I'm currently writing a piece on sex workers and society's inability to acknowledge sex work as a legitimate occupation. The sex industry is kept underground, and the workers within it are thus stigmatized for the work that they do. But why do we keep it so hidden when pornography, prostitution, etc are clearly so proliferate in this country? It seems that we take our own sexual shame and project it onto the people who do the "dirty" work we so enjoy. By outcasting and stigmatizing sex workers, we can feel better about ourselves--it is not us who are the sexually deviant.
As a very feminist thinker, I've struggled with this idea a lot. My very first response to the sex industry was that it was a cop out for women to gain power by using sex. It seemed like nothing new. Women were just usurping men's position on the sexual hierarchy. In Ariel Levy's (A writer I highly admire) words, they were acting like "female chauvinist pigs." It didn't seem radical to just give into what men wanted to see: women as sexual beings, working for their sole pleasure. I wanted to disrupt that order--to turn it on its head. Women needed to do something new to create a more equitable social structure--one that eradicated hierarchies and dichotomies.
But so often, women with this feminist perspective attack other women within the sex industry. We spit moral accusations at these women. We condemn them for upholding patriarchy or for being blinded by patriarchy. But who are we to make such proclamations? How righteous can we be? It hardly promotes sisterhood to condemn women for the choices they make. We are all different--with different ideas about what feminism is. Who can decide who is more feminist or less? Are we upholding an older doctrine of feminism when we should be expanding our cause to include feminisms?
While I cannot speak from personal experience, it would be wrong to assume that all women in the sex industry are victims of patriarchy. We make them victims by labeling them, outcasting them, and turning our heads when we see that they need help. How can we disrespect one portion of the population for what they do when we are all to some extent engaged in what they do? It is not radical to condemn them. It would be radical to unionize sex workers, legitimize their work, and to evaluate our own sexual shame/deviancy and how we choose to project it onto the Other.
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7 comments:
Hi Alisa,
I think you're right that it is difficult for many feminists to extend agency and respect to women who work in the sex industry. This is a shame.
I think the tension here arises from the fact that it's sometimes quite hard to see as agentive the choices these women make and still critique these choices from a position that is not paternalistic.
There seem to be good reasons for critiquing the sex industry. It's exploitative and alienating to degrees that other sorts of labor are not. It promotes values (objectification, disrespect, silencing of women) that are antithetical to women's flourishing. Worst of all, it's violent: women who find themselves in the sex industry are at greater risks of sexual and physical assault than women engaged in other sorts of labor.
However, we still have to respect the agency of women in the sex industry: part of the task of feminism is to respect individual women as being the people in the best position to make choices about how they should live their lives. If women choose to perform sex work, feminists seem obligated to consider this choice agentive insofar as they are committed to viewing women as legitimate agents who can make informed choices in their lives.
I think the proper way to understand feminist critiques of sex work is as a critique of the sex industry (the pornography trade, prostitution rings, etc) and the values and actions promoted by it rather than a critique of the individual women who find themselves working within the sex industry.
A resource that might be helpful to you in thinking through these issues is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry on feminist perspectives on sex markets.
Prostitution in the Third Wave of Feminism
As for feminism, I don’t like to talk about it, because I don’t believe in that women’s lib shit. What has it done for us working women?
- “Jasmine”, a prostitute in Frankfurt (Jasmine 1993, p37)
INTRODUCTION
As the epitaph above suggests, the historical opposition to prostitution in feminist discourse has, among other things, alienated a whole community of women from feminist movement. Many feminists posit prostitution and other forms of sex work as manifestations of patriarchal sexual violence against women, and specifically as male exploitation of female sexuality. Yet such a position denies prostitutes’ personal agency, forces a victim status, and fails to consider sex work as a source of economic self sufficiency. A third wave theory of prostitution merges this rather tired knowledge of oppression with the insights of prostitution as wage labor, performance, and liberation into a dynamic framework characterized by multiplicity and coalition. Understanding prostitution by asking prostitutes themselves to contribute critical material to the feminist canon and working for and with prostitutes for their freedom to negotiate their own lives is one of the most difficult but profitable endeavors attempted by the third wave of feminism.
A DEFINITION OF THIRD WAVE FEMINISM
The third wave of feminism is characterized by multiplicity in terms of its membership and theoretical orientations, the use of personal narrative in critical inquiry, and the collusion of feminist politics with other progressive or liberationist social movements through solidarity, coalition, and intersectional theorizing. Dicker and Piepmeier note that “because of its willingness to use beauty, sex, and power strategically, even as it criticizes traditional definitions of or approaches to them, the third wave occupies a space defined by seeming paradox and contradiction” (2003, p13). To bridge the gap between what is often an inaccessible academic discourse and women’s experience outside of academia, the third wave often utilizes “good storytelling and critical analysis without jargon, lived personal experience that [is] tied to the larger social scene” (Heywood and Drake 1997, p14). With an understanding that “women” are a heterogeneous group and that patriarchal oppression is inextricably related to issues of race, class, ability, sexuality, nationality, etc., third wave feminism works to maintain solidarity and coalition between all women and with other subjugated groups of people. There is also a trend in the third wave to develop an understanding of the intersections between different identificatory categories and lived struggles, and it is here that feminism meets queer theory. Third wave feminist conceptualizations of prostitution are informed by other/older feminisms as well as a wide variety of progressive or liberationist discourses, and so it becomes necessary to provide a strict working definition of prostitution for the purposes of this analysis.
