@X+ Man-i-Fiesta
[This project consists of many drafts in evolution. My first draft was written for the Anarchist Bookfair in April of 2009, which I helped to organize. This original writing, which was distributed as a zine, can be found here: http://www.nytrash.com/annakissed]
[I began to create a second version of this project for the 2010 Desiree Alliance, but never completed my work. This version can be found here: http://issuu.com/annabellexaah/docs/_annakissed_manifiesta_2nd_ed__part_1_]
[Below is the most recent draft, which I created in 2011]
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INTRODUCTION
It is a commonly accepted belief that in the United States, wives achieved political equality with husbands in 1928 when they won equal right to vote at the age of twenty-one. However, it was not until the late 1960’s when wives successfully challenged not only political oppressions but also social ones: demanding the right to higher education and equal pay in the workplace. This social revolution is commonly known as the Women’s Liberation Movement. But it was not the liberation of all Women: some women are not counted as Women – whores for example, and the poor, colored, and migrant. These latter classes of women have never achieved full social equality.
Here in these pages, I shall focus on the whore.
Whores do not have equal rights as other women. They are illegitimate women; that is to say, they are neither women nor human in the eyes of law. A whore can be raped, and the rape can be ruled in the courts of justice as mere robbery.# They can be harassed and abused not merely by clients and pimps, without protection from law, but also by police, the very agents of law, who are more likely to force sex upon them than help them.# They can be trafficked, enslaved, and forced to labor under the most inhumane conditions, yet receive no effective protection from the international community, which might protest loudly the great tragedy of their victimized chastity, yet refuse to recognize their agency or right to work. Throughout history whores have suffered, and continue to suffer, some of the worst stigma and violence of any social group, yet they are supposedly practicing the “world’s oldest profession,” as natural to society as any commerce or trade. They have never intentionally harmed anyone, yet they are marginalized and punished along with the worst of criminals.
What is so wrong with being a whore, that they should merit such severe punishment?
There is nothing morally wrong or naturally degrading about prostitution. Ideological arguments against prostitution are constructed to enforce Patriarchal control over women’s bodies: their sexuality, reproductive ability, and caring labor, in order to assert Patrilineal rights over children and enable inheritance of private property.# It is a social arrangement that has worked fairly well in maintaining a certain type of material order in society, but is inherently unjust for wives and whores. The maintenance of this social arrangement requires great sacrifice in the lives of all girls and women. Chastity and sexual obedience of women are keystones to the construction of Patriarchy, and its imperative is embedded at the core of every ideological system in Patriarchy. Therefore, challenging the fall of Eve, challenging the moral and political authority of social constraints on women’s sexuality, destabilizes the very foundations of Patriarchal hegemony.
That is why the subject is so taboo. The implications for an enlightened ethics of women’s sexual labor extend far beyond the question of whether prostitution should be legalized, decriminalized, or left as is, though this is currently a puzzle for the international community in spite of clear evidence supporting decriminalization without stringent regulation# – for it is understandably difficult and confusing to attempt the prescription of justice for a group that is not allowed to speak for itself. – Rather, the question of “morality” as applied to women’s sexual choices, is an artery to the very heartbeat of society: the social regulation and control of all sexual, reproductive, and familial relations that uphold Patriarchal politics. The whore is stigmatized, not because her actions are inherently wrong, but because her sexual freedom tastes dangerously like the Achilles’ heel of Patriarchy. The whore is kept low in society in order to control the wife and discipline the girl. Her oppression, which is tied to the oppression of all women, is unreasonable and unjust.
The following manifesto for true sexual liberation and gender justice provides in detail the rationale for all previous statements. The general pronoun used for prostitutes will be “she,” even though there are many rent-boys and transgendered or third gender people who work in this profession, many of whom are the most outspoken activists in this movement. The use of “she” to stand in for all prostitutes is for simplification purposes only, without intending to diminish the gender and sexuality diversity in this industry.
ONE. SEXUALITY AND THE ILLEGITIMIZED WOMAN
A. Madonna and Whore: The Rape of the Mind of Woman
Little girls learn quickly in school that the worst thing to be, next to fat or faggot, is a slut. What is a slut, exactly? A slut is a delicate line in the dark, which every girl must feel out for herself. It is when the social benefits of Sexy cross over to the social taboos of Sexual, and it happens in a heartbeat, usually first spotted through the lens of jealousy by another little girl. When Girl Number One touches blindly upon the delicate line of sluttiness, she is made painfully aware of it by Girl Number Two, who is joined by other voices ad infinitum, and this malicious social signaling is how she will come to know that she has crossed the vague and arbitrary borders of Sluthood neverland.
Sluthood is the negative equivalent of Chastity, that prized quality once used as the sole evaluation of an unmarried girl’s social status. In many parts of the world, the premium of virginity is still a supreme measurement of the “virtue” of women. The social utility of the slut boundary lies precisely in its flexibility and arbitrariness; it is the perfect tool of social oppression. It divides the Madonnas from the Whores, the “valuable” women who contribute to society through legitimized motherhood (bearing children for a man) and the “degraded” women whose contributions are vilified because their sexual labor belongs in part to themselves and is not colonized by any one man. Anyone can accuse a girl of being Whore-like, and the accusations alone can damage the value, reputation, or social capital of the girl in question. The flexibility of Sluthood makes it an ideal weapon against women.
Everyone knows that Sluthood follows a double standard. Only women can be sluts; mansluts are admired as studs or Casanovas. A slutty-looking girl, who resembles a Whore in some way, even if she does not engage in promiscuous or commercial sex, is sometimes subject to the oppressive treatment of a whore. That is why in many countries even today, appearing slutty in public can be an appropriate rationale for rape in the courts. What is implied is that if a girl dares to dress “loosely,” to look like a whore, she deserves to be treated violently, because a man’s sexual instincts can not be curbed; which implies further that whores deserve to be subjected to violence because whores do not have rights; they are unchaste and illegitimate women. Thus all woman are disciplined and controlled by the constant threat of mistakable whoredom.
The existence of the madonna/whore divide is oppressive for both madonnas and whores; both illusions are used to colonize the body of woman. Corporal discipline in the form of beauty tyranny in the media involves very stringent guidelines of dieting, plucking, and self-loathing, in order to appear sexually desirable. A young woman’s attractiveness and sexuality is still her ultimate source of power, and it is achieved through mental colonization. The ideal of the “young girl” is sold in package to women everywhere, and it involves believing in very trite, socially constructed things, such as “love,” “happiness,” “cuteness,” and many other vague and shallow notions of desirable states in life.# The young girl is pictured in the media as a commodity to be attained, a decoration to be used for enhancing the appeal of products, an object to be gazed upon. Thus, the young girl rationally adopts this view and prepares herself as the perfect commodity, tailoring every part of her body and mind to the performance, believing whatever is required to achieve this. Her value is dependent upon the accurate assimilation of the prototype commodity, and it is a value that quickly depreciates when she hits a tender age of thirty, despite all her efforts to maintain herself. Thus, the battle of the young girl against extinction is a futile and tragic one.
A truly liberated woman in the 21st Century lives beyond the Madonna/Whore paradigm and defines her sexuality for herself. She exercises her freedom by re-appropriating the masculine gaze upon her, reclaiming her subjectivity with respect to the socialized gaze, and renegotiating the borders of her agency through gender consciousness. Thus, she becomes aware of the social construction of womanhood, and makes every effort to decolonize her body and mind, choosing to perform those aspects of femininity and masculinity that are closest to her most healthy nature and enable her to enjoy the greatest freedom.
B. Decolonizing the Female Body: Reexamining the Contemporary Institution of Marriage
Monogamous marriage has long been theorized as a Patriarchal form of state control over human relationships between the sexes. According to Engels, marriage in Patriarchal society evolved historically as an economic instrument to ensures that a man’s property is passed onto his genetic heirs, thus the wife’s fidelity must be enforced for the proper regulation of wealth and land distribution from generation to generation. Early human society was matrilineal and matrilocal, thus women had greater power within the family; but with the introduction of the modern institutions of private property, as well as warfare and Patriarchal government to protect this property, Patrilineal marriage evolved favoring the physical dominance of men. Later on, monogamy evolved with monotheistic religions, as the primary instatement of Patriarchal marriage, replacing the matrilineal and tribal forms of family.#
Yet modern biology has shown that human beings and most other animals on Earth are not naturally monogamous; rather our primal biology remains with us and dominates our emotions in spite of cognitive cultural restrictions. Our oxytocin-induced feelings of love last for an average of seven years, enough time to raise a Neanderthal child to an age where he or she can take care of himself and join the tribe. The timing of the fading of chemistry concurs with the infamous “seven year itch,” at which time it is said there is a significant drop in oxytocin levels, and partners lose much of their sexual interest for one another.#
In a tribal society where there is no Patriarchal dominance over private property and land ownership, couples often naturally dissolve after chemistry disappears. For thousands of years and continuing into the present day, among matrilineal tribal communities, such as the Na of southwestern China, women and men have unrestricted sex for pleasure with as many partners as they please. Women live with their own families and never “marry” into the husbands’ families, as is the case for the rest of China. The children born to women are considered to be of the women alone, and have no socially-recognized father. The word father is not used, and fatherhood is not practiced; rather, the brothers of the mother often play a fatherly role in the upbringing of the child. The child is brought up in the intergenerational family and the village community, where the love between mother and daughter is ever-lasting. For thousands of years, the Na people have enjoyed this cultural familial arrangement with pride, even to the present day, demonstrating that polyamory is possible and healthy, and can create a vibrant and joyful community. In this Na society, prostitution does not exist.#
However, in a civilization that is built on organized distribution of property, violent warfare, and systematic reproduction of social classes with unequal access to resources, it is important for sexual and reproductive partnerships between men and women to last a lifetime so as to keep material society orderly. Because this life-long partnership is contrary to our biological inclinations, marriage in modern Western society requires much social coercion to stay in place, as enforced by government, sanctioned by religion, and mystified by fairy tales, and held by popular media as the most sacred ritual of our society. Yet even with all of these systems of control, monogamy is tenuous at best. Steadily increasing divorce rates indicate increasing difficulty in the face of increasing democracy and education for traditional systems of social control to monitor sexual, reproductive, and familial behavior.
