10 reasons why I don't really know what I think about Iceland's strip club law

So, Iceland passed a law banning strip clubs, which "will make it illegal for any business to profit from the nudity of its employees."

When I first read the headline, I thought, "Hmmm." And then I read this quote by Kolbrún Halldórsdóttir: "It is not acceptable that women or people in general are a product to be sold," and I thought, Right. The fuck. On.

And then I headed over to Feministe, and read Jill's take, and I actually started thinking. Because, really, isn't this kind of the Central Debate of Our Day. Or any day? Isn' t this a Big Divisive Feminist Question? Even in my own head, it's a Big Divisive Question. And even if you know why, I'll tell you why anyway.

1) Because I am skeptical of laws that limit personal freedoms. At least in theory. I think we should trust people to be able to make their own decisions. I am concerned by laws that tell you what you can and cannot do with your body. I am concerned with the idea that women are just always victims, and categorically unable to make choices.

2) Because I am aware how often the "person freedom" schtik is used to support abusive, exploitative, power-hungry, victimizing people, organizations, and practices. Personal freedom means little to a lot of people. Personal freedom is money. It belongs to the people with the money and it is their prerogative to share it, or not.

3) Because I don't know where the line is between my right to self-determination and social good. Because there is a line; there has to be - if you deny that you're an absolute anarchist. We must all, to a greater or lesser extent, consent to have our freedoms limited if we are to live in a society, for the good of that society. Blasphemy, I know.

4) Because I am not a sex-worker, and never have been, and am perhaps not likely to be, and so any of my ideas or theories are necessarily based on second, third, or tenth-hand information, and therefore anything I have to say is really not at all relevant.

5) Because I hate the "you're not a real feminist because..." arguments, even if I join them sometimes. Because I hate the privilege inherent in saying, "that's not good for you, trust me I know." Because I don't know, and neither does anyone else who isn't you. Because I think that in a world that doesn't respect or honor individuals, that doesn't really often listen to them, we need to listen to them.

6) Because making sex work of any kind illegal is, to me, kind of beside the point. Because if you want to make sex work illegal because (you assume) women are forced into it due to poverty and addiction, you are not actually fixing the problems of poverty and addiction. You are, in fact, maybe making them worse by removing one potential method of income for some women. If you want to make it illegal because it's not safe, you're not actually making women safe. Because you're assuming, somehow, that sex work is the cause of the lack of safety, that the behavior of the women is the problem, that violence just happens, that it grows organically next to sex work in some kind of natural symbiosis, you're taking the perpetrators out of the equation entirely. AND because making it illegal probably won't stop it.

7) Because it's hard for me to accept that we are going to encourage any sort of gender equality in a society in which the unspoken last resort of women is to sell their bodies, in which women bought and sold and on display is just part of daily life, in which the constant message is that we're valuable first and foremost for our bodies, for what we can provide, for how available we are to eyes and hands and other things.

8) Because we live in an increasingly global world, and even if one suddenly found NO representations or realities of objectified women in Iceland, it wouldn't fix anything. Those representations and realities are everywhere else. Because I don't know how taking away those representations will actually change the minds of the people who make up culture, of the people who buy and sell and create and destroy and write the scripts, for all of us, all the time.

9) Because, as Jill writes, "at the end of the day you can’t regulate or legislate respect."

10) Because patriarchy is like air. It's everywhere, in everything, it not only permeates the atmosphere it IS the atmosphere. There is nothing separate from it, nothing that can really escape or live in isolation from it. I believe this. I didn't used to. Advertising, books, movies, history, music, religion, fashion, humor, wars, resources, politics, business, street names, social systems...it's like air. And therefore nothing we do can really be apart from it, and none of us can really be immune. It doesn't matter what we do.

On that nihilistic note, I suppose I will end.