Prostitution / Sexwork

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> Silenced and drowned? Being defeated and obsoleted by others due to its
> faulty logic or unpersuasive rhetoric is not "silenced";

Granted.  Obviously, I don't agree that this is what has happened.

> and sexual hierarchy politics, it is a convenient tool for mostly white
> middle-class feminists to pretend that they are working for all women,
> including working-class women and women of color, while remaining
> oblivious to their own complicity in the oppression against these women,
> and without working toward the actual processes (e.g. decriminalization,
> immigration reform, drug policy reform, trans civil rights) necessary to
> bring about the changes working-class sex worker feminists demand.

Well Emi, obviously we'll have to agree to disagree here.  I'll plead
guilty to being white and middle class, but many of my colleagues
in the feminist movement against prost/porn are not -- and many, unlike
me, have themselves been used in the commercial sex industry.  They know
whereof they speak, and their concern is (as I think/hope mine is as
well) to act for the interests of some of the most dispossessed, poor,
and horrendously abused women and children on the face of this
planet.

And no, I'm not saying you don't know whereof you speak--you've clearly
read the analyses that I find convincing, and you don't find them
convincing.  That's your business.  My main concern in my post was to urge
those who are *not* familiar (directly) with these analyses to become
familiar with them, so that they too can judge them on their own merits.

> Speaking of silencing, Sarah Lawrence College has just canceled my
> speaking engagement. I was going to speak there on April 13 about the
> sex worker feminism and the idea of the whore revolution from the third
> wave feminist perspective, but the president of the college singlehandedly
> withdrew handing, labeling it "inappropriate and uneducational." This
> happened on April 9, only three days before my planned travel. If I had
> more energy and I wasn't in the process of moving right now, I would have
> gone anyway to call attention to this specific act of "silencing." As a
> radical feminist concerned about the silencing of women's voices, what
> do you think about this?

Well, I think it's unfortunate, and although I'm not a lawyer, it
sounds like breach of contract to me.  It sounds like your presentation
would indeed have been educational, and the college was probably just
afraid of bad press.

Again, I wonder how typical this kind of silencing is.  For instance,
I wonder if we counted the number of big-budget, splashy conferences per
year on U.S. university campuses, devoted to the "pro-sex," sex-work, pomo
perspectives -- versus to radical feminist perspectives on virtually
anything . . . well, I'll leave the rest of that comparison for
listmembers to consider.

> > The following cannot be said too many times: the radical feminist critique
> > of prost/porn is not a moral criticism, or indeed any kind of criticism,
> > of the women.
>
> I've been told "false consciousness" many, many times. If that is not a
> criticism of where I am and my views, what is it?

I'm not charging you with false consciousness.  I'm charging you, and
many others, with having a mistaken, faulty analysis of the causes,
effects, and meanings of prostitution in the society that we live
in -- its effects on women and girls, both in the industry and in
general, and what those effects are *primarily* due to (stigma and
"working conditions" versus the inherent nature of prostitution
itself in our male supremacist culture).  These are largely matters of
empirical fact (as well as, to some degree, of theory), and we cannot both
be right about them, for our positions are inconsistent with each
other.  So they are matters for rational debate and discussion, which is
precisely what I'm trying to engage in here (and I take it you are as
well).

> > Perhaps the most fundamental theme of this critique is that
> > prostitution, including pornography, exists because men, as a class,
> > demand that there be a sub-class of women (and children, and men, and
> > transgender people--but mostly women) who are available for their
> > unconditional sexual service.
>
> Prostitutes do not provide unconditional sexual services any more than
> other workers provide eight hours of "unconditional" work. They only
> provide conditional sexual services.