It is for economic reasons, catering to male property ownership, that women’s sexual liberation is an inherent threat to this society, which is organized around private property and class inheritance. That is why Eve’s temptation is the original sin and Lilith is an infamous legend; why the fall of every Chinese kingdom is attributed to the fox demon, a sexually powerful woman who corrupts the emperor. The sexual liberation of women from the oppressive institution of marriage is the most fearful threat of Patriarchal civilization.
C. Enslavement of Female Labor: The Informal Private Sphere of Mothers, Housewives, and Sex Workers
The unrecognized and disproportionate division of domestic labor within the traditional family is unfair to women. The realm of “women’s work”: domestic housework, reproduction, sex, and childcare, are essential sources of labor that are fundamental to the successful functioning of society, yet this labor has always been unpaid and unaccounted for in the capitalist national assessments of production.# Women have historically been kept within the home where they are treated like children, dependent upon the care of fathers and husbands, and subservient to the needs of the men in their lives. Women’s domestic labor expectations have not decreased with the liberation of women in professional life. The pressure for modern Western women to be all at once perfect career-women, housekeepers, mothers, and attractive sexual partners creates an oppressive and unequal work load that leads to increasing anxiety and illness.
Traditional patriarchal attitudes towards the “ideal woman” as beautiful and chaste objects of sexual attraction before marriage, and self-sacrificing and loyal wives and mothers after marriage, continues to coerce women into underappreciated and oppressive roles as sex objects and domestic servants. Thus, attitudes towards women’s beauty, chastity, and motherhood, are ways of social control, which bind women to an institution of marriage that is inherently unjust in its labor division, and that perpetuates the oppressive gender binary and heterosexual orthodoxy.
Women are expected to be more family-oriented than men, and men are socially permitted to take on less responsibility than women in looking after their children and households. In many societies, it is accepted and expected that women must nag men to contribute financially to the family, rather than spend their money on personal expenses; that wives must compel men to stay loyal to them “against their natures” while they themselves would never be allowed the same promiscuities as their husbands. The myth of the natually brutish, horny, and irresponsible man is used to justify men’s iresponsibility in the home. Women are often give the task of pressuring their husbands to spend quality time with children, and if laws permit, to pay child support when all else fails and the marriage ends in divorce. The burden of family maintenance is placed disproportionately on women, who are held responsible for unpaid domestic work, while also having to manipulate husbands to keep to their end of the deal. Meanwhile, men have been afforded the social recognition and free sexual enjoyment that their wives have historically been denied.
Political theorist Carole Pateman explained through Contract Theory that originally in the constitutions written after the French Enlightenment that freed mankind from monarchic rule, creating a Brotherhood of equal rights, only men had access to the equality promised in the public spheres of government and business. The private sphere of the family was relegated to women, who were still not considered to be full or equal citizens. According to Freud, women’s biological natures rendered them incapable of morality or public service; they are deemed too emotional and too willing to abandon ethical principles in favor of caring for people close to them. Many reasons were given for why women should not be allowed to participate in the public sphere. The realm of the private sphere was not subject to the same principles of equality that was extended to the public sphere. It was believed that what occurs in the private sphere is “natural”: to bear and care for children, and maintain the household. Since these activities in the private sphere is natural to feminine biology, political equality needs not apply; instead, the father is considered the natural ruler of the household, and until fairly recently, households were publicly accounted for only by the “heads” of households, presumably men. The democratic revolution of the Enlightenment eliminated inequality between Father and Son, but sustained patriarchal inequality between husband and wife, wherein biology was used as the justification for inequality. There has not been a second revolution since then, to achieve full elimination of Patriarchal rule, and the democratic political institutions that we have today stem from foundations which exclude women, with mild amendments to allow women entry into the public sphere without methods to ensure true equality in the private sphere: by provisioning mothers with the means to fully participate in the workplace, requiring fathers to take equal domestic and childcare responsibility, or allowing for alternative household arrangements outside of the heterosexual monogamous family. The fact that rape within marriage is rarely acknowledged or punished in the Court of Law goes to show that Patriarchal justice continues to regard women’s sexuality to be wholly possessed by her husband, who should be protected in his right to free, unrestricted access to her dutiful body. Neither our legal policies nor our cultural values allow for true equality between women and men, and the root of this inequality is our cultural interpretation of biological sexual difference.
D. It’s Written in the Books: Biology and Religion As Ideological Cohorts of Patriarchy
The commonly prescribed reason for the sexual double standard is biological. Men have an unlimited supply of sperm and can engage in sex with many women simultaneously, impregnating multiple partners without necessarily taking on any responsibility for the children. Women, on the other hand, have to go through nine months of labor, and can only carry the child of one man at a time, so they bear a greater “cost” when engaging in sex. Even with birth control, there remains a risk of pregnancy, which will more greatly and immediately impact the woman. Therefore by necessity, and not by justice, a woman must more carefully guard her sexuality than her fellow man. Furthermore, since it is always obvious who the mother is when a child is born, but not obvious who the father is, the woman needs to be “faithful” in order to persuade her partner to believe that he is the true progenitor of her child.# Men do not want to be tricked into taking care of another man’s child, since they often have enough trouble taking responsibility for their own biological spawn, therefore the infidelity of woman is considered to be a graver sin than that of men, as it can perhaps lead to the gravest of consequences: the duping of men into doing something altruistic that they can’t take credit for.
Furthermore, biological arguments are often made to justify men’s “greater lust.” Their uncontrollable horniness, which Western science has usually attributed to the natural physical or hormonal composition of men, makes them more “in need” of sexual stimulation. This can not be “their fault,” since it is reasoned that men can not be held responsible for the way they are biologically wired.# Though the science behind this argument is spurious, and culture has been proven to have a far greater influence on sexuality than biology, the assertion that men “need” to be more promiscuous, is used to justify their greater use of mistresses and prostitutes. Since science dictates that women are not as “naturally” horny as men are, wives are not allowed the same privileges of marital deviance as their husbands. Female sexuality outside the bond of marriage is held as a terrible sin, and biology is used as a tool in cohort with Patriarchal ideology to hold women responsible, to discipline, punish, and control her sexuality.
Most biologists throughout history have been men influenced by Judeo-Christian values. From physiology to psychology, most scientists throughout history have looked at women’s bodies with condescension and belittlement. They have been very wrongheaded in their research on women, the revision of which is still slowly taking place today, especially in the male-dominated field of psychology. For example, Victorian psychologists believed that women are never naturally horny, that sex is naturally objectionable and uncomfortable for all women, so that is why a wife should only naturally want to have sex her husband, as a conjugal duty. According to these Victorian “scientists,” any woman who feels any sexual desire is deviant and abnormal. This shows how Patriarchal psychology has not only failed to accurately portray women’s desires, but has also been used to prescribe to women what they ought to desire, pathologizing those who deviate from faulty clinical prescriptions. The overwhelming success of their exertions in actually determining women’s sexual behavior and self-conceptions during the Victorian Age further goes to show how sexuality is based more heavily in culture than on biology.
Prostitution has sometimes been defended by science as a “necessary evil” for men to “take out their energies” in a less emotionally exhausting way than getting involved in an affair. This argument frames prostitution as beneficial to the institution of marriage because paid sex work is assumed to pose a lesser risk to domestic union than an affair of the heart. However, women who are supposed to have no biological desires to stray from their marital vows, are not given the same access to outside sexual services. This is how some biologists explain why there exist far fewer giggolos in the world than female sex workers, but the increasing demographic of female consumers of porn, the fastest-growing niche in the industry, proves otherwise.
The invisible assertion in all spheres of society that sex should be available for free to men is founded on the fact that all work which traditionally belonged to women (mothering, housekeeping, and sex) were once considered the unquestionable property of men. Should women choose to take control of their own sexuality, to abstain from marriage, and use her sexual labor for her own purposes, she would be immediately castigated into the worst sectors of society, among the tramps, the whores, the witches, the spinsters, and the infertile: the socially marginalized. For she who performs sex outside of Patriarchal institutions of control is a social outcast at best, and an “evil” criminal with supernatural powers of “black magic,” punishable by death, at worst.
When a woman engages independently in sex work outside of marriage, she is undermining the sexual hegemony of men; thus the whore is a most dangerous threat to Patriarchy, because her independence from male monopoly undermines the most crucial building block of Patriarchal social units: the monogamous family in which the husband has an absolute right to his wife’s body, her sexual and reproductive labor. It is Adam’s God-given right over Eve, the ancestral disobedience of which is religiously constructed to be the reason for all humanity’s sufferings. The supreme threat of Eve’s attainment of sexual self-knowledge is suppressed with stigma and violence, and brainwashed with misogynist ideology in religion, science, and popular culture.
