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I interviewed the amazing Maggie McNeill — dissident feminist, sex worker, writer, and speaker — about the ongoing Satanic Panic, human trafficking, sex work, White Feminism, Carceral Feminism, the infantilization of women, and what we should really be afraid of.
It’s hard to choose my favorite parts of this interview. But here are some choice quotes:
“To a large degree, the mainstream feminism has a very low opinion of women.”
“When QAnon appeared, we were back to the full-blown Satanic elements. I wasn't surprised at all. I'm like, oh, there it is. It's been under the surface. It just took a while to resurface again.”
“You can say no to a hug. But at the same time, we're also telling children that it is okay for an adult to stick their fingers in your genitals and take your clothes off as long as they have a title and they call it a search. We teach them unquestioning obedience to authority figures. And then we wonder why cops, teachers, pastors are the ones committing sexual abuse. It's like, because you've taught them they're not allowed to question these authorities.”
“It's what women of color are calling ‘White Feminism.’ It's a kind of feminism that comes out of a sheltered place, a place where daddy, wealth, expensive school, they're all taking care of you and never let anything bad happen to you. You wanna believe that this kind of world is the norm and that bad things happening is not the norm. But of course that's not the case. When you live with danger, when you have a difficult life, when you're in the street, you have to develop a realistic sense of danger so that you're not constantly just marinating in cortisol. If you've been a sex worker, like I have, for as long as I have, if I was afraid of every single man I saw how could I have ever survived? You have to develop a realistic sense of what's scary and what's not scary. People who have never been in danger don't know what danger looks like. They think danger looks like a white van. Danger looks like internet porn. Danger looks like other women living in a different way than you do. That's what danger looks like to them. Danger looks like not keeping your kid, and by kid I mean anybody under 25, imprisoned essentially in your house. That's what danger looks like when you don't know what danger looks like.”
“Even the real honest-to-goodness cases of real trafficking do not look like the myth. There's no vans. There's no kidnapping. You'll see things like, ‘Oh, they think that the pimp is their boyfriend.’ Very often, usually even, the pimp is their boyfriend. He's just an abusive boyfriend. How can you expect to have a conversation with a woman when you're gaslighting her? You're telling her that her boyfriend is not her boyfriend when she knows he's her boyfriend. When I was a teenager, I didn't listen to people who infantilized me.”
Full transcript below
Cathy: Hello, and welcome to Sex and the State, a newsletter about power. Today I'm interviewing the amazing Maggie McNeil. Maggie and I have been friends for quite a long time now. She is a sex worker. She's been a sex worker for decades now. She is also a writer and thinker and speaker. Her blog is the Honest Courtesan and I couldn't recommend it more highly. And she's also on Twitter I believe at @Maggie_McNeill.
I just wanted to have you on to kind of talk about sex work, feminism, masculinity, all the things that I've been writing about recently. But I wanted to start out and just kind of ask you about some of the kind of frustrations that you have with quote unquote, mainstream feminism.
Maggie: Oh, goodness. How many hours do you have?
Honestly, if you boil it down to the most important parts, the most important details, I think my main problem with mainstream feminism, with mainstream anything ism in that it's a religion. It's got a set of principles that you're not allowed to question to be in the club and it's got a certain catechism.
It has a certain canon of writers that you're expected to quote from. And even if thoughts are in similar veins to some of these folks, if you don't use the same language and the same shibboleths as everybody else then you're out. Then you're not a feminist.
You just can't question certain things. Any movement in which you are not allowed to question is not a movement for me. So that's the main problem I have with mainstream feminism. Obviously there are dissident feminisms. And I have no problem with those.
And to a lesser extent, the problem I have with it of course, is that to a large degree, the mainstream feminism has a very low opinion of women. I remember saying that practically since high school. For something called feminism, it has a really low opinion of women, women's agency, women's resilience, women's power, and women's everything.
Cathy: I think these are definitely reasonable critiques. I'm wondering if you see a relevant difference, especially as far as the not being open to critique, between feminism and libertarianism, for example.
Maggie: Libertarianism, it's an ism, right? If I have to sit through one more lecture of the difference between deontology… and you're smiling.