Yeah, and they get more money (except they usually don't, most of it
goes to the pimp) the more they "consent" to let men abuse them -- to not
use a condom, to treat them violently, burn them with cigarettes, all
that good stuff.  As one john said in a recent book interviewing johns in
Australia said, "They've all got their price."  (Conversations in
a Brothel, published by Hodder Headline Australia)  Another, after whining
about how his girlfriends occasionally actually refuse to serve him
sexually in exactly the ways he wishes them to, pointed out that "Here, I
know that, within reason, there won't be any problem. That's the thing
about paying money: you're the boss. The customer is always right."

Still a third said the following, which pretty much sums it up:"It might
sound crazy, but this is really the only place where I feel I can be a
man, the way men are supposed to be, without feeling guilty or that
I'm a social misfit."  Right.

> This once again proves my argument that radical feminist critics of
> prostitution have rapist mentality: that prostitutes are and must be
> always available to any man unconditionally.

Emi, that's absurd.  That's exactly the view that we're *criticizing.*

> Clients must ask for and negotiate about services they receive. Only
> people who think that they don't have to are anti-prostitution feminists
> and rapists.

See above.

> Anti-prostitution feminists participate in the definition
> of prostitutes as degraded and inferior.

Again, I think this is an unbelievable case of what Mary Daly calls
"reversals"--the very thing that we're criticizing is said to be our own
view.  I just don't get it.  (Well, I do, but I think it's just wrong.)

> In addition, one of the barriers
> to having better negotiation about services is the illegality of
> prostitution (neither the worker nor the client can explicitly negotiate
> the exact acts traded without breaking the law, risking arrests). What
> are you doing to help change this situation?

My view is that we should do as Sweden has done, and decriminalize the
selling of sex while criminalizing pimps and johns.

> "I've never been felt as dirty and used as when I was told how dirty
> and used I had been/ like I'm a pawn in someone else's theory about
> me" - from "difference," a piece performed at "Intercourse: A Sex and
> Gender Spoken Word Recipe for Revolution 2001."

Thanks for this quote.  It summarizes what I think is one of the most
fundamental issues in this dispute: whether the *primary* harms of
prostitution are a result of having people think bad thoughts about you,
or rather a matter of being violated and treated as a piece of meat day in
and day out in ways that are NOT merely accidental and occasional
"extra" abuses within this industry, but are rather PRECISELY what the
industry exists in order to promote, protect, and give men as a class
LICENSE to do to a certain class of women.

This will be my last post on this topic (for the time being).  I've said
enough, and my primary motive here, as I've said, is not to offer the
be-all and end-all defense of the radical feminist view of these issues,
but rather to encourage those who haven't done so to research and consider
these views seriously for themselves.

Rebecca

On Thu, 11 Apr 2002, Rebecca Whisnant wrote:

> I also did not mean to suggest that everyone who accepts the "sex
> work" view does so unquestioningly or without having seriously considered
> the alternatives.  I just think it's a significant risk, given what I
> still firmly believe is the silencing within academic women's studies of
> these alternatives.
>
> Rebecca

Isn't this a straightforward empirical question?  Whether or not radical
feminism is "silenced" in women's studies classes cannot be verified by
anecdotes and subjective interpretations.  Let's look at (or gather)
some data before we make a strong claim about the marginalization of
radical feminist perspectives in women's studies.

Miles Jackson

I agree that the key to this is to help students see the structural
oppression of women in prostitution. The violence in prostitution is often
hidden from most people in society, which is why many people see
prostitution as a moral issue. It is, of course a question of values, that
is how does society value women, but it is not a question of the inherent
worth of the woman (or prostituted man).

Unfortunately my files are still packed from my intercontinental move from
Belgium to the US. Prof. Jeffreys has already mentioned some of the health
problems that prostitutes suffer. I believe Janice Raymond also wrote on this.