TWO. RECONSTRUCTION OF THE ILLEGITIMATE WOMAN
All the “moral” arguments against prostitution are inconsistent, unjust towards sex workers, and oppressive for all women. Any thoughtful evaluation of the ethics of sex work would reveal that it is a victimless crime, a consensual exchange of sexual services, which does not deserve the same kind of punishment as harmful crimes. Conditions for prostitution are not alleviated by government legislation against it; rather, criminalization of prostitution only further pushes the industry underground, and harms sex workers by requiring them to work in worse conditions, under the influence of gangs, coercive pimps, and con-artists, without recourse to legal protection.
Many human rights activists who dedicate their efforts to stopping “sex trafficking” and sex slavery are misinformed about the nature of migratory sex work. Most woman who are “trafficked” into another country to work in the sex industry chose to do so willingly and knowingly, because this option pays so much better than the economic options available at home. Though these woman often face horrendous working conditions, are often tricked into debt enslavement, and are isolated in the double dangers of migratory labor in the black market, their lives are not improved by human rights “rescuers” and raids, that merely seize and deport these women, often causing them to be unable to pay off their debt to their traffickers or earn the amount of money they need to support their families. That is why most “rescued” and deported women try to sneak back into the country and try to work again as prostitutes, in order to send more remittances home.#
The best way to “rescue” women from the human rights atrocities of this informal market is to decriminalize prostitution and migration for sex work purposes. The hypocrisy of many “abolitionists” in the human rights movement against sex trafficking is that they are very loudly crusading against the trafficking of “innocent” women, the kind of woman sold into sex slavery who had previously been chaste, good, and absolutely unaware she would be working as a prostitute. These abolitionists who protest the horrible working conditions of migrant sex slaves turn a blind eye to the same conditions when they realize that the woman in question was a willing immigrant, and a willing sex worker. The rationale is that “if you knew what you were getting into, then you deserve what happens – sex work is dangerous and violent, and it should be.” What is their true humanitarian attitude towards woman if they believe that certain women deserve to be treated horrendously; that only wives and chaste women who follow the Patriarchal sexual code deserve basic human rights?#
Accepting money for sex is considered highly immoral, but for no rational or consistent reason except for the historical stigma placed on the prostitute to keep her down and isolated from the “good girls.” Wives were educated to know their place, to submit docilely and unquestioningly to their second class citizenship, their unpaid servant status, and historical social inferiority to fathers and husbands. The labor of women within the private sphere is considered natural and therefore not requiring pay: mothering, cooking, cleaning, managing the household, and engaging in sex with husbands.# Since sex is “free” for married men within the traditional private sphere, it is assumed that sex should always be free for all men. Sex that is not free for men is thus constructed as immoral.
However, the mass entrance of women into the workplace blurs the lines between the private and public spheres. No longer are women exchanging domestic labor for economic dependency upon husbands; now, most women have a double burden of public work and assumed primary responsibility for housework. As first world women in cosmopolitan cities such as New York increasingly prioritize their careers over traditional “women’s work,” these services have been relegated to a servant class of nannies and housekeepers, mainly composed of immigrants and racial minorities.# The problem is that “women’s work” are still not given equal status to work in the public sphere, and instead racial inequalities are underlined through globalization. However, with the increasing monetarization of other forms of women’s labor, why should sex work not follow the same global trends?
Sexuality is pervasive in our media-saturated society, and the widely accepted sexual norms among the younger generations is simply not what it used to be. Popular culture from hip hop music videos to reality TV shows fully embrace the sexual revolution. Promiscuity is the norm now rather than the exception. Furthermore, the sexualized images of women are used everywhere to sell everything from cars to cigarettes and toothpaste, so why should women be prevented from selling and profiting from their own sexuality, when every corporation that advertises anywhere seems to be profiting from women’s sexuality?
The question of changing gender and sexual norms, interacting with global Capitalist trends, are important to consider when evaluating the contemporary ethics of sex work.
Here are ten reasons that are most often given for why sex work is considered immoral:
1) Sex work is not real work. A prostitute is selling her body, which is the equivalent of slavery. Slavery of all kinds should be illegal.
2) Sex should only occur between people in love. It is too intimate an act to engage in with strangers, so prostitutes who have sex with strangers for money are perversifying something sacred.
3) Sex should only occur between married people for reproductive purposes. Engaging in extra-marital sex for pleasure is wrong because the Bible [or other religious authority] says so.
4) Everyone knows that a “loose” woman is an immoral woman.
5) Prostitutes are homewreckers. They are the natural competitors of wives. Since marriage is one of the most holy things in society, anything that harms marriage is immoral.
6) Prostitutes spread veneral disease, which is bad for the health of society. Prostitution is also tied to organized crime, drugs, and violence.
7) Girls all over the world are trafficked daily into sex slavery. This inhumane treatment should never be condoned. Anyone who engages in the sex industry is helping directly or indirectly to support the illegal sex trade worldwide.
8) Porn is harmful to society. Men who consume porn and other commercial sex come to believe that all women should behave like porn stars. These expectations are oppressive towards wives and other “good women” who are forced to compete with sex workers to live up to unhealthy or impossible bodily and behavioral standards.
9) Prostitution and pornography are inherently degrading towards women. They only exist because of an essential inequality between men and women, so making a profit from that inequality is anti-feminist, contrary to movements for social justice, and thus immoral.
10) Prostitutes harm themselves. The work they engage in is destructive to their emotions, and the easy money can be addictive, like a drug. They also destroy their future prospects, lose everyone’s respect in society, and harm their children who also have to deal with the stigma. Prostitution is immoral just like drugs are immoral, because it is bad for the practitioners, so prostitutes should be saved from their self-destructive habits.
A. The following pages contain critical analyses of each of the above accusations against sex work.
Reason #1. Sex work is not real work. A Prostitute is selling her body, which is the equivalent of slavery. Slavery of all kinds should be illegal.
Some anti-prostitution theorists argue that sex work is “unskilled” work, therefore the only reason that sex workers are paid a disproportionately high “skilled workers’ wage” must be because they are selling their bodies in the exchange. On the contrary, almost any sex workers would argue that there is definitely a set of skills and knowledge that are required in order to practice “good business,” and the wage differential between “pros” and “newbies” testifies to that skill difference. Sexuality is a performance that prostitutes consciously engage in, and that requires physical and emotional investment. A sex worker “performs” the sexually-enticing role by taking on a certain appearance and set of behaviors. A prostitute is not selling her body, but is instead selling her emotional labor, which engages various parts of her body and mind. Though massage workers get paid for their bodily labor, and psychotherapists get paid for their emotional labor, most people refuse to acknowledge that sex work is also a form of emotional labor.# Sex work is both physically and emotionally taxing for the laborer as well as physically and emotionally rewarding for the client: thus, fitting the definition of a valuable exchange of service that deserves financial compensation.
Sex workers engage in highly intimate labor that can be unpleasant. Another way of understanding the sex worker unskilled labor “surplus” may be to consider their wage bonuses as being not unlike the high pay of American garbage collectors, whose incomes often exceed that of schoolteachers. In addition to dealing with clients who are unpleasant in physical or personality terms, sex workers also deal with “kinky” or unusual sexual desires of johns, many of whom are married and are unable to find appropriate satisfaction with wives. This is particularly true in the homosexual and transsexual sex markets, as well as professional Bondage/Domination/Sadomaschism industry, in which male clients pay to be dominated by a female “Mistress,” and in which no sexual services are performed, but the fantasy of female domination over the client is acted out for payment.
Economist Lena Edlund wrote in “A Theory On Prostitution,”# which was published in the Journal of Political Economy in 1992 that prostitutes are exchanging their marriage capital, or long-term support from a husband, for short-term advances of money from clients. By engaging in sex work, prostitutes trade off the possibility of a better marriage partner, assuming that many of the partners that may have once been available to the prostitute previous to engaging in sex work are now off-limits. This is a fairly rational assumption, although it is not without exceptions. There are many sex workers who are married with children, particularly among migrant workers who send remittances home to care for their children. Of the sex workers who are not married, many do eventually get married, and it is difficult to calculate whether their arrangements are hypothetically worse off than what they might have been able to procure if they were not engaged in sex work. For sex workers that engage in popular sex tourism destinations like Thailand or Dominican Republic, one of the primary goals of the sex workers is to find a client that they can marry, in order to be given better opportunities with citizenship in a first world country than any husband in their home countries would be able to provide. Therefore, Edlund’s assumption of marriage capital exchange lacks statistical proof and global analysis, though it remains a useful way of understanding how sex workers are trading off human capital for long-term gains in exchange for short-term profit.
Sociologist Catherine Hakim wrote recently in “Erotic Capital”# that women have more “erotic capital” than men do because it is easier for women than men to trade off their attractive physical qualities for financial benefits. She states that it is an example of Patriarchal oppression that men forbid women from using their greater resource, their erotic capital, in order to achieve economic gains. That is why there is stigma attached to women who accentuate their sexualities and attractiveness over “other qualities”: intellectual or manual that men also have. Though Hakim’s critique of the Patriarchal injunction against women’s utilization of their own sexuality, she may be mistaken in assuming that women necessarily have more erotic capital than men do. In her assessment of the different properties that make up an individual’s erotic capital, she includes cultural knowledge, social etiquette, and aesthetic tastes, which are indications of a woman’s class. However, she doesn’t acknowledge that the composition of a woman’s erotic capital and that of a man are inherently different and unequal in value. Physical attractiveness, the property that is most significant for a woman’s erotic capital, depreciates very quickly with age. However, for men, their physical attractiveness is not as significant as their social status in the market for sexuality and marriage, therefore, their erotic capital may actually increase with age. Therefore, though it may be argued that young women have more erotic capital than young men, over the course of a lifetime, men has as much or more erotic capital than women do. This is evidenced by the relative difficulty of women over the age of thirty-five in finding a marriage partner, whereas men have far less difficulty.
