Breastfeedinggate Update: Maggie Mayhem FTW!!

Maggie Mayhem just posted at her blog a comprehensive and powerful rebuttal to Furry Girl's vicious smear of Madison Young for the crime of using her breastfeeding of her child as a "porn prop". The entire piece is worthy of a read because it gives the important background for the event in which Madison was maligned for, and a complete analysis of why it's not just a matter of she said/she said.

I will simply requote the final paragraphs of Maggie's blog entry, because they say what needs to be said about this matter far better than I ever could say them.

If we want to be totally logical about it, someone with a sexual attraction to pre-pubescent children isn’t hanging out on an adult porn star’s twitter stream hoping for the golden chance that they might see a glimpse of a child. Pedophiles are going to be hanging out in the family friendly spaces like playgrounds, swimming pools, child beauty pageants, churches, etc. It’s an odds game. If you are into children you’re going to go where there are a lot of children. Pedophiles aren’t heading out to the strip clubs to kidnap victims, they’re going to Chuck E. Cheese. People aren’t suddenly converted into dangerous pedophiles lusting after infants from watching a woman breastfeed or shall we go arrest the romantic partners of breast feeding women for watching a breast feeding and fucking immediately after? Human beings are perfectly capable of holding these concepts together without children being harmed for it. It is not “pedophile courting” behavior to share these pictures on personal blogging and micro-blogging services outside of a XXX porn site. Boogeymen don’t advance the argument, credible threats do.

The number of people fighting back are listening to those words, recognizing their significance, and unwilling to allow them to be used as synonyms for “my opinion is that this person is annoying.” I am deeply concerned about the sex worker revolution and that is why I’m not going to perpetuate the myth that the children of sex workers are in constant and unending danger of sexual exploitation and should be governed under a special set of laws about what they can and cannot depict when the set is closed, safe, and protected and no harm came to the child.
This has nothing to do with anyone’s affiliation or non-affiliation with feminism, it isn’t because Madison Young is getting a special pass, this doesn’t even have anything to do with San Francisco other than that it was largely people from the Bay Area who were present at these events and can speak up about their context and non-sexual nature. We have to respond. If we do not, then we are allowing an allegation that we are sexualizing an infant to go unchallenged and be accepted as truth. Speaking as though there were people openly masturbating to this infant is not a matter of opinion or perspective. You can’t state and imply that it is or does and act baffled when people correct the record. Putting that infant at risk of being taken away by police and subjected to that process to express a personal distaste of someone’s politics or PR is a far, far greater expression of child exploitation than posing for that photograph ever had any reasonable potential to be.

Say what you mean and mean what you say. Don’t put that child in danger to express your opinion about the mother. It’s not just the hypocrisy of using the machinations of a system you are trying to erode to hurt someone standing beside you in the battle. It’s the fact that it carries on to someone who didn’t get a say and chills a group of people into hiding for no good reason. Don’t throw another sex worker under the bus as a lesson of the power of the system posed against sex workers. This is not a claim that you should not disagree or challenge people’s beliefs. Pedophilia means more than Gail Dines writing a shitty article in the Guardian. Accusing Madison Young of hosting erotic breast feedings is not merely “pissing off the mommy bloggers.” It is suggesting that a child is being molested and that compels action. It’s like fighting for a sensible drug policy and planting crack cocaine and a machete on another activist but worse. I can’t sit back and let an accusation that extreme stand without correction. I cannot.

It's one thing to say that you don't like a performer using breastfeeding a child to promote her website. It's another thing altogether, though, to throw the charge of "pedophile" at her and explicitly throw her under the bus and call on the very same authorities who would no sooner go after you as well next to sacrifice her merely to fit your personal pique. But to sacrifice  the innocent child and separate her from her mother based on an obviously false charge?? That is the lowest form of viciousness you can go...and anyone worthy of those depths does not deserve to be called a progressive sexual rights activist or a sex worker advocate. In fact, it is one degree of separation from  Melissa Farley....or Laura Schlessenger.