs to be cheap, have a big room for the vendors and a little room for the speakers; close to mass transit; ready to put up with anarchist book fair shenanigans which might include nudity, unofficial vendors, and pie fights; and it must be ideologically cleaner than the kink.com armory.
Compelling, but only almost. One of the tenets of anarchism is that one should be very suspicious of institutions as institutions tend toward an interest in their own reproduction aside from any other goals the individuals who created and maintain the organization might have. The sad no-fun solution to the problems of finding a place for the fair is the easiest and most politically astute one: don't hold it this year. Take a year off. The world doesn't need a book fair, it (supposedly) needs anarchy. But handing money to either the state or a gentrifying pimp is hardly going to get you there. Or have four smaller anarchist bookfairs, on a quarterly basis, in an affordable venue. Or put the speakers/readers on Skype or YouTube for the world to see. Or or or...anything but privileging the institution over its goals.
So I am out this year. I have a specific interest in the fair, as PM Press, the publisher of Sensation takes a fair amount of organizational responsibility for the fair. (And yes, I still encourage you to buy PM books, especially mine, from the PM site.) I've spoken there; I've given up some of my speaking time there because I thought Daphne Gottlieb should have a slot and for whatever reason she didn't get one that particular year, and I've sold (and bought) plenty of books there. I like the fair, and think it's great. But I am not going this year. Pimpy the CEO has enough money; he doesn't need mine. And I'm an autonomist, not an anarchist—I don't have an aesthetic revulsion toward the county fair building or UC Berkeley or anything like that.
So I hope to see my smelly, black-clad pals and eat vegan doughnuts with everyone in 2014, when the fair is somewhere else. But this year, I'm staying home. I'm not calling for or joining a boycott—if your personal Algebra of Revolution is different, cool, go. I get that one cannot boycott capitalism or the state. I'm only speaking personally, and like I said I hope to see you all next year. Thanks.