You know what I mean. Really, I don't care I don't care. The whole thing of libertarians being so obsessed with the economic dimensions when at this juncture the social dimensions are so much more important in my opinion. I'm more concerned about all the crunching on civil rights that the establishment is doing right now much more than the amount of money they're stealing from me. I don't like being robbed, but I'm not being robbed to any greater degree than I have been most of my life. I'm used to that. It's the civil liberties, infringements growing civil liberties infringements. I think my main critique of mainstream libertarianism and I don't mean the Libertarian Party, which is a totally different subject.
Cathy: Which we will not address.
Maggie: Which we will not address. But I mean, just the movement. It's just, like I said, that obsession with economics.
Cathy: And I think to a large degree, the dichotomy between social issues and economic issues is a false dichotomy.
Maggie: Yes, absolutely. I think it is. But I think we agree on this, that so many of the economic problems are caused by the social issues in the first place.
Cathy: I'll never forget the Mercatus Institute, which I'm not trying to pick fights with any particular institution. But, they put out a ranking of freedom for the states in America. You know, one to 50, which is the most and least free. I don't think that they specified economically. And they didn't include access to abortion as one of the criteria. There's no reality in which access to abortion isn't an economic issue.
Maggie: Absolutely.
Cathy: The number-one reason people seek abortion is because they cannot afford to have usually another child. And the economic implications of not being able to obtain an abortion are obviously like, probably more important than your marginal tax rate.
So yeah, it's a huge problem. But I wanna dig into more the way that feminism often condescends to women. The way I often put it is that I find a lot of mainstream feminists really infantilize women.
Maggie: Yes.
Cathy: I think obviously when it comes to sexual autonomy, whether it's our ability to consent to do sex work or our ability to navigate a consent conversation like an adult, it just seems like a lot of feminism is just very, like you said, it has a very low opinion of women.
Maggie: Yeah. Well, I mean I think getting my first degree before the end of the eighties, before a lot of that stuff became mainstreamed, a lot of what's considered mainstream feminism now was considered radical feminism in the eighties.
I know that myself and my other peers would've been appalled at the idea that our consent sexually would be questioned merely because of our sex. That you can't possibly know, he tricked you into that or he, whatever. And you don't have enough strength to say no. You can't be held responsible for that.
I would've been incredibly insulted by that. And I think most of my peers would've been too. This is not to say that there isn't such a thing as a power imbalance, of course, but to say that an adult woman, because you're over 18 and this is before they started raising the everything to 21, if you're old enough to live on your own and be away at school and be paying your own rent, that somehow when it comes to sexual matters, you're still a child and you can be bowled over because of whatever, I don't know, he belongs to a frat or something.
I can't even analyze it. It's so weird to me.
Cathy: Yeah, the story I like to tell is, I was reading the Babe magazine interview with the woman who went on the date with Aziz Ansari. And the whole time I'm reading it I'm just thinking, you know where the door is. You know where your clothes are.
If you don't like what's happening, say no, stand up, put your clothes on and leave. It just seems to be like, if you are not ready to say no and stand up and leave, not to say there aren't circumstances where you're unsafe doing so or inebriated to the point where you can't. Leaving aside extenuating circumstances, part of being an adult is the ability to say yes or no and mean it and go on with your life. I think the reason that I identify as a sex-positive feminist is first and foremost, I think sex is inherently morally neutral. But what that means is that sex is not magic.
And what I see in a lot of feminism is the idea that sex is magic. That somehow women can consent to cleaning toilets for money. They can consent to making lattes for money. But they can't consent to having sex for money. Or they can consent to going to a party, but they can't consent to having sex with someone at a party without six times of being asked and then them saying the magic word. Women are adults. Sex isn't magic. It seems to be really missing from the conversation, but something that I also wanted to talk to you about that you've written a lot about, is the Satanic Panic, or shall I say Satanic Panics?
I think that it's the same panic just rebranded.
I'd love, just for somebody who has no idea what we're talking about what's happening, why does it matter?
Maggie: I think you want like a quick synopsis of the history of it. Like a two-minute capsule.