A DEFINITION OF PROSTITUTION
Prostitution may be defined as attending to the sexual desires of an individual with bodily acts in exchange for the payment of money (c.f. Zatz 1997, p279). “Bodily acts” are most commonly genital acts, and precluding extraneous linguistic arguments, a prostitute attends, and a client pays money in this transaction. In this context prostitution includes (but is not limited to) street, car, club, and hotel prostitution as well as brothel prostitution, including those masquerading as massage parlors and escort services. It does not include stripping, video and photographic pornography, phone sex operation or other forms of entertainment which generally involve no direct “bodily acts” upon the client; also excluded are sexual slavery, bride trafficking, child prostitution, arranged marriage, or other phenomena that are explicitly coerced or unpaid. We are also limiting our discussion to prostitution in contemporary Euro-American democracies. Limiting this analysis to prostitution sensu stricto does not imply intellectual laziness but rather an assertion that theorists who define prostitution broadly “are completely divorced from the lived experiences and thoughts of women who actually perform those labour[s]” (Koyama 2005). Sex work is a term developed by sex worker-identified women which may be used interchangeably with prostitution but is sometimes used more loosely than the definition supplied here. The identification of prostitution as a form of (or equivalent to) sex work highlights the two phenomenological aspects of prostitution that emerge most commonly as themes in various prostitution discourses: sex and work.
SEX AND WORK
Most feminist prostitution discourses cluster around sex or work as the more important theoretical concern. After tracing sex and work through various feminisms, a third wave position emerges that collapses both into a cohesive framework characterized by multiplicity. Informed by first wave prudery, lesbians concerned with heterosexism, and the struggle of many women engaged in sex work, an anti-sex discourse emerged that posits prostitution within the framework of male sexual violence and exploitation of female sexuality. Identifying prostitutes as victims, these anti-sex feminists seek to decriminalize the transaction of prostitution but with an eye toward the abolition of all sex work, including pornography. Largely influenced by 1960’s free-love hippies, lesbians engaged in S/M, and post-Stonewall pre-HIV queer liberation, a pro-sex position considers prostitution to be an acceptable way for women to express their sexuality and sexual desires. Aligned with reproductive freedom and bodily autonomy, the pro-sex position stresses the need for women to have the choice or the option to engage in prostitution. Placing prostitution within the realm of the marketplace, mostly Marxist feminists posit prostitution as a service not unlike most between a wage laborer and a capitalist. “Under a Marxist interpretation, every sale of services is entrance into a relation of subordination that transforms the worker into a commodified object” (Zatz 1997, p287), and while not specifically coerced, this labor is oppressive. Other non-Marxist feminists focus more upon prostitution as a source of economic self-sufficiency, and stressed that the choice or option to engage in prostitution should not be abridged.
The anti-sex position unfortunately denies personal agency to women engaged in prostitution, perpetuates a victim status, reductively equates sex with rape, and ignores “the numerous and conflicting first-hand accounts that sex workers have provided about their work” (Shrage 2005), particularly those who do not consider their work to be degrading or exploitative. Conversely, pro-sex feminists presuppose that sex equals desire, and ignore the deleterious effects of criminalization and the socioeconomic contexts that compel women to enter prostitution. Emi Koyama writes, “I’m annoyed as hell of the “sex positive” activists who don’t recognize how race, class, nationality, etc. diminish occupational choices for many women” (2005). Both sex positions (as it were) fail to consider that prostitution is a form of employment, often the best-paid work that women can find. Marxist feminists and others who view prostitution solely as wage labor or service work fail to acknowledge that sexual acts, sexual domination, or sexual desire is integral to the experience of the client. While the considerations of any one feminist likely includes sexual domination, liberation, labor, and choice in some minimal combination, a truly coherent and expansive third wave feminist theory of prostitution simultaneously collapses all of these notions into a narrative characterized by multiplicity.
MULTIPLICITY
The contradiction, paradox, and multiplicity of prostitution in the third wave develops not only from the various ways of theorizing about prostitution in the academy but also from the personal narrative of prostitutes and (to a lesser degree) clients which suggests that prostitution as an event transpires in different contexts for each participant in the act. The extent to which prostitution is experienced as a fulfillment of sexual desire or as a marketplace transaction “depends on the interpretive resources each person brings to the event” (Zatz 1997, p296). The client pays money so that sexual desire/fantasy/fetish is “attended to” by any variety of “bodily acts” on the part of the prostitute. The assumption is that because bodily, genital, or vaginal acts are occurring, the client is experiencing a sexual encounter. Prostitutes, on the other hand, often articulate their practice as “a form of service work structured as a sex act, a performance in which the client’s experience of participation in a sexual act is an illusion created by the sex worker, the sex actress” (Zatz 1997, p284). Michelle Tea, a lesbian sex worker who services men, describes an outcall hotel experience where after stalling by talking about her client’s interest in the Occult, she unexpectedly has an orgasm during the bodily encounter. “I was going to fake it anyway, as part of my regular whore routine, so either way he was going to think he was a little champ, but I would know” (Tea 1997, p155). Her “routine,” complete with a fake name (“Tiffany”) and what is usually a fake orgasm, and the fact that she is a lesbian servicing men, indicates her interpretation of the event as a performance, and not especially pertinent to her own sexual desires. The same event transpires within different contexts for the client and the prostitute, and “the instability of context and event allow for power and resistance to coexist” (Zatz 1997, p303).