Lena Edlund touches upon this idea in her 2002 paper. She writes that because women are only fertile and attractive for a short period of their lives whereas men are fertile and socially-deemed attractive for a much longer period of their lives, that older men as well as young men all tend to go for young women, especially between the ages of twenty-five and thirty#, creating a natural scarcity that makes them more valuable in the erotic market during this short period of their lives. Thus, using Edlund’s analysis, combined with Hakim’s theory of “Erotic Capital,” it can be stated that when a woman who has greater erotic capital engages in sexual relations with a man who has lesser erotic capital, in terms of physical attractiveness or age, that difference can be made up for in other ways via financial remuneration.
In summary, here are ten rebuttals against the accusation that sex workers are not engaged in “real work” and therefore their earnings are immoral:
1) Sex workers are in fact, engaged in emotionally and physically taxing work, that requires some level of skill. This skill can increase as a sex workers gains more experience in the industry, and is demonstrated in greater wages among more experienced sex workers who are independently in control of their business.
2) Sexuality is a conscious performance that sex workers invest and engage in: they are not the sex objects they portray themselves to be, but are instead active agents taking on that role in exchange for financial remuneration. Therefore they are not selling “their bodies” but the performance of sexuality.
3) The emotional and physical therapy that sex workers provide for their clients is a form of “emotional labor.” Emotional labor, such as nannying, housekeeping, nursing, primary school teaching, and prostitution, is often ignored as a form of legitimate work because it is stereotypically the work of women, which is considered natural and unpaid in the private sphere; therefore, the wages of all workers who engage in emotional labor tend to be lower than other workers. This is evidence of structural sexism in the labor markets.
4) The work of sex workers can be sexually deviant or “kinky” so that clients are compelled to purchase it from a professional, as they find it difficult to find equivalent service with marriage partners or other potential partners in society.
5) Some clients may also construe it to be cheaperto seek satisfaction in this way than to court an ordinary woman through dating and commitments of greater time and energy. Therefore, purchasing sexual services can be a highly rational choice for some clients, just as engaging in sex work for the surpluses involved can be a highly rational decision for sex workers.
6) There are also some erotic performers and sex workers who consider their labor to be a form of “art,” another form of labor that can contribute highly to society but that exceeds the simplistic laws of the market and often goes unacknowledged and underpaid.
7) The work that sex workers do can be very unpleasant, physically and emotionally. Therefore, sex workers are compensated extra for the discomfort of their work, much like garbage collectors. Further unpleasantness resulting from criminality due to illegal practice underground also artificially raises the price of sex work. Legalized prostitution, which eliminates some of the unpleasantness and risks involved in the business, also tends to decrease sex worker wages, therefore proving that sex workers are partially paid in compensation for the special difficulties of their work.
8) Another way of looking at the service of sex work is to see it as an exchange of marriage capital. Prostitutes are being compensated for loss of certain marriage opportunities. This analysis, by economist Lena Edlund, is generally true to life, though there are many exceptions to this scenario in the globalized markets of sexual labor.
9) Finally, a theory that this Man-i-Fiesta proposes is that prostitutes may be compensated for the difference between their erotic capital and that of their partner. If a young woman, who has high erotic capital in the sex and marriage markets due to natural scarcity, decides to engage in sexual relations with someone who has lower erotic capital, it is easy to find people who are willing to pay for the difference.
10) Wage slavery exists all over the world, including debt slavery in the United States. Many argue that the unpaid domestic service of wives and mothers is a gendered form of slavery. The alienated labor of all people is exploitative and wrong, but sex work is not the only example of this kind of human slavery that continues to exist in various direct and indirect ways. The involuntary trafficking, forced labor, and inhumane working conditions of all workers is wrong, and should be eliminated. However, by conflating involuntary sex work with voluntary and consensual commercial sex, even well-intentioned human rights activists are inserting Patriarchal moral and/or religious biases to their proscribed “victims,” and diffusing the focus required for the reform of the truly criminal and unjust kinds of sex work.
Reason #2. Sex should only occur between people in love. It is too intimate an act to engage in with strangers, so prostitutes who have sex with strangers for money are perversifying something sacred.
Our media-saturated society informs us also that “love” exists according to the portrayals of Hollywood romance, and that this “love” is sacred; that ideally, sex should only take place between people in love. This reflects a Western contemporary trend in the conception of “love,” which changes with time and culture, and the lines for appropriate sexual behavior have changed dramatically since the 1950’s. In contrast to the message of true love, the media also portrays steamy sex between movie stars that are engaging in sex just for the thrill of it, and sharing the pleasures with everyone through a twenty-foot screen.
Actors get paid for their sexual service, exchanged visually and contractually, and they are well compensated for their sexual superiority, their “erotic capital.” What is the difference between movie stars who have sex on screen and porn stars, whose on-screen sexual engagements are perhaps a bit more pronounced? And what is the difference between porn stars who perform for a camera and strippers who perform for a live audience? Finally, what is the “moral” difference between stimulating sexual arousal visually, through erotic performance, and engaging in the stimulation physically? Why is there a “moral” difference between Angelina Jolie’s sexual stimulation of men and women worldwide, and Angelina on the street corner waiting for a John or two to pass by?
Though selling sex “indirectly” through the medium of a camera lens is obviously quite different, experientially, from selling sex “directly” through physical contact, the fact remains that sexuality is being employed to gain profit, and the service of sexual arousal is being rendered and paid for. Thus speaking, those who profit the most from the sale of sex are corporations worldwide that force upon our visual mindscapes an endless stream of sexualized advertisements, which primarily make use of women’s bodies to gain profit. If the use of women’s sexuality as a means to service arousal, and the ideology of “love” itself, are used as means for most advertising businesses to gain income, then why should it be illegal or stigmatized for women to take agency of their own sexualities and utilize their own erotic capital and erotic skills to earn economic independence?
The sexualized images of women are used ubiquitously to oppress women; to demand that women discipline their bodies in ways that are appealing to the socially-prescribed male Gaze; to diet, shave, pluck, paint, and even nip/tuck every square inch of otherwise socially unacceptable bodies; to squeeze into painful attire and shoes; to be made to feel that chemical products are needed to enhance a naturally ugly, hairy, disproportionate, and otherwise unpleasant frame. And then, to depreciate in social power and erotic value every day of life past twenty-five; sometimes even to suffer plastic surgery, which can be a rational choice for many women, but still reflect immense gender injustice. Yet in spite of all these taxing self-improvements, women are still rendered incapable of using this tiresome and socially-enforced investment to empower themselves financially, except through marriage or commited relations with a man – Any rational and consistent thinker can see the moral injustice in this situation. It is not only unfair towards women; it is plain absurd.
Furthermore, the construction of “intimacy” is personal and differs from person to person, and from encounter to encounter. People can have certain sexual exchanges that are intimate and “sacred” in nature while also have others that are simply physically indulgent, even within the same relationship. Therefore to rule that all sexuality is “too intimate” for selling, is to imply that an individual can not make conscious decision how to engage in or interpret their specific sexual behaviors. This is objectionable on the grounds of intruding on emotional self-determination and diversity. Since intimacy is a private feeling by definition, shouldn’t each person be allowed to judge for him or herself what is or isn’t “too intimate”?
With the change in our modern sexual values due to the popularization of birth control and the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s, it is not uncommon for someone to seek a sexual partner in a bar or over the internet. Having sex with strangers, multiple strangers, seems to be the norm rather than the exception nowadays, as portrayed in the popular media. Therefore, the added injunction that promiscuity is not okay when money is involved in the exchange is a moral hypocrisy that infringes on civil liberties.
Reason #3. Sex should only occur between married people for reproductive purposes. Engaging in extra-marital sex for pleasure is wrong because the Bible [or other religious authority] says so.
When women do not have access to birth control and abortion services, they suffer a much higher risk of being punished for sexual engagement with men because of the possibility of childbirth; therefore, before the advent of the above technologies, only having sex in the protective economic relationship of marriage makes a good deal of sense. Having sex only for reproductive purposes also makes a certain amount of sense in a Protestant, work-centered way. Having too much sex can take away from productivity, the same as engaging in any non-work-or-family-related leisure activity. However, human beings are different from other animals in that we do take pleasure from sexual activity, and given the amount of leisure time that many modern human beings are lucky to have, it is somewhat tyrannical to dictate what naturally-inclined activities are allowable for that period of leisure. Sex confined only to the boundaries of marriage is not only a media double-standard in contemporary society, but it is also a historical double standard, as people have always engaged in pre-marital and extra-marital affairs throughout human history across all different cultures, with some settings being more tolerant of such behavior than others.
However, it is impossible to make any argument against those who adhere strictly to religion. Their arguments are based on faith and not logic, on specialized interpretations perceived ancient texts and not on easily perceivable realities. There are ways to argue for various behaviors within the traditions of different religions, but the author is currently unable to engage in this kind of analysis, and does not feel it is particularly productive for the purposes of this publication, since religious arguments against female sexual self-determination are irrational, unscientific, and inherently inconsistent.