It would be of interest in your course to examine the Swedish position.
Sweden is the first country in the world to decriminalize (not legalize)
prostitution for the prostitutes. Because prostitution is seen as violence
against women, prostitutes are helped to retrain and those who sell (the
pimps) or buy (the johns) are arrested. This law did not appear magically.
It is the concerted effort of a couple of decades effort to progressively
bring the Swedish legal system into line with a policy of equality between
women and men. Decriminalizing prostitution was the last of the laws to be
passed. It is of interest to note that the Swedish parliament has a very
high percentage of women in it. Gunilla Eckberg (I think that is how to
spell her last name) of the Coalition against the Trafficking in Women is
Swedish and can give you more information.

The situation in the Netherlands, now that prostitution has been legalized,
is similar to the one in Australia. A large number of women are being
trafficked into the Netherlands. Now that it is legalized, the government
closely regulates the brothels and window prostitution. The brothel owners
are complaining that this regulation will make prostitution even more
dangerous. In a newspaper interview, one brothel owner gave the example of
the pillow. The Dutch government insists that each bed must have a pillow.
The brothel owner said that if they start to put pillows on the beds, the
johns will use them to kill the prostitutes. Unfortunately the copy I have
of this newspaper article is packed. Perhaps Prof. Jeffreys knows of it?

A question that might be useful for your students to reflect on, would this
"profession" be allowed if most prostitutes were men?

Just to be clear about where I stand, I do academic research for and am a
member of the Movement to Abolish Prostitution and Pornography and all
forms of sexual violence and sexist discrimination, an international human
rights NGO.

Loni Bramson

Rebecca wrote:

>I'm not charging you with false consciousness.  I'm charging you, and
>many others, with having a mistaken, faulty analysis of the causes,
>effects, and meanings of prostitution in the society that we live
>in . . .  the inherent nature of prostitution itself in our male supremacist 
>culture).

Rebecca, I feel a sense of unfairness for responding to you after
you've already said that you don't intend to post again, but I
feel the issue is important enough to put on the public table
rather than resorting to mail.

I've not read any of the current crop of rad-fem analyses, but
unless the burden has changed greatly since the '70s, it's still
about the unexamined patriarchal skeleton that gives the
essential shape to our society.

My sense is that understanding the sex trade in terms of
patriarchal subjugation of women will be less helpful on a
practical level than if we shift our focus to understanding and
changing the economic basis for the sex trade.  The article
pointed to by Jennifer Harris earlier
(http://www.awigp.com/default.asp?numcat=sextour)
gives a clear picture of one segment, and I read in it a clear
indictment of Capitalism.

I know of nothing in rad-fem theory to condemn a woman's free
choice to be sexually available to men.   The issue is always
whether her choice is in fact free.  It seems clear to me that,
for her choice to be free, the woman must not only be physically
able to walk away unmolested, but economically secure in herself,
too.  That is in general not possible for most women under
Capitalism.  The very basis of Capitalism is inequality and
insecurity, and women bear that burden disproportionately.

Understanding that Capitalism is the tool by which the ruling
class creates prostitution allows us to focus our energies much
more productively than if we frame the issue in terms of men's
oppression of women -- something that, in any event, many men
today and women too will rightly find unfair and inappropriate.

in Sisterhood,
Margaret

--
Margaret Tarbet / oneko  @  mindspring.com

Greetings!

Regarding the meanings of prostitution:  I go back to my posting about
my student's report about the negotiation of roles within the exchanges
between dancers and clients at at "gentleman's club", and the
objectification of the clients by the dancers.

My student worked at this "club", and her explanation of the things that
she observed, and analyzed, were quite different than mine would have
been, as someone who had only viewed this environment from a safe,
theoretical "distance". All of which made me question my own
understanding of  these things.  Going to work at this "club" was a job.
She made lots of money. I don't know what her own personal limits were,
nor did I ask her. She went to "work".  (I hope she writes a book
someday--she did some fantastic analysis of her work environment!)