PERSONAL NARRATIVE
Third wave theorists understand the importance of prostitutes’ own accounts of their work, but often these narratives are treated as anecdotes written by prostitutes who do not understand the theoretical context they inhabit or the oppression of their situation. This immediately constructs a problematic binary between the privileged inquirer and the unconscious inquired-upon subject. It is perhaps more profitable to consider the use of personal narrative as “a part of an attempt to include critical work produced outside the academy in [a] purview of relevant sources with which to engage in critical conversation” (Zatz 1997, p285, emphasis mine). In a review of four books on the subject of prostitution, Jill Nagle identified four common traps that academics fall into, the third of which being the framing of “nonacademician sex workers…as objects of study and objects of outside forces rather than as producers of knowledge and producers of counter-cultural meanings” (2002, p1177-8). That prostitutes are subverting dominant discourse from communities of resistance sounds an awful lot like Butlerian queer theory, and here the analysis makes another slightly contrived transition into the intersectionalist politics of the third wave.
COALITION POLITICS
The first trap of Jill Nagle’s critique is the failure to contextualize the prostitute as one of many “non-reproductive white sexualities” (p1177) that are policed by the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy (hooks 2001). The police extort, abet, abuse, antagonize, and selectively enforce prostitutes along with all manner of outcasts of society, such as in New York City’s “Quality of Life” campaign to clean up queer autonomous spaces like the Christopher Street Piers: “Giuliani’s crackdown also meant the policing of public sex spaces, both indoors and outdoors, and the closure of sex shops to make neighborhoods safer for gentrification, as well as the mass arrest of youth of color, sex workers, and transgendered women to make the streets “safer” for tourists and yuppies” (Mattilda 2004, p238). This analysis written by a radical queer trans woman highlights the fact that prostitutes make common cause with people of color, queers, the homeless, immigrants, and all sorts of strange, marginalized bedfellows. Pushed to the fringes of society, prostitutes often inhabit the same geographic spaces as other Others, but they also forge alliances and networks among other sex workers. Out of the women’s spaces of the street corner and brothel, prostitutes and their allies have mobilized into prostitutes’ rights organizations. These groups have been instrumental in bringing prostitutes’ theories of their existence into the Ivory Tower and the White House, and articulating legal demands and recommendations to feminists and policymakers.
RECOMMENDATIONS
Feminists have often recommended decriminalization of the actions of a prostitute, but still support the criminalization of brothel owners, pimps, and clients and their actions. The first major insight from prostitutes is that legal restrictions surrounding prostitution disallow prostitutes from living with each other (brothels), financially supporting their loved ones (pimps) or communicating with anyone (clients). “[T]he analysis of sex work generated by prostitutes’ rights groups has focused on the way that patterns of legal regulation and enforcement operate to create the very phenomenon of prostitution to which feminists have endeavored to generate legal responses” (Zatz 1997, p283). State sanctioning of prostitution also creates the oppressive environment that keeps women dependent upon extortionate brothel landlords and abusive pimps and keeps prostitutes out of legal jurisdictions where the lawlessness of others upon them might be criminalized. Margo St. James, a prostitute and organizer, states: “I want to take the laws that are on the books and go after the people—mostly men—who are using force, fraud, violence, and deceit. The laws needed to do that are on the books already; we don’t need special laws to prosecute men who do this to prostitutes” (in Bell 1987, p86). Existing laws against fraud, extortion, rent profiteering, violence, and abuse could be enforced if all prostitute-specific laws were abolished and prostitutes did not have to hide from the legal system.
CONCLUSIONS
“One of the goals of the prostitutes’ rights movement is to empower everybody who works in the sex industry regardless of how we entered this field, creating many options for ourselves, both inside and outside of the industry” (Koyama 2001). We must ensure that prostitutes have as many options as possible and that prostitution is a decriminalized, destigmatized, legitimate form of economic self-sufficiency, sexual activity, or autonomous choice. Third wave feminists explore the multiplicity of sex work, critically engage sex workers’ narratives, and tie in other forms of oppression with intersectionalist and coalitional theorizing and politics. A third wave theory of prostitution merges the understandings of prostitution as work and as sex, as oppressive only in its contemporary legal context, and as liberatory, well-paying subversion of the Patriarchy.
And what we are basically saying is, let us take care of ourselves. We’re perfectly capable of doing it. We have been doing it for years under the most distressing conditions. And until you allow us to exist, we’ll still be working under distressing conditions. We want to be able to work and control our business and our lives by ourselves (Valerie Scott in Bell 1987, p179-180).
WORKS CITED
Bell, Laurie. (ed) 1987. Good Girls/Bad Girls: Feminists and Sex Trade Workers Face to Face. Proceedings of a Toronto conference on the politics of prostitution and pornography, held Nov. 22-24, 1985. Seal Press, Seattle, Washington.