Cathy: No sweat.
Maggie: No, I can do this. In the early eighties, this whole moral panic started around a bunch of things. I think part of it was a reaction to the sexual revolution in the seventies. Part of it gained a lot more credence because of HIV. Because people were afraid. It seemed like to some people of a traditional mindset that God was punishing us for the sexual revolution. I think it's tough for younger women to really understand how much guilt there was in women in those days for taking a full-time job and putting your kids in daycare. Nowadays that's so normal. Nobody thinks about it. But there was a lot of guilt in those days. And there were a lot of plots in TV shows and movies and things about that sort of a thing. And so it wasn't surprising when this idea arose, this panic arose, that children were being sexually abused inside of daycare centers, which was of course the center of, of the Satanic Panic.
And it spread into all sorts of other things. I can remember during my two years of teaching, yes, I did actually teach in the late eighties. I can remember lecturing to a class of high schoolers talking about a local newsman claiming that Satanists had broken into his garage in order to take revenge on him for doing a story about their rituals.
And as I said to the class, because obviously they couldn't just have been trying to steal his lawnmower. It was absurd. The Satanic Panic as such didn't last a tremendously long time, 15 years maybe. It was starting to die by ‘94, ‘95. But it didn't really go away. It stuck. And what happened, was it rebranded, as you said. They changed the motive of the villains. So we still are being asked to believe that there's these huge cabals of shadowy villains, abducting women, and, and engaging in, in weird, exploitative sex with them and children. But the motive is now being cast as profit versus religion. But it's the same thing. Otherwise, it's the same panic. It's the same idea. It's the same people lurking all over to steal your children to abduct women off the street.
And I think that's why the sex trafficking hysteria was so much more widespread, because the Satanic Panic as such was a pretty much strictly American phenomenon. Whereas, of course, the sex trafficking hysteria went worldwide. I think it's because it seemed to have a more solid basis in reality. A lot of people understood from the beginning that the Satanic Panic was silly. There's no giant cabals of magic Satanists, especially doing the kind of stuff that they were supposedly doing building networks of tunnels under daycare centers and spiriting children away into all this kind of foolishness, but even so, since at least the end of the aughts, maybe the early teens, once the sex trafficking thing got really established, we started seeing elements of Satanic Panic popping up in it from square one. I recall, I wanna say it was like in 2011, 2012 a post called mumbo jumbo where I talked about the idea, all these magic ideas, the idea that the pimp has like magical mind control powers that they can walk through walls like ninjas and, and abduct women out of guarded shelters and things like that. The whole story getting bigger and bigger and bigger with time. And so when QAnon appeared, we were back to the full-blown Satanic elements. I wasn't surprised at all.
I'm like, oh, there it is. It's been under the surface. It just took a while to resurface again. And there it is. So it's not surprising.
Cathy: Thank you. That was excellent. And I think that one thing that's really interesting is that when you see moral panics throughout history, they always seem to accompany social change that people see as frightening and destabilizing.
Maggie: Yes. Yes.
Cathy: So I think the widespread entry of women into the workforce in the seventies leading to the widespread utilization of daycare in the eighties was really scary and destabilizing for people. And, I think that the kind of explosion of access to online pornography.
Maggie: Yes.
Cathy: And certain moves that we've made toward becoming a more sex-positive society more recently has been super destabilizing, I think as well. The change in gender relations that we've seen in recent decades,, we've seen men become less educated than women on average, male wages are declining at the bottom half of earners, manufacturing and agriculture becoming less feasible ways for men to earn a living. You're seeing these major changes in society that are frightening and destabilizing and so people look for scapegoats.
And, I think in, in this case the daycare owners were the scapegoats in the Satanic Panic. I think the sex industry, however you wanna define it, is the scapegoat in the current human trafficking moral panic.
Maggie: Sure.
Cathy: And I think what's particularly upsetting to me about these panics is that child sexual abuse, and, abuse of women is a real problem. But the vast, vast majority of it is perpetrated by family members, coaches, pastors, people who have direct contact with children and are in positions of power over those children. It's not strangers.