Joan

--
!^!^!^!^!^!^!^!^!^!^!^!^!^!^!^!
Joan I. Biddle Ph.D.
Sociologist
LTC, USAR (ret)
jandjb  @  erols.com
jbiddle  @  straxmobile.com
joan.biddle  @  us.army.mil
^!^!^!^!^!^!^!^!^!^!^!^!^!^!^!^

I am new to your list (today!) and have read several of your opinions on
this topic and the web articles Rebecca offered. Let me offer another
perspective please. I agree generally that when females are subordinate to
males -- whether it is the proverbial secretary in an all-male office or a
prostitute, there is no room for autonymy, even through codified behavior,
language, or any other in-group experience that is not understood by the
colonizer (and patriarchy is colonization of females). Specifically, I
believe certain acts of subordination are worse than others (prostitution
being worse than secretaryhood). That said, I do not agree that lesbian
s/m, lesbian porn, and lesbian butch/femme relationships are unwitting,
nonconsensual, zombie-like replications of destructive phallocentric
paradigms.

I am writing my doctoral dissertation currently titled: "Recovery and
Resistance: Performing Incest Activism in the Age of Therapeutic Feminism."
One chapter is about sexually explicit incest narratives and feminist
morals (I'll be speaking about this on April 25th, 7:30pm at the Five
College Women's Studies Research Center, Mt. Holyoke College, So. Hadley,
Mass. for anyone in the area). Without going into a whole long thesis here
... in a nutshell, I argue that a feminist activist response to incest has
been railroaded by the feminist recovery/therapy movement and that the most
potent representation of incest in our media-numbing time is not the
therapeutic recovery narrative but re-enactments of incest in performance
art, lesbian s/m, *real* lesbian porn (meaning lesbian-produced and
distributed), women's comix, experimental video. These narratives are
frequently criticized by feminists as being revictimizing and anti-healing;
the response to Dorothy Allison's _Bastard Out of Carolina_ being a popular
example. I contend that they are about mastering sexual trauma and
reclaiming the body and psyche from the perpetrator, and should be embraced
by feminists as grass-roots activist performance of the kind that was
central to feminism in the 1970s. (Please excuse my singular and blanket
use of "feminism" throughout).

Robin Maltz
PhD Candidate
Performance Studies
New York University
and
Research Associate
Five College Women's Studies Research Center
So. Hadley, Mass.

ram3616  @  nyu.edu
or
missrobinm  @  earthlink.net

Margaret wrote: "Understanding that Capitalism is the tool by which the
ruling class creates prostitution. . ."

This seems to me a bizarre, if entirely conventional, claim.  Prostitution
has existed in all sorts of societies and in many periods long predating
capitalism.  A feminist analysis that strains to make everything fit neatly
into a simple overarching paradigm (whether it's capitalism or patriarchy or
both that explain all evil) isn't going to be very useful as an analytical
tool.

DP

---------------------------------
daphne.patai  @  spanport.umass.edu

> Again, I wonder how typical this kind of silencing is.  For instance,
> I wonder if we counted the number of big-budget, splashy conferences per
> year on U.S. university campuses, devoted to the "pro-sex," sex-work, pomo
> perspectives -- versus to radical feminist perspectives on virtually
> anything . . . well, I'll leave the rest of that comparison for
> listmembers to consider.
> Rebecca


I think I missed something. What big splashy pro-sex conferences? And by
"pomo" do you mean postmodern theory? If so, what does that have to do
with the topic? Postmodern theory is mainly about political economy
(Jameson, Baudrillard, Virilio, Lyotard) or literary/art/architecture
theory (Hutcheon, Jencks, etc.). This thread is getting confusing and
perhaps it is time to end it.

peace,
Linda Wayne
wayne005  @  tc.umn.edu

Here is my last post on the topic (for now, at least) also...

On 4/11/02 10:26 AM, "Rebecca Whisnant" <rsw  @  EMAIL.UNC.EDU> wrote:
> > Perhaps the most fundamental theme of this critique is that
> > prostitution, including pornography, exists because men, as a class,
> > demand that there be a sub-class of women (and children, and men,
> > and  transgender people--but mostly women) who are available for
> > their unconditional sexual service.
>
> Prostitutes do not provide unconditional sexual services any more
> than other workers provide eight hours of "unconditional" work.
> They only provide conditional sexual services.
>
> Yeah, and they get more money (except they usually don't, most of
> it goes to the pimp) the more they "consent" to let men abuse them
> -- to not use a condom, to treat them violently, burn them with
> cigarettes, all that good stuff.

