Like an unflushed turd in the soiled waters of our sociopolitical moment, there are some majorly paranoid conspiracies floating around. Most of these conspiracies—if not all— utilize Gothic-narrative-style imagery of sex slavery to push a decidedly alt-right agenda. From #SaveTheChildren to #Plandemic to #PizzaGate, otherwise critical thinkers have been seduced by the most spectacular stories. Not the least of which is the claim that LOL Dolls reveal “secret lingerie” when submerged in ice water, a strategy ostensibly devised by tens of thousands of moving parts and people with the singular goal of grooming and kidnaping your children for sex slavery.
And yes. That is a real conspiracy associated with #SaveTheChildren.
Secret messages in the banal. Pedophiles lurking on every corner. An underground network of half-dead, morally corrupt social architects; we may as well crack open our dusty copies of Dracula or Lolita. Sprinkle in a little reality television—or what Plato identified as The Ideal almost 2,500 years ago— and you have “well-meaning” civilians clamoring to the idea that censored speech via policies like FOSTA/SESTA and EARNIT is indeed the ethical imperative.
As a sociologist and (mostly) former sex worker, the white supremacy at the core of these whore-hating, sex-industry-fearing theories is important to acknowledge and dismantle. Because at its core, Gothic-narrative-style imagery of sex slavery has always been, either subconsciously or otherwise, fuelled by the desire to preserve and protect white womanhood at all costs.
The cross-cultural archetype of The Whore is an unsettling one for most because of the white supremacist notion that femininity be exceptionally private, removed from the public sphere of domination and influence, and, of course, perennially docile—a kind of accessory for white, cishet masculinity. Black women, alternatively, have never had the luxury of existing solely in the private sphere. Black women are often stereotyped for this reason, portrayed in the dominant cultural imagination as, what Patricia Hill Collins calls, “The Jezebel.”
Everything outside of normative, white femininity is considered de facto whore-ish, which is why it is unsurprising that this historical moment should lend itself to a kind of collective fear of The Whore, with real-life implications for real-life sex workers.
Of course, no one drowning their kid’s dolls in ice water is rationally unpacking their whorephobia, but in a world dominated by symbols, or what Baudrillard called simulacra and simulation, it is rather curious that an LOL Doll—with all of her symbols of transgressive and inclusive femininity— rather than, say, a G.I. Joe or a Transformer, should be at the heart of sex trafficking conspiracies.
Moreover, despite the fact that we have a great deal of evidence about who actually harms little girls—spoiler, it’s the grown ass men in their lives— and very little evidence that the manufacturers of LOL Dolls are indiscriminately kidnapping children, the Gothic-narrative-style imagery is just too seductive for many.
To boot, one parent—a blond-haired, blue-eyed, pink-sweater-cladded white woman— made headlines after publicly declaring that LOL Dolls “look like prostitutes.” https://www.thesun.co.uk/fabulous/8538661/outraged-mum-lol-surprise-trading-cards-tots-prostitutes-bdsm/
The interesting thing is that this isn’t the first time white folks have utilized Gothic-narrative-style imagery of sex slavery to push a decidedly alt-right agenda.
The totally fabricated “white slave trade” scare in Victorian London was a yellow, journalistic plague similar to contemporary LOL Dolls conspiracies. White folks 200 years ago claimed that their daughters were being abducted by Black and Brown migrants and forced into sex slavery.
White, Victorian Londoners saw an explosion of migration at the same time that white women’s sexuality was liberalizing after years of oppressive, Victorian dogma. There was likewise an eruption of Gothic, lesbian pulp fiction at the time wherein the liberalizing of sexuality was portrayed as akin to sexual exploitation. These were predictable Gothic narratives: The sexually liberated woman lurks in the shadows, hoping to seduce the blond-haired, blue-eyed “good girls” of white, Victorian London. The sexually deviant villain is ultimately destroyed in the end, much like Dracula and Humbert Humbert are.
Rather than grapple with their own racism, xenophobia, and queerphobia, white people at the time— just like white people now— devised the wildest, most egregious narratives to validate the ways they fought to the literal death to protect the symbols of virtuous white womanhood.
“Make Victorian London Great Again” could have been their political slogan.
From Victorian London to the shitshow that is 2020, from exorcisms to fears that Hilary Clinton (and now Tom Hanks) eats the faces off of children in the basement of Comet Pizza with her lesbian lover, the toxic fragility of white supremacist conceptions of womanhood rears its ugly head whenever threatened by massive social change. But humans—notorious for a lack of introspection even as it sets us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom— prefer to understand our collective stress through spectacular narrative.
Secret messages in the banal make us feel important.
Pedophiles lurking on every corner helps us ignore the pedophiles in our own homes.
An underground network of half-dead, morally corrupt social architects shields us from ever having to examine our own moral corruptions.
Admittedly, I would be mildly amused by the whole enterprise if it didn’t impact sex workers in real life.