Maggie: No. I wrote an essay once about this, where I talked about that we have these obsessive things about consent. And I remember what spurred it was a little cartoon, which is popular. You see it on the internet a lot about, teaching children consent with the idea of, well, what if you don't like hugs?
You can say no to a hug. It's like, but at the same time as we're promoting things like that, we're also telling children that it is okay for an adult to stick their fingers in your genitals and take your clothes off as long as they have a title and they call it a search.
We teach them unquestioning obedience to authority figures. And then we wonder why cops, teachers, pastors are the ones committing sexual abuse. It's like, because you've taught them they're not allowed to question these authorities. What is it? 90%? I think. Obviously some very high number are people the kid already knows. They're not some random dude, like in the memes with a white van, with ‘free candy’ scrawled on it with spray paint. It's not that. It never has been. This is the same reason I have problems with the concept of rape culture, because I think to call it rape culture to focus on rape is to ignore the fact that it is part and parcel of a bigger problem. The problem being, we don't want to think that people we know are capable of bad. Because when you turn around and you say, well, people are perfectly willing to accuse strangers of rape.
They just don't want the star football player accused of rape. They don't want their uncle accused of rape. Those are the people that are being protected. Not some random guy on the street of a different race. Oh, we can accuse him all day long. There's no rape culture there, you know? We have this urge to shield from consequences, people that we think are important for whatever reason, whether because they're a family member, whether because they're a cop or a pastor or somebody that we want to believe good things about.
And so we shield them from consequences. While the underprivileged people. Oh, they're just getting those consequences.
Cathy: Yeah. That's a really good point. You know, I have read that, according to the best statistics we have, which are not perfect by any stretch, but from the FBI, I believe something like between one and 10% of reported rapes are unfounded. But when you ask the average person what percentage of reported rapes do you believe are unfounded? The average person will say 30%. I had connected that obviously to we don't believe women, but I hadn't connected it to that we can't believe it about our men. When you hear a rape accusation, you're probably hearing it against somebody you know. Because that's how it works. And so you're quite incentivized to believe that 30% of the rape accusations you've ever heard are unfounded because yes, we don't wanna believe something so horrible about people we know. I also think that there is an extent to which we can't grapple with how much danger we're all in at all times.
Maggie: Sure. Oh yeah, no, no, no. Yeah. I think you're right about that because that's that whole thing of that very Pollyanna thing that you hear from again, a lot of feminists, oh, I should be able to walk on the street and blah, blah.
It's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And a Black guy should be able to drive to work without being murdered by cops. But that isn't the world we live in. So you need to address that and not sit there with your pie-in-the-sky, we should this, and we should that. I mean yeah. Nobody should be living in poverty in the richest country in the world.
But here we are. So it just seems a bit Pollyanna to me to ignore the fact that… Well, it's what the women of color are calling ‘White Feminism.’ It's a kind of feminism that comes out of a sheltered place, a place where daddy and your wealth, your expensive school, and all that, they're all taking care of you and they never let anything bad happen to you. And so you wanna believe that this kind of world is the norm and that bad things happening is not the norm. But of course that's not the case.
Cathy: I totally agree with you that the critiques of White Feminism are really important. And I think they hit on something very real.
I think it is this being insulated from the realities faced by people who have less privilege. Ironically though, these people who have the most privilege are often the most afraid. They're the ones going on and on about how I have to have a thing of mace with me everywhere I go. And everybody's trying to rape me and men are trying to kidnap me in vans.
And it's like, no, none of that's true. I mean, anything is possible. But it's extremely unlikely. But I think that’s where their privilege really comes into play. The kind of threats they're really under, it's it's not strangers. It's things like carceral feminism where it's like, okay, the answer to me feeling afraid is just to lock everyone up.
Maggie: Yes, yes. To lock people up who are different from me. You make me uncomfortable. And for some, for some very extreme feminists, of course, that different for me is men. I think for most, it is men of a different color, men of a different nationality, men who speak a different language, men of a different religion, you know what I'm saying?
They don't want their own men to be the ones being considered, whatever men they consider, their own, whatever that us group, wherever that us group is drawn, you know? But I think your point was a really good one.