You made the statement that prostitutes exist due to men's need for
women available to provide unconditional sexual service - which
suggests that prostitutes provide unconditional sexual services. Are
you now withdrawing that statement, which was supposedly the
fundamental theme of your critique to begin with? And what constitutes
abuse - is it the dynamic of power and control in the specific context
(as I believe it is), or is any act that involves sex in exchange for
money abusive? (This, again, connects to radical feminists' self-righteous
criticism of S/M and other sexual practices and identities.)

>> This once again proves my argument that radical feminist
>> critics of prostitution have rapist mentality: that prostitutes
>> are and must be always available to any man unconditionally.
>
> Emi, that's absurd.  That's exactly the view that we're *criticizing.*

No. Anti-prostitution feminists argue that once a woman becomes a
prostitute she is available for unconditional sexual services, that
it is the norm within women in prostitution to be treated that way
because of the nature of prostitution itself - rather than addressing
specific social, political and economic factors, direct (physical
confinement, slavery) as well as indirect (poverty, neoliberalism,
sexism) that make women vulnerable to exploitatoin and abuse in
prostituiton, as well as in other areas of underground economy.

>> In addition, one of the barriers
>> to having better negotiation about services is the illegality of
>> prostitution (neither the worker nor the client can explicitly
>> negotiate the exact acts traded without breaking the law, risking
>> arrests). What are you doing to help change this situation?
>
> My view is that we should do as Sweden has done, and decriminalize
> the selling of sex while criminalizing pimps and johns.

In other words, you support leaving prostitution industry underground
and unregulated, so that workers can continue to be abused or exploited
with little recourse. Rebecca, it is not the exchange of sex for money
that is the problem; it is the exploitation, coercion, lack of choice,
lack of protective regulation, etc. - which arise from oppressive social
structures (sexism, racism, transphobia, poverty, etc.), not from the
fact one is trading sex for money. Not to mention the fact your response
does not address the problem I pointed out above - as long as it is
illegal to negotiate the exact acts being traded, that will close down
communication channels and put workers at a greater risk.

> Thanks for this quote.  It summarizes what I think is one of
> the most fundamental issues in this dispute: whether the
> *primary* harms of prostitution are a result of having people
> think bad thoughts about you, or rather a matter of being
> violated and treated as a piece of meat day in and day out
> in ways that are NOT merely accidental and occasional "extra"
> abuses within this industry, but are rather PRECISELY what
> the industry exists in order to promote, protect, and give
> men as a class LICENSE to do to a certain class of women.

You are mischaracterizing my argment by suggesting that I argue that
"primary harms of prostitution are a result of having people think bad
thoughts about you." The actual fundamental issue in this dispute is:
whether the pirmary harms of prostitution are an inherent result of
trading sex for money, or a result of many social factors such as
poverty, sexism, racism, neoliberalism, violence, etc. - which would
make working-class people vulnerable whether or not they work within
the sex industry. Your argument is circular in that you define
prostitution as inherently violent and the only evidence for that
position (i.e. *inherent* oppressiveness of sex-for-money transaction)
is the notion that prostitution is violence itself.

I view anti-prostitution feminism as extremely harmful to women, not
only because they collude with the law enforcement to dictate women's
lives, as many of my friends had to endure, but also because it makes
it difficult for workers to talk about their grievances around working
conditions, violence, or exploitation - because if they said anything
negative about their experiences, instead of actually addressing the
specific injustice of violence or exploitation, anit-prostitution
feminists would twist it and use it as a poster child to attack
prostitution as a whole (and soon after, local police department
will do a major sweep and everybody will be in jail). Thus rapists,
abusive managers, and anti-prostitution feminists are jointly
responsible for the silencing of sex workers.