Reason #4. Everyone knows that a “loose” woman is an immoral woman.
Like those who argue Reason #3, people who satisfy themselves with shaky and simplistic arguments that begin with “everyone knows” are also relying on blind faith and lack independent strength of mind. The Madonna/Whore sexual double standard between men and women is something that everyone knows about too. And where does it derive from? What is its moral basis? Is it fair? The rebuttal to this reasoning has already been stated, previously in the publication.
Reason #5. Prostitutes are homewreckers. They are the natural competitors of wives. Since marriage is one of the most holy things in society, anything that harms marriage is immoral.
The prostitute is certainly competing with the wife for sexual access to her husband. Although for most men who purchase commercial sex, it is not for the sexual alacrity of the wife that the man indulges in paid extra-marital sex. The prostitute is also not usually portrayed as “the other woman,” the terrible mistress who seduces a man to leave his wife. Rather, the prostitute is often a temporary substitute who the client does not intend on ever marrying. The married client indulges in sexual relations with the prostitute while respecting his wife’s reign over all other aspects of the household, and thus, it is sometimes said that prostitutes “save marriages” by being a safe outlet for sexual energies that might otherwise be diverted to more threatening, and more permanent mistresses. Furthermore, it is not provable that prostitution hurts marriages more than other factors. Do marriages begin to fall apart when men consult prostitutes or do men more frequently begin consult prostitutes when marriages are already falling apart from external factors? As of yet, there are no academic studies on this question.
The monogamous family is the cellular building block of contemporary society. Therefore, undermining the family is dangerous for social order. However, the current institution of marriage is not inclusive of everyone’s desired family constructions. Legal marriage, which used to be an exclusively religious institution, discriminates heavily against certain family formations: that of homosexual couples, and polygamous or collective families. The decision to live in partnership, and/or raise a child, is a personal decision that needs to be consensual among all members of the partnership. However, there is no reason to assume that an alternative family arrangement would be worse, biologically or psychologically, for a child, apart from the stigma that society imposes on these relationships. Matrilineal and matrilocal familial arrangements have existed throughout human history, including societies without fathers, such as the Na people of China, who for thousands of years raised their children under the care of the mother and her kin, by uncles and grandmothers, in a happy arrangement that the people continue to take pride in, where free engagement in sexuality is the norm.
The traditional monogamous marriage as well as polygynous marriages took shape under a Patriarchal social order that was oppressive to women, and amendments to allow women more rights in the public sphere fail to completely account for all the gender injustices within the family. With the steady rise of divorce rates worldwide in parallel with the empowerment and education of women, there are reasons to believe that the traditional model of marriage may not be good for all people, especially women and homosexuals. Is it necessarily wrong then, to bring to question the cultural hegemony of such an institution? Can we conceive of a society that would be better off by allowing every individual the liberty to choose whatever family formations provide the best utility for them, whether it be with a partner of the same sex, or with multiple couples and generations living together to mutually ensure well-being in the public and private realms of workplace and household?
In conclusion, not only is it unjustified to call all prostitutes “homewreckers,” but the very institution of marriage on which contemporary society is built may not be optimal for human welfare. Further discussion on the political economy of alternative family arrangements are included in chapter three.
Reason #6. Prostitutes spread venereal disease, which is bad for the health of society. Prostitution is also tied to organized crime, drugs, and violence.
Case after case in the U.S., Africa, Europe, Asia, and Australia indicate that prostitutes do not necessarily spread venereal disease more than other sectors of society.# They do not deserve to be targeted with this stigma while their clients go unpunished. Nobody wants sexually transmitted diseases, least of all sex workers; and inadvertently catching a venereal disease because of the nature of working conditions does not make a sex worker immoral but an unfortunate sick person. Therefore, adequate health care needs to be provided for those who are identified as at greater risk for illness.
Furthermore, sex workers need to be empowered to be able to say no to clients who refuse to use a condom. Currently, legal protections in the United States do not allow sex workers to sue for client non-compliance or even rape, because prostitution itself is illegal though understood and accepted by law enforcement to be ubiquitous underground. The most effective ways to fight the incidence of std’s within the sex worker population is to provide for better, non-stigmatized health care options, as well as give prostitutes the legal right to enforce the use of birth control, or it would be natural for sex workers to turn to pimps and members of organized crime to seek protection that the law does not provide.
Because of social stigma and criminalization, sex workers tend to float into the margins of society, where poverty, organized crime, drugs, and violence are present. Whether they began within that sector of society, and were drawn into prostitution due to involvement with one of the other factors, or whether they first began sex work without any involvement with drugs or organized crime, the marginalization of sex workers creates higher incidence of concomitance.
However, this concurrence of the victimless crime of prostitution and the more harmful criminal behaviors such as drugs and gang violence need not exist. Currently sex workers are simply not legitimate or well-respected members of society, therefore, they will go where the most outcast and marginalized members of society go. If attitudes towards sex work change, the industry itself will change rapidly for many people involved. It will also provide opportunities for sex workers currently involved with the most criminal sectors of the business to switch to healthier work environments.
Decriminalizing and destigmatizing sex work is the most effective way to reduce harm for sex workers and society at large.
Reason #7. Girls all over the world are trafficked into sex slavery. This inhumane treatment should never be condoned. Anyone who engages in the sex industry is helping directly or indirectly to support the illegal sex trade worldwide.
Any sex that is not consensually agreed upon should never be condoned: rape and sexual slavery are crimes against womanhood and humanity. However, it is important not to conflate consensual sex work with coerced sexual labor. The selling of sexual services, by itself, when freely and consciously chosen by the worker, is not a form of slavery.
There are many types of labor oppression all over the world, from debt peonage to working conditions that are destructive to worker health and exploitative wages that are below minimum subsistence levels. Sex workers, like all poor people all over the world, are subject to the oppressions of poverty and inequality of opportunity. Their choice to better these conditions for themselves or for their families, whether through sex work or another low-skill job, is a rational choice, based on available income opportunities, and should be respected. Human rights activists who advocate for “innocent” “sex slaves” but refuse to help willing prostitutes, are blind to the realities of the global sex industry, and disrespectful of women’s right to self-determination. They also make it more difficult for policy to be researched and passed that would target the problem and provide effective solutions.
Reason #8. Porn is harmful to society. Men who consume porn and other commercial sex come to believe that all women should behave like porn stars. These expectations are oppressive towards wives and other “good women” who are forced to compete with sex workers to live up to unhealthy or impossible bodily and behavioral standards.
Some feminists such as Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon are strongly opposed to pornography on the grounds that it objectifies women and causes social harm by changing men’s sexual expectations of women. The also argue that since men are generally the “buyers” of sexual services and women or gay men are generally the “sellers,” that this proves all sex work is inherently sexist. Because sex work exists on the basis of gender inequality, they believe it is due to the sexual power of men over women (and gay men) that men are able to “buy sex” from those who are inferior. Thus, participating in sex work or utilizing one’s sexuality in any way to one’s benefit, from porn to trophy-wifery to flirting with the boss, is all “anti-feminist” behavior, literally “sleeping with the enemy,” since any kind of deployment of sexuality is considered by these feminists to be engaging in an act that is inherently unjust and gender-oppressive.
The problem with this argument is that it confuses the correlation of gender/sexual inequality/oppression with the causation of that inequality. The reason why there are so few men working in the sex industry as giggolos is simply because an adequate market does not exist for them. If one existed, there would surely be more giggolos. The reason for this imbalanced market is due to the oppression of Patriarchal sexual values, which teaches women that it is wrong to pay attention to our sexual desires, and wrong to “sleep around,” because our desires are inherently “dirty.” Another reason for the underractive giggolo industry is that women, as wives, have traditionally depended on men for financial security, so we have not historically had much in the way of dispensable for purchasing sex from other men. Stigmatization of female sexual desire, historical economic oppression of wives, and the gender inequality in erotic capital in favor of men: these are the real reasons why there are more female and gay male sex workers than straight male prostitutes; if economic and cultural conditions were different, women would be just as likely to be sex “buyers.” It’s conceivable that as gender and sexual values continue to change, there will be greater equalization in the availability of sexual services for men and women.
The increasing availability of porn via internet, and the sexualization of all popular media, is definitely pushing a universal revolution in our sexual culture. Every person who views the media is influenced by these images, except for those who are most stringently protected in traditionalism. Due to the globalizing cultural hegemony of American Hollywood and the consumer lifestyle it promotes, this sexual revolution is permeating worldwide. Sex sells, beyond the pages of pornography, in every subway advertisement and radio tune. Expectations of sex have changed for everyone.
Whether the images in pornography are especially oppressive towards women as compared to the images of anorexic supermodels in glossy magazines, and the photoshopped faces on TV, is unclear. These are two forms types of gendered bodily discipline that both exert an unhealthy, self-effacing force upon women, who are forced to live up to oppressive expectations, whether in the bedroom or the classroom. Regardless, it is not the fault of any one woman or man, who participates in either the production or consumption of pornography, that these commercial demands and social values for beauty and sexuality exist. Rather each individual in pornography or the sex industry at large enters a pre-existing culture and industry, deciding for her or himself in what manner she or he shall participate, with an understanding that the standards are not created by the individual but by some invisible market hand.