Dicker, Rory and Alison Piepmeier. 2003. “Introduction” in Dicker, Rory and Alison Piepmeier (eds.) Catching a Wave: Reclaiming Feminism for the 21st Century. Northeastern University Press, Boston, pp3-28.
Heywood, Leslie and Jennifer Drake. 1997. “Introduction” in Heywood, Leslie and Jennifer Drake (eds), Third Wave Agenda: being feminist, doing feminism. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, pp1-20.
hooks, bell. 2000. Feminism is for everybody: passionate politics. South End Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Jasmin. 1993. Prostitution is Work. Social Text No. 37, A Special Section Edited by Anne McClintock Explores the Sex Trade, pp33-37.
Koyama, Emi. 2001. Instigations from the Whore Revolution: A Third Wave Feminist Response to the Sex Work “Controversy”. Distributed as a pamphlet by the Feminist Conspiracy during a demonstration in Portland, Oregon in April 2001. Archived at http://eminism.org/readings/supporthookers.html, accessed Dec. 13, 2005.
Koyama, Emi. 2005, Dec. 7. “Re:porn in the classroom and “action research.” Online posting. Women’s Studies List. Accessed Dec. 9, 2005. WMST-L@LISTSERV.UMD.EDU Archived at https://listserv.umd.edu/archives/wmst-l.html
Mattilda, aka Matt Bernstein Sycamore. 2004. “Gay Shame: From Queer Autonomous Space to Direct Action Extravaganza” in Mattilda, aka Matt Berstein Sycamore (ed) 2004. That’s revolting!: queer strategies for resisting assimilation. Soft Skull Press, Brooklyn, New York, pp237-262.
Nagle, Jill. 2002. [Untitled Review]. Reviewed Works: Making Work, Making Trouble: Prostitution as a Social Problem by Deborah R. Brock; Prostitution, Power, and Freedom by Julia O’Connell Davidson; Sex Work and Sex Workers by Barry M. Dank and Roberto Refinetti; and Sex for Sale: Prostitution, Pornography, and the Sex Industry by Ronald Weitzer. Signs 27(4):1177-1183.
Shrage, Laurie. 2005, Dec. 8. “use of anecdotes by anti-prostitution/porn feminists.” Online posting. Women’s Studies List. Accessed Dec. 10, 2005. WMST-L@LISTSERV.UMD.EDU Archived at https://listserv.umd.edu/archives/wmst-l.html
Tea, Michelle. 2000. My Body, and My Mind in Lee Damsky (ed), 2000. Sex and Single Girls. Seal Press, Seattle, pp.152-157.
Zatz, Noah D. 1997. Sex Work/Sex Act: Law, Labor, and Desire in Constructions of Prostitution. Signs 22(2):277-308.
John - is that your essay?
Hey Alisa, I wrote that in 05 for my 3rd wave class. Some of the html is gone funny on it though...
hope you are well
Hi Alisa!
First off, thanks so much for sharing this with me. This is a very important discussion with far-reaching implications for building a post-patriarchal society. Granted, those of us involved in the discussion may have different ideas about what that vision looks like (which is excellent and vital), but there is much we can accomplish through discussions like these.
I especially appreciate your emphasis on giving a voice to prostituted women. As you noted, these women are often victimized (although I would argue they are re-victimized) by the social stigma. What I would emphasize, as I discuss below, is that prostitution, as well as the stigmas surrounding it, were constructed by men for men. It is not, as long as we live in a patriarchal society, a system that can empower women, at least to the extent that it creates "a more equitable social structure." And I would argue that if a hierarchy-free utopia arrived tomorrow, we would have no need for prostitution, and frankly, we would be appalled by the notion of using the bodies of others for our sexual pleasure.
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I hate doing this because it takes up so much space, but am posting below a few excerpts from a paper I wrote a couple years ago (see kylepayne.wordpress.com for more). Here are a few basic arguments presented:
Radical feminist critiques of the sex industry, while they may misunderstand the individual experiences of prostituted women, have been concerned with the system that defines the terms of these women's choices (patriarchy), not the choices themselves. Rather than "victimizing" prostituted women, as sex-positive feminists have claimed, radical feminists have been the most prominent advocates for prostituted women all around the world.
Sex work is distinctly different from other forms of labor as it is rooted in sexual inequality. If we are interested in forming parallels, the closest might be between prostitution and slavery.
There is no legitimate way to reform prostitution in the context of a patriarchal society. Attempts to do so can only reinforce men's control over the bodies of women and girls, burying such atrocities under the veneer of "occupational hazards."
(Excerpts from "Choice, Harm, and Men's Responsibility for Change: Reflections on the Sex Industry by a Pro-Feminist Male" by Kyle Payne)
Sex as “Work” and Choice
Making prostitution appear as a legitimate occupation, sex-positive feminists can then frame it as a career choice for women, disregarding the actual experiences of prostituted women, as well as the underlying assumption beneath the demand side of the industry, that all men should maintain sexual access to women’s bodies. The radical feminist critique of prostitution has made clear that the concept of “choice” immediately becomes problematic in the context of prostitution. The critique here is of the claim by supporters of the industry, which Susan Cole (1995, p. 123) summarizes as,
the line that prostitution is a free choice; that it can be decontextualized from the patriarchal society we live in; that it can be fixed by unionizing it, legalizing, decriminalizing it; that the relation between a pimp and a prostitute is a love relationship; that prostitutes are on the cutting edge of women’s sexual liberation and that prostitutes control tricks and the rate of pay.