One last anecdote: I was attending a conference about violence
against women, and a speaker, who was from Council for Prostitution
Alternative, a rad-fem anti-prostitution group, gave a story about
the "successful" case in which a woman who had initially "refused"
to admit that she was being victimized or forced into prostitution
"finally, after three years in our program" came to see how abused
and without a choice she had been. And this, for them, is a "success
story"; it sounds to me that she was reluctantly attending the
program only to escape imprisonment, and resisted for three years
against the anti-prostitution feminists' demand to give up all of
her power and agency - until it came to the point where she gave
in and told them what they wanted to hear - either because she felt
she had to lie in order to keep her sanity and "graduate" from the
program, or actually came to accept the fabricated history and
experiences that were fed to her in order to resolve the cognitive
dissonance.

Those who successfully adopts to the ideology and history that match
rad-fem analysis of prostitution are recruited as a poster child and
used to "educate" the public. SAGE in San Francisco brings these women
into the program for johns, where they are encouraged to yell and
scream at the men. This shout therapy would have been rather innocent,
if there was any way to guarantee that these women would never see
the men in the program in the future; otherwise, it is one huge risk
that SAGE is pushing women to take.

I will be presenting about the interviews I've been doing with
working-class sex worker feminists at this year's NWSA conference,
but for now here are some online stuff you can read for clarification
of my positions:

My NWSA Abstract:
http://eminism.org/academic/2002-nwsa-prostitution.html

Support Prostitutes' Rights Now! (pamphlet)
http://eminism.org/readings/supporthookers.html

Instigations from the Whore Revolution: A Third Wave Feminist Response
to the Sex Work 'Controversy' ('zine - download PDF or order)
http://eminism.org/zines/index.html


Emi Koyama <emi  @  eminism.org>

--
http://eminism.org/ * Putting the Emi back in Feminism since 1975.

(This will be my last response in this thread)

Daphne wrote:

>This [assigning responsibility to Capitalism] seems to me a bizarre,
>if entirely conventional, claim.  Prostitution
>has existed in all sorts of societies and in many periods long predating
>capitalism.  A feminist analysis that strains to make everything fit neatly
>into a simple overarching paradigm (whether it's capitalism or patriarchy or
>both that explain all evil) isn't going to be very useful as an analytical
>tool.

I would agree that trying to shoehorn all instances of some
behavior into a single explanatory box is usually unhelpful, and
sometimes embarrassingly so.   Neither the patriarchy nor
Capitalism can reasonably be seen as causal in the case of the
woman who, economically secure and with a full array of choices,
still makes herself available to men for sex.

And I would also agree that prostitution predates Capitalism.
The root cause is not Capitalism (and I apologise if I gave the
impression that I thought it was), but classism:  the notion that
a few people should be rulers and have many choices, while
everyone else should be ruled and have few.

Capitalism is classism's tool in the world we list members live
in today.

Maslow's needs-hierarchy model  tells us that, until we feel
secure, all our attention will be given to security issues.  I
think most of us can verify the worth of that model from our own
experience.   So we cannot probably address root causes until we
disable the tool that creates the insecurity that holds
everyone's attention in thrall today.  It's not an accident that
social change more often follows improving circumstances than
deteriorating ones.  Improved circumstances empower people.

So in response to Molly Dragiewicz's original question about how
to reduce students' moralistic responses to prostitution, I would
frame the discussion in terms of how prostitutes are simply
following Capitalism's rules and getting the best return they can
on their personal capital--which, for many marginalised women, is
only their bodies.  If the students think there is something
wrong with prostitution, then perhaps they should more closely
examine the system that makes prostitution the most rational
economic choice for some people.

in Sisterhood,
Margaret

--
Margaret Tarbet / oneko  @  mindspring.com
--------------------------------------