For a model or entertainer who uses her body to earn a living and depends on adherence to strict cultural codes of beauty to survive, it is both empowering and oppressive to participate in an industry that disciplines the body in a gender-discriminant manner. Though it can surely be argued that the structure itself is oppressive on an aggregate scale for all women, the individual woman who is able to tailor herself to these standards can gain a sense of personal self-empowerment through participation. She may or may not be conscious of the greater gender oppression that underlines her choices; if she is not conscious or in agreement, then she can not be blamed for some “betrayal” of the ideology of women’s advancement as defined by other women; however, if she is conscious of this inherent oppression, she may also use this consciousness to create a separation between her whole self and the performance of socialized sexuality that she temporarily engages in for profit. By being aware of the way in which oppressive expectations are laid upon her, yet choosing to adhere to it, aware of the falsity yet necessity of her compliance, she can instead subvert that oppression by choosing her manner of participation in it, reclaim it for herself, taking all temporary cultural values with a grain of salt by re-negotiating the individual power dynamics of her social reality.
It seems rather unlikely that a Prohibitionist approach to addressing the problem of ubiquitous Capitalist pornography, such as the one proposed by Dworkin, MacKinnon, and some other feminists, will be effective in solving the problem of an increasingly sexualized culture. As Foucault famously stated in his History of Sexuality, the ostensive repression of sexual discourse only serves to strengthen it in other, less overt channels.
Rather than focusing on Prohibition, a greater equality between the sexes may be reached if women too embraced their sexualities and used their purchasing power to garner their own niches within the sexual markets, as they already have begun to do. Women are now the fastest growing demographic in consumers of pornography. Furthermore, independent and self-published “alternative” pornography that is conscious and self-determined, is available, including the self-made pornos of sex-positive feminist sex workers. These could be promoted as a more socially-conscious erotica choice, and the pornography itself can be an art form for the expression of a more progressive set of values.
It is not logical to accuse porn stars and prostitutes of oppressing wives and “good girls” by complying to the sexual standards that clients are demanding. What is oppressive are the standards themselves; and the way to overcome them requires first that women take a more thorough look at the gender-discriminant forces that shape these images, and realize that their objections are shaped by a Patriarchal morality that is oppressive towards all women. The Patriarchal division of sexual/delegitimized women and “pure”/legitimate women is the greatest barrier to women’s freedom and equality. Feminists need to stop bashing and abusing other women who are freely choosing for themselves.
What is a feminist but a woman of courage and independent choice? Look at Annie Sprinkle and Margo St. James: this is what a feminist looks like.
Reason #9. All prostitution and pornography are inherently degrading towards women. So making a profit from that degradation is anti-feminist, inherently contrary to movements for social justice, and thus immoral.
Continuing on with the argument stated from Reason #8 above, it is unfortunate that as of today, most feminists and human rights workers are morally opposed to sex work. As commonly stated in feminist literature, there is a general “intuition” that all sex work is inherently degrading to the worker. However, who is the one doing the act of degrading? Where does that attitude come from? Why does it matter?
Is sex work really inherently degrading? Unless all sexual acts are inherently degrading for women, there’s no consistent reason to believe why performing the same act without payment is less degrading than accepting money for that act. There are some who believe that all sexual acts are “dirty” for women, and thus degrading, but that correlates to the sexual double standard previously stated. What is it about the acceptance of payment in exchange for valued services that “degrades” the woman more than the man, besides the social stigma attached to prostitution, which we have already stated is rooted in Patriarchal oppression and the Patriarchal gaze?
Laura Mulvey, the film critic, wrote about the “male gaze,” as that which is socially forced upon women in such a ubiquitous way that its biases become invisible. The protagonist of most films and stories throughout human history are men; and the objects of gaze, upon which the camera literally stops, ever-taking the point of view of the male gazer, have usually been women. In a society dominated by the visual medium, we have all internalized the male gaze, and as women, we have forgotten how it is to look at each other as we once did as girls, because we have so internalized the gendered lens.
Let’s engage in a thought experiment. Let’s suppose first and foremost that the sex worker herself does not feel degraded by her work, because she is a conscious laborer, and a proud sex-positive feminist. Then, let’s suppose that it is only the client who finds her work degrading. Can a sex worker engage in this business transaction now in a non-self-degrading way? That is to say, does degradation lie in the eye of the beholder or in the self-esteem of the beholden? If the sex worker herself does not feel degraded by her work, then isn’t it a form of social violence to undermine her self-determination in favor of the judgment of the client or complete outsider?
According to sex-work author and activist Wendy Chapkis, it is very possible, and in fact, necessary for survival in the sex industry that workers disengage their self-perceptions and self-esteem from the appraisal of clients who come from all different backgrounds with different attitudes towards their own involvement in commercial sex. This is a form of emotional labor that sex workers need to do, in preparation and aftercare, in order to negotiate the emotional boundaries of her line of work, and firmly establish her subjective agency underneath the sexual objectivization of her clients, through the impression which she performs and controls consciously. In a autoethnographic piece entitled “Stripper,” college feminist and sex worker Debbi Sandal wrote about how she subverted the gaze of the male client, and reclaimed her own space, agency, and definition within the act of commercial sex in the sex-worker collectivized Lusty Lady Theater of San Francisco:
“The hardest part of the job was dealing with my feminist principles concerning the objectification of women. Dancing nude is the epitome of woman as sex object. As the weeks passed, I found I liked being a sex object, because the context was appropriate. I resent being treated as a sex object on the street or at the office. But as an erotic dancer, that is my purpose. I perform to turn you on, and if I fail, I feel I have done a poor job. Women who work in the sex industry are not responsible for, nor do they in any way perpetuate, the sexual oppression of women. In fact, to any enlightened observer, our very existence provides a distinction and a choice as to when a woman should be treated like a sex object and when she should not be. At the theater, yes; on the street, no. Having the distinction so obviously put out at work, I felt more personal power on the street.”
Through stripping, Sundhahl exercises her feminism by constructing a space between her performative self, which her male clients objectify, and her whole conscious self. This performance is an imitation of what Sundahl imagines to be sexual demand of the client, and is not truly a reflection of herself, therefore by engaging in the performance of sexual “degradation,” she is actually subverting it by creating distance and controlling it. Sundahl shows that sex worker who understands that sexuality is performed and adopted, is more empowered to combat against the ubiquitous degradation of the male gaze in all of society, than the inexperienced woman who believes that her sexuality is somehow tied to her essential qualities and value as a person.
I argue that this performance, since it is an adaptation of the script provided by the assumed sexual fantasies of the client, is thus only outwardly degrading insofar as it is defined as such by the client. Therefore, it is only truly degrading if the sex worker herself believes it to be so.
If society deems sex work to be degrading and deems sex to be dirty, then a good sex worker, performing her job in a professional manner, needs to adopt that social interpretation if that is what is required to turn a client on. So if sex work is “degrading,” society is to blame, and not the sex worker. The only reason why an act of sexual service might be “degrading” is because the client who pays for it believe it to be so; thus, by professional standards, a sex worker must perform the service to the expectations and values of the client, and the social expectations around her. She is paid for that performance. When a client is respectful and does not deem the transaction to be degrading, then a professional sex worker would act accordingly as well, with greater dignity on the outside; but again, in the same way, the true state of her “degradation” is also reliant only on her own interpretation. When it comes to sex work, all external “degradation” or lack thereof is defined by the client and society as a whole, and merely reflected by the sex worker as a professionally-rendered service that requires investment and skill. But it is not necessarily, or usually, the self-interpretation of the sex worker. And ultimately, for any true feminist, it is the interpretation of the sex worker that counts.
Sex-negative feminists who state that sex work degrades all women, and accuse sex workers of “sleeping with the enemy,” are not understanding this performative leap between self-understanding, self-portrayal, and male perception. They may be too indoctrinated under Patriarchal values to be able to separate their own self-perceptions from that of the male gaze. They need to work on building their feminist consciousness with regard to sexuality, for if their efforts to fight for women’s equality results in their upholding of Madonna/Whore divisions, they are the ones embracing the most harmful foundations of Patriarchy and “sleeping with the enemy.”
Reason #10. Prostitutes hurt themselves. The work they engage in is destructive to their emotions, and the easy money can be addictive, like a drug. They also destroy their future prospects, lose everyone’s respect in society, and harm their children who also have to deal with the stigma. Prostitution is immoral just like drugs are immoral, because it is bad for the practitioners, so prostitutes should be saved from their self-destructive habits.
Yes, marginalized cultures hurt. People on the outskirts of society: the impoverished, the pariah, the criminal, the mentally ill, the physically disabled, the drug-dependent, are all people who do not fit well into mainstream society, and may find instead on the darker fringes of social life, a rougher way of being. Yes, sex work among those spheres tend to hurt.
Others argue that all sex work must inherently hurt because sexual intimacy is so “sacred” that repeated “violation” must be damaging (to the woman worker). There is obvious bias in these statements. Wendy Chapkis wrote in Live Sex Acts about the way in which sex workers can and do exercise a certain emotional disengagement from particular sexual performances in order to preserve their emotional integrity. On one hand, this kind of emotional self-alienation can also be construed as “harmful” to the prostitute because it is a form of self-alienation. On the other hand, the fact that sex workers can and must engage in a form of emotional self-care, in addition to a therapeutic caring work for the client, proves first, that sex workers are performing a real service that requires both their bodies and also their hearts and minds; and two, that sex workers can create conditions for labor that minimizes harm to themselves; thus, they have, at least, the agency to reduce their victimhood, if not eliminate it altogether, contrary to the assertions of many anti-prostitution abolitionists.
