Harlot's dictionary

The Honest Courtesan defines terms. My favorite entry:

Swedish model: An insidious form of prohibitionism based upon the neofeminist premise that adult women are forever the equivalent of legal minors, neither able to consent to sex acts of which the state does not approve, nor held liable if they consent to those acts. Since men are fully competent adults, however, they are unilaterally liable just as they would be in statutory rape cases

Feminism should be about empowering women, not infantilizing them.

I also learned a new word, namely dysphemisms. How often does that happen when reading a blog?

Iceland government makes it harder to get warm

My casual impression has always been that regulation of the sex industry tends to be pro-cyclical, with laxer regulation in bad times, perhaps because the general public has more sympathy with people who will take "any job" when there are fewer jobs to be had in general.

Iceland provides some evidence against this theory, as they have just banned strip clubs, despite being in a fairly dire economic situation. Matt Yglesias has some comments, with which I largely agree.

I still find it odd that anyone would think it feminist to either deny female sexuality or to put women out of work. This is just good old fashioned puritanism, dressed up in secular clothes. In my view, a serious feminism aims to empower women, not treat them as metaphorical little girls who need the protection of the state.

Feminist humor

Via: instapundit

Defining feminism

The Guardian reports on the on-going battle between sex-positive and sex-negative versions of feminism or, framed differently, between individualist and collectivist visions of female empowerment.

Key bits:

Julie Bindel, a feminist campaigner and journalist, admitted being infuriated by women like Egan and Tkacik. "Feminism is not the freedom to act like a dickhead," she said. "These women are individualists, not feminists. They are lazy, bone-idle women who have no interest taking part in a political movement for change but are trying to get credibility for their selfish lives by playing identification politics. You can't claim to be a feminist simply because you're a woman."

Ellie Levenson, author of the forthcoming book The Noughtie Girl's Guide to Feminism, is also critical of Hirshman's definition of "good" and "bad" feminism. "A lot of the criticism against Jezebel is against women being open about their sexual antics," she said. "Feminism is about women choosing how to behave and having the same rights and freedoms to behave badly as men do, so in order to make these choices we need to be able to read about women who have made all kinds of choices."

Worth a look for those into such things, though the article itself does not know as much feminist history as it thinks it does. There is a rich vein of individualist feminism going well back into the 1800s, a vein that is tied up in interesting ways with spiritualism, free love and other 19th century enthusiasms.

Jezebel link here.

On libertarian feminism (and broader related issues)

I had a discussion with Jim Heckman many years ago in which he described a disagreement he had had with Richard Epstein at Chicago about separating out state oppression of blacks from what might be called social oppression of blacks. In the post-bellum south, he had argued, the two were largely one in the same and thus both difficult to separate and perhaps also not that useful to separate.

Along those lines, I think it is a narrow view indeed to assume that the best society can be obtained simply by figuring out how to restrain the state to the provision of public goods combined with thoughtful redistribution. Surely this would help, but it would not be enough. A society with such a modest state could still be a distinctly illiberal state, depending on what was happening with its culture. Social actions can be oppressive just like the over-armed agents of the state; that this oppression takes somewhat different forms makes it no less real. This, to me, is part of the appeal of thinking of myself as a classical liberal rather than a libertarian, as classical liberal thought extends its purview well beyond just questions of governmental size and scope.

I was reminded of this line of thinking by reading this piece by Reason's Kerry Howley on the relationship between libertarianism and feminism. Here's a taste:

Libertarians spend an enormous amount of time telling people that they are, in fact, oppressed. We don’t call it “consciousness raising” when we explain why you ought to be able to shoot up while selling your kidney to a sex worker, but that’s what it is.

Hat tip: Julian Sanchez

Is feminism all wet?

Second wave and third wave feminism do battle in a Danish municipal pool. The gist:

After a successful campaign by the Socialist People's Party to allow women to go topless at city swimming halls, employees at the facilities report that they have not seen a single bare-breasted female in their pools.

Full report here. Seems like somehow the Danes are having more fun than the rest of us.

I bet the socialist workers would get more votes here in the US if they put more emphasis on their policy on topless pools and less emphasis on their views about freeing Mumia and nationalizing the means of production.

Hat tip: Lars Skipper