It should be noted that much of this argument about ‘free choice’, and in fact much of the ‘sex wars’ discussion, is reserved for Western countries. As Sheila Jeffreys (1997, p. 341) points out,
While women in pro-prostitution groups in the West talk of prostitution as ‘choice’ and ‘work’ and ‘sex’, prostituted women in the Philippines and those who campaign with and for them, see their experience as exploitation, do not like the idea that it is just work, do not see themselves as having choice, and certainly do not see their use by men as having anything to do with their sexuality.
When radical feminists question this notion of choice for women, sex-positive feminists have responded by accusing radical feminists of trapping women in a persistent state of ‘victimhood’ and restricting women’s sexual agency. As radical feminists have questioned the nature of choice in relation to women’s experiences of patriarchy, the response by sex-positive feminists is to claim that radical feminists believe there is something inherently wrong with women that they cannot freely choose prostitution. What seems misguided about this suggestion that radical feminists are criticizing women’s choices to participate in the sex industry is that their critique has nothing to do necessarily with the choices of individual women, but instead, with the contexts of these decisions – the climate controlling the terms of these decisions.
As Lynn Phillips (2000, p. 20) explains,
Power is enacted within, but also transcends, particular moments or particular relationships. Power is not simply something we have, but rather something we exercise in relation to others, through both resistance to and compliance with the discourses available to us. Our ability to exercise power in a particular context depends, in many ways, on the number and types of choices available to us in that context. And the choices available to us determine, in many ways, whether and how we exercise power.
Taking into account this understanding of power, it must be made clear that women’s sexual agency does not exist in a vacuum. Furthermore, agency cannot exist in one’s head. Making a choice to become a prostitute does not, in and of itself, express “free choice.” As Rebecca Whisnant (2004, p. 23) explains, “Consent is not a simple on/off switch, and it is important to be aware (and to make others aware) of the sexist social pressures, abuse histories, economic needs, and other factors that constrain and influence women’s and girls’ participation in the sex industry.”
By ignoring this basic understanding of how power is negotiated, sex-positive feminists fail to recognize the environment in which prostitution is regarded as a legitimate choice. Sex-positive feminists also suggest that the only choice that matters is that of the women being sold, as if the sex industry created itself. By embracing this sort of liberal approach, on behalf of prostituted women, “the sex of prostitution is reduced from being a class condition of women to a personal choice of the individual” (Barry, 1995, p. 69).
The oversimplified notion of choice from sex-positive feminists also represents a sort of ‘just world’ ideology in their view of the sex industry. For instance, if a woman chooses to be prostituted, regardless of her motivations, then we can assume that it will be her full responsibility if it turns out that her choice was a poor one. In this way, by assuming agency on her part, we construct a model of the sex industry that is not rooted in economic disadvantage or the eroticization of male dominance. Instead, we see a woman who made a poor choice.
Recognizing the complexity of choice in relation to women’s participation in the sex industry does not necessitate regarding all women’s choices as problematic. Indeed, this has been an unfortunate misunderstanding of radical feminist analysis. The conclusion sex-positive feminists have read from radical feminists is that any women who participate in the sex industry are being misguided and exploited, which of course has fed into accusations that radical feminists believe women are inherently victims incapable of making choices for themselves. Rebecca Whisnant (2004, p. 23) clarifies this issue, stating, “Choices made in the absence of better economic alternatives, or in the grip of pernicious ideologies, or even as a result of traumatic disassociation, are still choices, and are still significantly different from being forced.”8
The choices of women to participate in the sex industry must be honored and respected. If prostituted women are, in fact, only selecting, to varying degrees, the terms of their own oppression, then the response ought not be to criticize these individual women, but to criticize the political, social, and economic constraints limiting women’s choices. We also must look at the considerable harm that women experience in the industry, as well as the collective harm women experience from the sex industry. Also, as radical feminists have argued, the more relevant question is not whether women “choose” prostitution or not, but why men have the right to “demand that women’s bodies are sold as commodities in the capitalist market” (Miriam, 2005, p. 2)
Prostitution’s Harm and the Social Construction of ‘Woman’
A well-know prostitutes’ rights organization, COYOTE, has identified some integral rights of prostitutes that could be realized through a legal and regulated sex industry:
Prostitutes have the right to work independently, to work in small collectives, or to work for agents, they should be covered by enlightened employment policies providing paid sick leave and vacation, disability, health, and workers compensation insurance, and social security, like other employed workers (COYOTE Howls, 1988, p. 1).
While this sort of movement could prevent some of the hazards associated with an unregulated industry and seems to present a supportive form of employment, it glosses over the collective harm experienced by all women in a patriarchal society. Sex-positive feminists assume that victimization and agency are mutually exclusive, suggesting that the ability of prostitutes to negotiate over aspects of their work conditions as evidence that they have agency.
