We're Women! 2021
Version 1, 38 diam x 16 high cm
The bowl 'We're Women,' featured in this post, is currently showing in 'Feminist Satire, No Safe Spaces,' @u_jazdowski Castle, Warsaw, until Oct 1st 2023
An earlier version of this piece, a fired clay 'sketch,' (private collection,) will also be on show soon in, 'A Nasty Piece of Work: The Art of Dissident Feminists,' from Sept 16 - Oct 16, 2023, in San Francisco, California. The opening reception on Sept 16th will coincide with the annual conference of the Women's Declaration International, USA.
info@femalesmatter.org for more information.
I'm delighted they've used this version for the publicity. It gives both versions an outing in the USA where neither have yet been seen.
The title of the bowl, 'We're Women!,' is derived from the words of Fiona Broadfoot, a survivor of the sex trade in the UK. It was these words, set out below, that prompted me to make the pot.
eTangled into the hair of the woman on the plate are all the words used to describe women exploited in prostitution.
When asked by a TV journalist which word she most disliked, Fiona said,
'sex work,'
'but Why?'came the mystified reply,
'what do you want to be called then?'
'Women! Because that's what we are, most of us, We're WOMEN!'
Many people use 'sex work' with the best of intentions. They genuinely don't wish to insult. The problem is that it sanitises and obscures the violence and brutality that is inherent in the sex trade and, while many women don't experience violence all the time, there are few, if any, who have escaped it and, even if they did, they know the threat is always there.
The expression itself entered common usage in the UK via the political Left, positing the idea that women exploited in prostitution were 'workers' like any other. It aims to comfort the middle-classes who don't wish to think about the vicious brutality meted out to the girls and women involved. It also comforts campaigners for 'sex worker's rights,' a pipe dream if ever there was one, as if the men who pay for sex have any interest in the rights of prostituted women.
It is also a dehumanising word. 'Workers' were and still are seen almost as mechanical parts in the bigger system. The imagery associated with 'the worker' turns men and women into the nations heroes, pictured, always, from a 'worms eye' view point, forging the future of the Fatherland. Little wonder the adherents of the 'sex work is work' ideology can ignore and forget the humiliation of prostitution so easily. The word is completely de-sexed and that is profoundly relevant. The sex trade is an ideology, a form of extremism, based on the idea that one sex is for sale to other. This is an intolerable idea in a democracy that seeks sexual equality and hold women's sex-based rights to be important. The humane word is woman. That is the one that should used by the Left.