Furthermore, a kind of emotional disengagement is required in all emotionally taxing labor; in fact, the common definition of “professionalism” in modern Capitalism is precisely the ability to “disengage your emotions from your professional attitude,” and to do a standardly good job no matter how terribly you feel. Is the emotional labor in sex work, this kind of “professionalism,” actually very different from the acting that entertainers, waitresses, and bankers do?
Though the emotional self-alienation of sex workers is a real factor of harm for many, it is not the sexual act itself that is emotionally damaging so much as the value that the sex worker attaches to the act. Most sex workers carry the same moral attitudes and stigmas that have been socialized into all women. Sex work hurts most because it is stigmatized, because it is looked down upon, even by the sex worker herself. Women who are already looked down upon, already on the margins of society, are also more likely to engage in sex work. This causes a feedback loop in a downward spiral of social esteem among economically and socially disadvantaged women. Like any other activity that is practiced foolishly, without careful deliberation and planning, sex work that is practiced poorly, with emotional carelessness or self-loathing, can be extremely destructive to sex workers.
But should sex workers be automatically prohibited from practice, just like drug-users? Firstly, the social stigma that exists against sex work already constitutes a strong persuasion for most people not to enter the profession, so the additional legal barrier seems likely to only cause more public cost without much greater benefit to anyone. Secondly, even if can be proven that prostitution is absolutely always harmful to practitioners, it is still more legally sound to protect the civil liberties of the individual and right to self-determination, even to protect one’s right to harm oneself. However, the latter statement does not coincide with the way U.S. law functions when it comes to addressing many personal issues, like injunctions against euthanasia and taxation on cigarettes. Thus, though it may seem undemocratic, it would not be against legal precedence for the U.S. to outlaw sex work on the basis that it is bad for the workers themselves.
That would actually be one of the most humane and unprejudiced reasons to outlaw prostitution. But the argument of self-harm is not the argument that is usually used in most human rights debates against prostitution. In addition to the normal moral criticisms, whether directly stated or implicitly followed, anti-prostitution “abolitionists” argue that every sex worker is a slave. They believe that all sex workers are either coerced in sex labor physically via kidnapping or economically via poverty; therefore, their argument against prostitution is not based so much on the poor working conditions currently in the trade, which are specific to particular times, policies, and sexual sociopolitical climates, but based on the essentialized victimhood of all sex workers, which is made to seem unalterable.
But the “economic coercion” argument that abolitionists make is faulty when exclusively applied to sex work; sex workers who choose their occupation rationally as their best possible option, of which comprises the majority of those wrongly believed to be “trafficked” or “enslaved,” are not anymore “economically coerced” into their labor than some of their neighbors who may have chosen to perform a lower-paying wage job such as factory labor. Both are being forced into terrible working conditions; both conditions can greatly harm the health of the workers in question. But the sex worker has decided that the tradeoffs of the sex industry are of greater utility to her than working longer hours for lower pay in a factory. Nevertheless, she came from the same background of economic coercion via poverty as some others who did not become sex workers; therefore her becoming a sex worker must be a result of her choice, her agency, rather than pure external coercion, as anti-prostitution advocates often argue, illogically. In so doing, these abolitionists refuse to acknowledge the agency of sex workers, and the admirable courage and determination that many sex workers must cultivate in order to go against social norms and take immense risks to survive, relying on herself and often only herself.
If these abolitionists were able to acknowledge that the current situation for sex workers is indeed generally oppressive, but that this is due to current legal and cultural interpretations of sex work rather than the essential nature of the work itself, then they would see that the way to fight these conditions is to repeal the laws that criminalize prostitution; that it would only exacerbate harm towards sex workers to try to fight these conditions with more abolitionist laws.
Furthermore, abolitionists also refuse to recognize the desires of the prostitute. It is sometimes of desire and enjoyment for some sex workers in the industry; but because female sexual enjoyment is still so taboo and morally-tainted in our Patriarchal value system, the possibility of emotional and sexual fulfillment for a sex worker through her job is often considered impossible, or at least very exceptional. This silences the very real beliefs that many sex workers actually do hold. Though sex work is not easy labor, many sex workers do nevertheless enjoy it, and prefer it to whatever other work available; some even believe it is a sort of “calling,” a special talent that they feel they are best at using and most enjoy developing.# The possible desirability of sex work is considered to be so far from the standard social construction of female sexuality, that it is absurd. But in reality, it is not very absurd at all, and in fact, most voluntary sex workers do agree that they take at least some pleasure in their work.
Stereotypes that sex workers must only be engaged in prostitution because of drug addiction or enslavement to an abusive trafficker or economic circumstance, deny the possibility that sex work might be enjoyable for some people in and of itself. Many sex workers from both the first and third world interpret their experience in the industry to be empowering rather than emotionally destructive. Thus, finally, and most importantly, it is not factually correct to state that sex work is by definition destructive towards all practitioners. Since value varies according to experience, sex work should not be outlawed like drugs. Many woman do become better off due to a brief stint in sex work; for most women, it is not a long-term career or identity, but a few occasional encounters to supplement other work in a difficult life, and many sex workers, particularly those in sex tourism hot spots like Thailand or the Dominican Republic, use sex work to gain citizenship and a demonstrably better life abroad. They are no different from “paper brides” who engage in the same kind of tradeoff long-term, and are not considered illegal.
The children of prostitutes are indeed often hurt by social stigma towards their mothers and themselves, but once again, the problem is the stigma, not prostitution itself. Personal stories by the children of women from SANGRAM, a sex workers’ collective in India, demonstrate that many children grow up to appreciate their mothers’ sacrifice and suffering and become some of the strongest advocates for sex worker rights.# There are many people in the world who engage in lifestyles that may be harmful to their children, but it is not right to forbid them from exercising their liberties based on that assumption alone.
The better question to ask is not whether or not sex workers are hurt by the industry of sex work as it exists today: yes, they are. But so are sweat shop laborers, and in fact, many prostitutes go into sex work to escape the worse oppression of more economically exploitative wage labor. The bigger question to ask is what are better measures to help sex workers and all people on the margins of every society live a more dignified life? This Man-I-Fiesta attempts one solution to this question in Chapter Three, Section C.
B. Psychology of the John: The Evolution of Confining Masculinity
Men also suffer from confining gender roles. In fact, in modern American society, it can be argued that the gendered expectations of being a man are stricter and more confining than that of being a woman, and men who break away from the macho, masculine image pay a heavy, physical price than women do for gender deviance. American men, who are afraid of wearing short shorts, afraid to cry or express any emotional vulnerability, afraid to hug other men, for fear of appearing “gay” in any way, are afraid because the price of being weak is especially costly for men. Since men are often not socially permitted to openly express or explore these gendered fears, they often must channel their frustrations in one of a few acceptable, “manly” channels: brotherhood, violence, group-rallied sexuality, and self-destructive machoism – thus, the common makeup of a dingy strip bar.
Traditional masculinity is burdensome, and the burden is placed without free choice, based on biological sex rather than chosen gender. Just as stereotypical female gender expectations are oppressive, so are traditional expectations of masculinity: to be tough, successful breadwinners, to ask for dates and pay too, and to be the leaders of families, able to provide as wealthy a lifestyle as possible. These social expectations, which boys deal growing up, can lead to strong feelings of anxiety and inadequacy among those who fail to live up to the standards. Since many distressed men feel they can’t easily talk about their problems with anyone the way women are allowed, a more popular outlet for the troubled male is the performance of exaggerated masculinity in the rough use of alcohol, drugs, and participation in gangs – which men engage in at far greater rates than women.
Older men, who may be doing measurably successfully, may also seek bars and sex venues for gender-acceptable emotional release. Sometimes they are looking for a thrill, and other times calming comfort. When older, married men feel they can not express their feelings of dissatisfaction to their wives, who expect them to be strong and resilient breadwinners, nor to their buddies who loathe vulnerability in other men as much as in themselves, they may choose to express their feelings sexually, with great macho thrust. Thus, prostitutes have always been men’s greatest psychotherapists.
Therefore, as many sex workers often note, many of their male clients are not looking for mere sexual release but desire an emotional connection that is secretive and disposable.
The socially constructed role of Prostitute provides a unique value to the socially constructed role of Man. She exerts no pressure on him to prove his masculinity, but is exclusively interested in confirming it. She demands far less from him than the Wife does: neither proof of economic reliability and social success, nor emotional attachments and behavioral requirements. She is there exclusively to help him reach sexual pleasure, and she will even fake her own to make him feel more sexually potent. She does not care if he engages in sexual relations with other women. She does not bear his children and would not be able to hold him responsible for a child’s upbringing if one is created.
Sex workers are often band-aids for wounded masculinity. In this sex-obsessed culture, sexuality has become the ultimate proving ground for men, as further witnessed by recent viagra and penis-enhancement’s increases in subscription across many generations of men.# Thus, it’s a sport that many men engage in to validate their manhood. Sex workers can easily and conveniently provide such a thrill. In an age of changing gender norms, some men may take relief in seeing women perform the stereotypical and subordinate roles of sexually objectified womanhood they secretly, sometimes misogynistically, fantasize, perhaps in response to threatening competition with women in all other areas of life.