As Kathy Miriam (2005, p. 14) explains, sex-positive feminists claim that sex workers are “’free’ unless forcibly coerced into prostitution: the theory argues that if prostitutes have this ‘freedom’, they cannot therefore be said to be ‘victims’. The sex-positive-work position assumes a contractual model of freedom: it construes the consent to be subordinated as an exemplifying freedom.”
The question is not whether sex workers have agency (indeed they might). Instead the question is, what is the meaning of agency when this term is defined as a capacity to negotiate within a situation that is presumed to be inevitable? In other words, if it is already taken for granted that women around the world are in place to serve the sexual interests of men for economic survival – that sexual access to any woman’s body can be bought - then a fundamental human right of women has already been violated.
The role the sex industry plays in shaping the social construction of woman, while articulated by radical feminists, is rarely acknowledged by sex-positive feminists. If it were, perhaps there would be less discussion, if any, of ways to legitimate prostitution and pornography. Radical feminist critiques of pornography are particularly relevant here in the way they describe a practice of dehumanization that all women face in a society dominated with pornography. Despite tremendous opposition, leaders in the anti-pornography movement such as Andrea Dworkin, Catharine MacKinnon, Diana Russell, and many others illustrated the connections between pornography and sexual violence and challenged people to think about pornography not simply as fantasy, but as a real and damaging actor in the war against women.
Whether we call this the ‘rape culture’ or sexual terrorism, the key issue is that, through prostitution and pornography, we have constructed a society in which women are, first and foremost, ‘sexed’. To be a woman in this society means being sexually available to men and shaping one’s own sexuality around male sexual pleasure. As prostitution and pornography, and more generally patriarchal sexuality, have shaped our understanding of sexuality, women have been constructed as sex objects, as objects designed to feed men’s sexual pleasure.
As Kathleen Barry (1995, p. 21-22) explains, “Sexualization of society constructs femaleness as an ‘essence’ and an acquisition that is sex. As sexed body, woman is made universal, and women, accessible for sex, are made to be indistinguishable from each other.” This is the philosophy that is fundamental to the “rape culture” and various myths that support it.19 The experience of men, in relation to their bodies, is quite different, Barry argues, “men are not the objects of sexualization; neither as a collectivity nor in their individuality are they sex… men’s identities are not formed by what they do in the world, not by functions attributed to their bodies.”
Sex Work and Other Forms of Labor
The suggestion from sex-positive feminists that sex work is no different than any other form of labor carries with it some significant flaws. Rejecting the radical feminist critique that prostitution buys and sells women’s bodies, sex-positive feminists present a naïve version of the industry. As COYOTE leaders (need citation), explain,
“In reality, a prostitute is being paid for her time and skill, the price being rather dependent on both variables. To make a great distinction between being paid for an hour’s sexual services, or an hour’s typing, or an hour’s acting on stage is to make a distinction that is not there.”
Using words like “time” and “skill” to represent what a prostituted women is providing serves as a way for sex-positive feminists render invisible the inherent violence in prostitution. Representing the woman as agent, offering her time and skill in the exchange for monetary reward, sex-positive feminists ignore the man’s use of the woman’s body to fulfill his sexual pleasure. Yes, the prostituted women may offer this service, but the claim that prostitution is not about a man using a woman’s body for sex is distorted.
The impact of this representation, of course, ignores the experiences of women who may find the experience of prostitution to be victimizing. It also constructs a reality based on the fundamental assumption that men have the right to use women’s bodies for sex without any sort of meaningful consent, or perhaps that such consent can be established through the exchange of money. Carol Queen furthers this argument, claiming that radical feminists misrepresent what actually goes on in the sex industry, particularly through the language they use. Queen (1997, p. 135) states, “We are not selling ourselves or our bodies (a reprehensible turn of phrase repeated, often as not, by feminists, who ought to have more concern for the power of language to shape reality) any more than does any worker under capitalism.”
Queen’s assertion that prostitution is just like any other occupation under capitalism fails to address basic critiques from radical and Marxist feminists, namely the exploitation of labor. Obviously, if Queen is stating that other occupations exploit workers just as much, if not more than, prostitution, then that does not necessarily suggest a defense of prostitution so much as it implies an overarching problem with capitalism. Also, in order to address statements from Queen and others that prostitution is just like any occupation, perhaps it may be useful to address some of the major distinctions.
Ruling out characteristics that are inherent in an unregulated industry (which would presumably disappear if the sex industry was decriminalized and regulated as many sex-positive feminists would like), the primary distinction regards property in person. In her 1988 book The Sexual Contract, Carol Pateman (p. 208) claims that prostitution remains a violation of women’s human rights, no matter what reforms are made, because it is supports and in fact celebrates men’s domination of women. Her analysis is firmly rooted in Marx’s work on the domination of wage-labor by capital as she asserts that the “sale of women’s bodies in the capitalist market” is distinctly different from other forms of labor. Pateman explains, “The patriarchal construction of the difference between masculinity and femininity is the political difference between freedom and subjection, and that sexual mastery is the major means through which men affirm their manhood.” Applying this to the ‘prostitution contract,’ Pateman states that a john is “not interested in sexually indifferent, disembodied services; he contracts to buy sexual use of a woman for a given period. Why else are men willing to enter the market and pay for ‘hand relief’?”