When you live with danger, when you have a difficult life, when you're in the street, so to speak, you have to develop a realistic sense of danger so that you're not constantly just marinating in cortisol.
If you've been a sex worker, like I have, for as long as I have, and I was afraid of every single man I saw. How could I have ever survived? You have to develop a realistic sense of what's scary and what's not scary. People who have never been in danger really. They don't know what danger looks like. They think danger looks like a white van. Danger looks like internet porn. Danger looks like other women living in a different way than you do. That's what danger looks like to them. Danger looks like not keeping your kid, and by kid I mean anybody under 25, imprisoned essentially in your house. That's what danger looks like when you don't know what danger looks like.
Cathy: Well, and when you are taught what to fear mostly through media.
Maggie: Yes.
Cathy: I remember when I was really young I read a lot of news. My dad and I were talking. I was talking about murder rates for whatever reason. And he was like, what do you think the murder rate is? And I don't know what I said, but I told him and he laughed. He was like, no. It's way lower than that. It's actually quite rare to get murdered in the United States. I didn't know, because every day on the news somebody was getting murdered, you know?
Maggie: Yes, yes. And the 24-hour news cycle has not helped us. Because it used to be you only heard about murders that happened in your city. It was in the local news. You got a sense of, oh, okay, that's how common it is. But now, I was complaining about this on Twitter recently.
You actually see that a lot of online news sources don't put the state they're happening in. They'll have the name of the town or they'll have the neighborhood. And sometimes for my blog I have to actually go digging around to figure out where in the world this is supposed to have happened because it's not obvious. There's no city and state. A lot of times I even have to go down to the bottom of the page and look and hit the about us column and find out what's your office's mailing address? That's the only way I know what state you're in.
And when you have that situation and that is the norm, well, of course people are gonna be afraid.
They can't localize where this rape or this murder or this shooting or this whatever occurred.
Cathy: Right. And again, like with the Satanic Panic, you had a lot of reporters just credulously reporting that Satanists were at work. Looking back, there was absolutely no credible evidence of any instances of ritualistic, Satanic sexual abuse of children. But it was reported as fact. And now with the human trafficking moral panic, we're seeing reporters reporting as fact human trafficking stings. There is no evidence there is any human trafficking at play. In every case I've looked into, upon further investigation, we have adult consenting sex workers, or we don't even have that. It's just cops doing stings, pretending to be sex workers or pretending to be clients. So, it's just really unfortunate that the media is so ready to report on these stories about doing any kind of fact checking, any kind of verification. And it, again, causes people, especially people insulated from real danger, as you said, to be afraid of things that aren't real, that aren't what you need to be afraid of.
The vast majority of human trafficking cases turned out to be domestic violence.
Maggie: Of course, absolutely, domestic violence. I have a whole tag on my blog talking about I call it ‘the face of trafficking’ where I point out that even the real honest-to-goodness cases of real trafficking do not look like the myth. There's no vans. There's no kidnapping.
It may seem nitpicky, but you'll see things like, ‘Oh, they think that the pimp is their boyfriend.’ It's like, very often, usually even, the pimp is their boyfriend.
He's just an abusive boyfriend. How can you expect to have a conversation with a woman when you're telling her, when you're gaslighting her, you're telling her that her boyfriend is not her boyfriend when she knows he's her boyfriend.
Cathy: You're worse than gaslighting. You're infantilizing. You're saying ‘You can't tell the difference between a boyfriend and something else.’
Maggie: Yes. They're not gonna listen. Why would they listen? Why would they listen to that? I didn't, when I was a teenager, I didn't listen to people who infantilized me.
Cathy: And if you had other options, you wouldn't be with the domestic violator, right? Like this is not an issue of, we need to have a conversation. This is an issue of, they need better options. These are systemic issues.
Well, on that note, we’re about at time. Thank you so much. It’s always wonderful to see you and catch up and hear from you. Thank you so much for all the work you do again. Catch her on The Honest Courtesan. Catch her on Twitter at @Maggie_McNeill. Thank you so much, Maggie.
Maggie: You're very welcome, Cathy. Bye-bye, talk to you soon.
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