One way that these conspiracies are harming sex workers, aside from just generally piling on more whorephobia onto an already saturated cultural imagination, is that said conspiracies colonize progressive discourse for ends that are decidedly regressive. Conspiracies are also helping to validate more mainstream practices of preserving white womanhood, like religious and white-savior-based anti-trafficking efforts
Christians, despite having a rather unsavory laundry list of sexual exploits, for example, are now the self-appointed mouthpieces for survivor liberation and worker solidarity across the globe. Organizations like Exodus Cry rely on Gothic-narrative-style storytelling of sexual slavery to make millions a year, despite being a nonprofit. Their egregious shock-and-awe strategies leverage trauma porn for profit. And they do it all by reifying symbols of virtuous white womanhood.
Helen Taylor, a woman famous for holding up a pair of an anonymous stripper heels and shedding white tears at a Washington D.C. counsel hearing, is almost indistinguishable from the LOL-Dolls-are-prostitutes-mom: blond hair, blue eyes, cheeky pink lipstick, cutesy headbands… you get the idea. She helps Exodus Cry round up whores and introduce them to God.
And this is absolutely the hill I am willing to die on. I believe—from a sociological point of view and as a long time industry worker—that her “activism,” just like LOL Dolls conspiracy theories, are less about helping folks and more about creating fear around non-normative femininities. Great White Savior Helen has also colonized progressive language for these ends. Indeed, she calls herself an “abolitionist.”
Similarly, Nickolas Kristoff, a boot-licking white savior who raids Cambodian brothels with the help of corrupt local governments, unabashedly calls his work “liberating.” By colonizing discourse for regressive ends, Kristoff has found a cozy following of white liberals through his weekly columns in the New York Times, where Black and Brown women in the Global South are routinely tokenized. The subtext is that proximity to whiteness—either by “getting saved” or by working in more “virtuous” labor sectors like sweatshops, where the pay fucking sucks and the women are far less autonomous than in the brothels— is somehow the same thing as being liberated.
Like an Orwellian fairytale, Kristoff fancies himself more of an expert on the lived realities of Black and Brown sex workers than actual Black and Brown sex workers. To boot, there is a reason that the New York Times publishes Kristoff as opposed to activists organizing with the Asian Pacific Network of Sex Workers, who’ve popularized the phrase “no more sewing machines” in direct response to the bullshit of white saviors.
Conspiracies around trans women likewise perpetuate white supremacist conceptions of womanhood. Despite the fact that all of our creepy, cisgender uncles are actually the ones who think that toilets are fuck-cubicles, trans women— like sex workers— are treated as empty vessels into which dominant culture dumps its social anxiety.
And, LOL Surprise! There are some majorly transphobic conspiracies surrounding LOL Dolls, too! What a fucking coincidence! It’s almost as if queer-ness, trans-ness, and sex work are all interchangeable identities in the dominant, cultural imagination; that is, these identities are merely placeholders for femininities that threaten to expose white womanhood as the toppling citadel of asinine symbols it has always been.
But it isn’t just about symbols. Violence against trans women and sex workers, specifically trans sex workers and especially Black trans women in the sex industry, is a real, material reality. Mass shootings are also a real, material reality.
White vigilante groups, some composed of fucking teenagers, have appointed themselves judge, jury, and executioner because of the mainstreaming of conspiracies and the white supremacist ideology behind protecting white womanhood.
Tiny-baby-in-a-people-suit Kyle Rittenhouse is being touted as a hero, for example, by the same boot-lickers who think cops should be given carte blanche to brutalize their own adopted, biracial children. (https://www.businessinsider.com/rnc-speaker-condones-police-racially-profiling-her-biracial-son-2020-8). Ann Coulter—who, holy-fucking-shit!, also has blond hair, blue eyes, and an empty soul— even tweeted that she wants Rittenhouse to be president.
Many of these babies-in-people-suits cite the need to protect white womanhood through their vigilantism. Dylan Roof said “you’re stealing our women and you have to go” before killing Clementa C. Pinckney, Cynthia Marie Graham Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lee Lance, Depayne Middleton-Doctor, Tywanza Sanders, Daniel L. Simmons, Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, and Myra Thompson.
LOL Dolls conspiracies, white savior do-gooders, and babies-in-people-suits all have something terrifying in common—the preservation of normative, white supremacist conceptions of femininity. That is, cishet femininity, blond and white femininity, blue-eyed and pink femininity. Private femininity. Femininity as an accessory. And of course, the opposite of whore-ish femininity.
LOL Dolls conspiracies, white savior do-gooders, and babies-in-people-suits furthermore use the language of progress to wreak havoc on marginalized communities. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
For these reasons, we should all be skeptical of any narrative pedaling Gothic-like fiction as a means to an end that upholds white supremacy.
It’s time to flush the fucking turd.
Disclaimer:
This post is authored by Juniper Fitz and any views or opinions expressed in this post belong solely to the author.
The author does not represnt Assembly Four or Tryst.link.