Having related the status of manhood and womanhood to the sex act, Pateman (1988, p. 208) argues,
When a prostitute contracts out use of her body she is thus selling herself in a very real sense. Women’s selves are involved in prostitution in a different manner from the involvement of the self in other occupations. Workers of all kinds may be more or less ‘bound up in their work’, but the integral connection between sexuality and sense of the self means that, for self-protection, a prostitute must distance herself from her sexual use.
A powerful dilemma that arises from prostitution is that men’s use of a woman for sex necessitates objectifying her, yet johns are not always satisfied with simply using an object. Pateman relates this to a discussion of the subordination of wives by John Stuart Mill in which Mills (1970, p. 141) states, “Their masters require something more from them than actual service. Men do not want solely the obedience of women, they want their sentiments. All men, except the most brutish, desire to have, not a forced slave but a willing one, not a slave merely, but a favorite.” This forces prostituted women not only to disassociate themselves from their own experience (as their bodies are being used by a john), but to construct a new reality of pleasure through which she can provide assurance to each john that she is a consenting and active participant in the contract.
Rather than lumping prostitution in with all other forms of labor, Pateman’s analysis posits the demand side of the sex industry within a gendered framework. In doing so, she demonstrates that men who use prostituted women for sex are not merely seeking “sexual service,” but the control of another self. In no other form of labor, except of course for slavery, do we see this type of process.
Radical Feminists and the Lived Experiences of Prostituted Women
Much of the debate between radical feminist and sex-positive feminists has centered on fundamental misconceptions and sometimes even deliberate misinterpretations of radical feminist theory. One of these misconceptions relates to the historical stigma attached to prostituted women, which has been mistakenly associated with radical feminism. As Carole Pateman (1988, p. 193) explains, “The perception of prostitution as a problem about women is so deep-seated that any criticism of prostitution is likely to provoke the accusation that contemporary contractarians bring against feminists, that criticism of prostitution shows contempt for prostitutes.”
Feminist arguments stating that there is something wrong with prostitution do not necessarily imply an adverse judgment on women who are prostituted. In fact, as radical feminists have primarily focused on making visible the harm experienced by prostituted women and challenging prostitution as an institution of male dominance, it would be virtually impossible to find any radical feminist who spoke out against prostituted women in such a way that sex-positive feminists seem to believe.
In order to better understand how this manipulation occurs, it is important to identify the social and political forces underlying such a claim (that radical feminists are contemptuous of prostituted women) and to identify who benefits from such distortion. As Pateman (1988, p. 193) explains, “The patriarchal assumption that prostitution is a problem about women ensures that the other participant in the prostitution contract escapes scrutiny.” In other words, by centering the debate on women, men avoid any judgment at all despite their direct role in subordinating women. By playing into the hands of pimps and pornographers, sex-positive feminists have demonized radical feminists and radically altered the debate to the extent that the ‘sex wars’ have pitted groups of women against each other fighting about a problem created by and for men.
The conclusion from radical feminists is that the sex industry is an institution of male dominance and must be broken down. Contrary to popular belief, the purpose of a radical feminist critique of the sex industry is not, nor has it ever been, intended to condemn any woman for the ‘choice’ to participate in that system. Instead, radical feminists have been working to establish a discourse through which all women can identify and confront the way the industry harms women, as well as tear down the system that supports it. Their goal is a very simple one – liberation for women, which comes through deconstructing systems that support male dominance.
Unfortunately, organizing a feminist movement against the sex industry invites a variety of problems through which radical feminist theory is misunderstood and manipulated, alienating women in and outside the industry for whom radical feminists are advocating, and in fact, providing further support for the industry. During a time when sex-positive feminists have marginalized radical feminist analyses of the sex industry, a challenge arises for radical feminists to more clearly articulate these critiques and relate them to the lived experiences of women of all backgrounds.
Susan Cole (1995, p. 122) identifies an important challenge within radical feminism:
Most of us simply cannot speak with the authenticity of the first person. This means that when sex workers say that they experienced tricking as ‘just another gig’, or ‘no worse than being a secretary’, or ‘a job I want to do but in safety’, there isn’t a lot we can say. For what do we know? If a fundamental principle of radical feminists is to believe women and what they say, we have no way to respond to sex workers who just want to be left to do their work in peace and safety.29
It is important to note, of course, that many radical feminists do speak from experience when talking about the sex industry. In addition, other major radical feminist figures in the debate, though not speaking through direct experience, have centered their work on survivors of prostitution and pornography who have been willing to share their stories. The responses Cole identifies toward radical feminists do present an important dilemma, though – how do radical feminists make their critique relevant to women who enjoy sex work?
As Rebecca Whisnant (2004, p. 24) argues, “There are women who choose participation in the sex industry from a meaningful range of options and who experience that participation as at least tolerable, and at best empowering.” While we may suspect that denial or disassociation are at the heart of this identification with what radical feminists see as an oppressive industry, we must not assume that this explains all cases. Some women may, in fact, experience the sex industry as liberating, and the role of any feminist is not to refute or ignore these women’s voices, but to recognize the context of these experiences.
It is also important that radical feminists recognize and appreciate the sort of defensiveness women, particularly prostituted women, express at the implications of a radical feminist critique that articulates men’s dominance and control over women’s lives. As a survival strategy, women may reject this assertion and in response to it, claim (as some liberal feminists have) that radical feminists are trying to turn women into passive victims. We see this response in this sentiment from Margo St. James as she states, “They’re totally forgetting the people and not listening to them. And when they say working prostitutes are brainwashed (into prostitution). I mean they totally belittle and take a super-patronizing attitude” (quoted in Jenness, 1993, p. 79).
Women may experience radical feminist critiques as patronizing and as promoting victimhood for women. This supposed victimization by radical feminists is part of a reversal constructed by a patriarchal culture that seeks to hide men’s violence. As Sheila Jeffreys (1997, p. 80) points out, “Feminist who challenge the objectification of women are seen as making women victims.” Radical feminists, then, are cast as the enemy of prostituted women. For instance, Nickie Roberts (1992, p. 343), the ex-prostitute author of Whores in History argues that “the concrete effects of (radical feminist discourse) are wearily predictable, costing many whores their livelihoods and, all too often, their lives as the whore-stigma is translated into violence on the streets.” Rather than putting responsibility for men’s violence in the hands of men, Roberts harnesses the anti-feminist backlash to blame radical feminists for a patriarchal culture that abuses women.
In response to Cole’s argument that radical feminists have no way to respond to sex workers who want to be left alone, that may be true. Perhaps a radical feminist critique is not as relevant to the experiences of women who experience sex work as empowering (like Roberts, for instance). One might conclude then that radical feminists would be better off focusing their efforts on those women who do not find it so empowering, who happen to compose the vast majority of women and girls in the sex industry.
Upon recognizing and appreciating the privileged few women who, with a range of meaningful alternatives, choose to embrace participation in the sex industry, the next question seems to be, what about the costs to all other women? Are we to ignore the experiences of all other women involved in various facets of the industry for whom “choice” is not so available? Reaching out to these women is essential, and making the world aware of their experiences could shift the ridiculous notion that sex work equates with women’s liberation.
Very Brief Conclusion
There is no way to simply repair prostitution. The system itself is corrupt and rooted in a fundamental notion of male sex-right that is oppressive toward women. Could there be an alternative? For instance, could there be a post-patriarchal prostitution? Perhaps there could be a more life-affirming and equitable model of sexuality in our culture, one that embraced women and men as human beings and sought not to dehumanize either or both. At this point in time, however, we are deeply rooted in a patriarchal culture that at once degrades and dehumanizes women in the name of manhood, while spreading woman-hating propaganda that convinces society that being against the sex industry means being against women’s right to control their own bodies. It is when we can overcome patriarchy that we can fully assess our values as human beings and decide whether or not men have the right to use women’s bodies for sex. In the meantime, the system holds no redeeming qualities for women, men, children, or society as a whole.
References:
Barry, Kathleen. (1995). The Prostitution of Sexuality. New York: New York University Press.
Cole, Susan. (1995). Power Surge: Sex, Violence, and Pornography. Toronto: Second Story Press.
Jeffreys, Sheila. (1997). The Idea of Prostitution. North Melbourne, Australia: Spinifex Press.
Jenness, Valerie. (1993). Making it Work: The Prostitutes’ Rights Movement in Perspective. New York: Walter de Gruyter.
Mill, John Stuart. (1970). “The Subjection of Women.” In Essays on Sex Equality, edited by A.S. Rossi. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Miriam, Kathy. (2005). “Stopping the Traffic in Women: Power, Agency and Abolition in Feminist Debates over Sex Trafficking.” Journal of Social Philosophy Vol. 36, no. 1.
Phillips, Lynn. (2000). Flirting with Danger: Young Women’s Reflections on Sexuality and Domination. New York: New York University Press.
Queen, Carol. (1997). “Sex Radical Politics, Sex-Positive Feminist Thought, and Whore Stigma.” In Whores and Other Feminists, edited by Jill Nagle. New York: Routledge.
Roberts, Nickie. (1992). Whores in History. (London: HarperCollins.
Whisnant, Rebecca. (2004). “Confronting Pornography: Some Conceptual Basics.” In Not For Sale: Feminists Resisting Prostitution and Pornography, edited by Christine Stark and Rebecca Whisnant. North Melbourne, Australia: Spinifex Press.
I don't think many prostitues do what they do to challenge patriarchy or anything like that. There is a cycle of poverty and substance abuse attached to the vast majority of prostitution, and if you look at the world-wide sex trade(especially the eastern European, and Russian Vory v Zakone) there is a culture of brutality and violence against the women that exists, which ironically is extremely patriarchal, as is the concept of a 'Pimp'.
Perhaps high class prostitutes which either employ themselves or work for a professinal prostitution orginaztion (like the bunny ranches in Nevada) can have the values you described, but these are in the extreme minority as far as prostitutes go.
I see there is a split of the argument into two parts: pornography and prostitution. I am for the transparency issue, that is legalisation of prostitution like in Amsterdam.
This is very difficult because "freeing sex" from mafia power control may disrput the family agency and other agencies in society based around the capitalist boss (man or woman) exploiting labour to death and for profit. This is the most preserved taboo of the society we live in. I also assume that when you wonder who can decide what is feminist and what is not, it is MONEY in the hand that makes the decision...
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