# Men who seek escape from confining masculinity also often feel safer when doing so through the anonymous and non-commital purchase of sexual service. That is why there is a far greater proportion of “kinky” and non-heteronormative sexual engagements in the sex industry than estimated for the general population. Firstly, a fairly large portion of New York City sex workers are rent-boys, who sometimes see clients who are not yet open to others about their homosexuality. The term “fag,” meaning both gay and effeminate, is one of the worst slanders that boys can call each other, and they are taught from an early age to resist at all costs any behaviors that put the masculinity to question. Secondly, there is also a great percentage of transgendered people in commercial sex, who find a niche market eager to engage their service. Due to the varying degrees of success that the trangendered have in passing off as the opposite gender as their biological sex, many find it more difficult to find work, and consequently find the opportunities offered by the sex industry to be most welcoming. Finally, men who seek domination by women through Bondage/Domination/Sadomasochism (BDSM services) are seeking escape from confining masculinity. In New York City, the demographic of men who most frequently use BDSM services are, not surprisingly, the most powerful men of the city: often lawyers, corporate CEO’s, and other high-powered officials, who tire of the pressures of their offices, and seek relief from masculine expectations through submission to playful gender reversal. Thus the unique offerings of the sex industry offer a sort of sanctuary to men who deviate from heteronormative masculinity or seek relief from its performance.
On the other hand, there is an element of power and dominance that a client may crave when he purchases sex. Some clients do take a covert or overt pleasure in objectifying and degrading the sex worker, which may be rooted in a feeling of fear and hatred towards all women, exacerbated by changing gender roles. Thus, the urgent, male-dominated voice of media over-sexuality may be one way in which men try to maintain dominance by controlling women through sexual evaluation. Another way for men to maintain their feelings of gender superiority may be seeking contact with sources of more traditional female roles as sex workers. With changing constructions of gender roles, contemporary men often feel somewhat threatened by capable women who often outcompete them in the workplace as well as at home. Since women work just as men do, there is greater importance placed on men today than in past generations to be both physically attractive and economically successful, as demonstrated by the greater consumption of male botox in Europe#, and increasing purchase of various sexual enhancements. There are also higher incidences of male bachelorhood in modern society, along with female single motherhood, as more and more men find they are unable to attract or keep a partner in the dating market. In this age of fast change, sex work sometimes fills that gap the unfinished gender revolution leaves wide open.
Each john is each unique in his motivations for purchasing sex. Some simply enjoy the pleasures of promiscuity and access to variety. Others enjoy the symbolism of exercising their purchasing power, which underlines their wealth and sense of accomplishment. There are many who seek escape from dissatisfying marriages bound by responsibility towards children. And there are also many uncommitted men who meet and come to enjoy a special relationship with a certain sex worker, and seek to continually build a wonderful and sincere bond. There is no way to generalize the typical client, just as there is no way to generalize the typical sex worker.
However, both the client and the sex worker can recognize that restrictive gender roles and rules for sexuality and marriage are cracking under the pressures of enormous social change, and currently contribute significantly to a mutual sense of dissatisfaction, which the sex worker and client can alleviate via mutual exchange. To a certain extent, both johns and prostitutes are stigmatized for engaging in commercial sex, though the john is not punished as severely as the prostitute in the U.S. Therefore, clients can and ought to be allies to sex workers in the movement for sex worker rights, by defending the right to sexual self-determination and the decriminalization of commercial sex. Clients can also choose to purchase the services of conscientious, independent, and self-empowered sex workers, and engage in a more conscious form of sex consumerism. They can lobby for legislation alongside sex workers and support the movement in any variety of ways.
When a conscious, self-empowered sex worker meets an enlightened john who respects and honors her lifestyle choices, it is a relationship to be cherished. For each recognizes the alternative sexuality of the other, and allows for that freedom.
The moralistic attitudes towards female sexual propriety are vestiges of a patriarchal system of gender relations, which confines both men and women, and often causes much pain and sacrifice. These traditional gender values remain strong in modern society in spite of the recent liberalization of cultural attitudes towards sex in the 1960’s, and the clash and hypocrisy between new and old is extremely confusing for young people growing up in this age. We live in a half-way revolution, where material and social structures have changed significantly but cultural attitudes are still evolving; and we have a long way to go.
C. What’s Wrong with Tradition? (The Reverse Argument)
Strict gender roles that dictate a woman’s place in the home and a man’s place at the workplace limits individual choice, and reduces the optimal use of human talents. If an intelligent woman can contribute significantly to the public sphere, she should be allowed to do so, or society suffers the loss of her capacities; likewise, if a nurturing man prefers to be a stay-at-home dad, he should be encouraged to do so without stigma, or the family and society at large would suffer from the loss of his care. A libertarian outlook on gender roles would be to allow individuals to define and perform whichever gendered traits allows them the greatest happiness.
However, are there biological constraints on how much a person’s gender can be freely chosen and performed? Are there biological benefits to the traditional model of the family? How did traditional gender roles evolve? What purposes did they serve? Is there an intrinsic value in the stability of adhering to tradition that might outweigh the possible gains in happiness from attempts to sustain and publicly recognize alternative models of sexuality and family life?
In a society that was relatively static in terms of technology, production, social organization, cultural norms and practices, such as the Pre-Modern ages of Europe, from the rise of Christianity to the beginning of the Age of Encounters, before modern medicine, when the life span of a woman was relatively short, and the ratio of child survival was low enough that she was expected to have many kids in order that one or two may live beyond the age of ten, it may have been more justified then to deem the education of women a bad investment, simply because if a woman were expected to be married, she would be continuously involved in childbirth or childcare duties until death. For thousands of years, people abided by strict gender roles because static technology did not exist to allow otherwise.
In such a society, where Patriarchal control of property included husbands’ purview over wives, the institution of marriage clearly favored men. However, it can be argued that women gained necessary protections in this way, for women are particularly vulnerable during childbirth, and where there are lesser social protections offered by other family members and community, as is the expectation in the monogamous marriage agreement, women must rely on husbands to protect them during periods of physical weakness, and supply food to her and their children. Since women are tied to their children in a way that men are not, via the process of labor, the institution of marriage effectively protects women by socially binding the father to her support. Therefore, given Patriarchal control of property, it can be argued that marriages actually “helps” women and “enslaves” men to work in the public sphere for their families. Now, as marriages are breaking apart in a society that continues to hold Patriarchal values, it is clear that women, particularly single mothers, are suffering the most from the undermining of the institution of marriage.
However, rather than assuming that the solution must lie in strengthening the current institution of marriage, one may also question why society as a whole does not take better care of single mothers. The Patriarchal monogamous family structure is not the only possible structure for sustaining reproduction and child-rearing. Alternatives have existed and do continue to exist. There are matrilineal and polyamorous societies in the world. It can be argued that the benefits of monogamous marriage towards women are only true given that Patriarchal material and political structures have already been established; that is, we can argue that in fact, monogamy and the nuclear family structure actually isolates women by making them more reliant on their husbands’ paternal investment; as opposed to allowing them the freedom and support they once enjoyed in matrilineal societies, where they are helped in motherhood by other family and community members rather than relying on husbands. However, why did societies with such alternative family arrangements not take dominance over Patriarchal civilizations? Why are the Na people an oppressed minority in China instead of its rulers? Why are all the most powerful civilizations in the world, with the greatest advances in civilization and culture, Patriarchal and male-dominated, not matrilineal? There are two hypotheses to explain the possible superiority of Patriarchal societies over Matrilineal societies in production, warfare, and survival during certain points of history:
Firstly, aggressive groups force other groups around them to be aggressive or die out. The existence of even one aggressive element may force all groups to become aggressive. If a civilization with masculine-dominated values attacks a nurturing and peaceful, feminine-dominated, matrilineal civilization, it will force the latter to turn aggressive or submit. Wherever there is warfare, male-dominated culture comes to the forefront, because men are biologically stronger, bigger, and have more aggressive hormonal tendencies, and where they have taken leadership in militaristic activities, they are likely to also take leadership politically. Therefore, matrilineal tribes that have been shown to have more peaceful and communal tendencies than Patriarchal societies, can exist only in relative isolation, and had no chance to survive amidst aggressive warlike societies.
Secondly, there may be an ethic of hard work, and minimizing leisure pursuits, including the pleasures of sex, that is inherently greater in enforced monogamous relationships in which sex is primarily treated as a means for reproduction. A practical approach to monogamy, characterized by traditional marital relationships, may be superior for promoting human productivity than a more libertine lifestyle of free love and sexual indulgence. Weber theorized in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism that the Protestant ideology is particularly well-suited for the development of Capitalism; it is this Protestant faith and Puritanical attitude towards sexuality that served as a foundation for society in colonized North America, and resulted in the economic system that dominates globally today. It is conceivable that elements of Judeo-Christian religion, which is Patriarchal in nature, particularly with regard to sexuality and family, may be more conducive to human advancement of labor and knowledge than other familial arrangements. Certainly, in common sense terms, sexual relationships take up a lot of human resources, both in terms of time and energy invested in sexual leisure and the emotional dramas that may follow with having multiple partners, and this investment may be better put into socially beneficial work. Therefore, a highly controlled sexual culture in traditional societies may have been most beneficial for promoting a civilizations’s productivity and survival, and this may explain why Patriarchal civilizations remain dominant in the world today whereas matrilineal societies have largely disappeared.
However, just because Patriarchal values have enabled survival and progress during certain historical periods does not mean they remain the best model for promoting social welfare to this day. The male-dominated paradigm of aggressive conquest may not be optimal today in solving the contemporary Tragedy of the Commons: the collective problems of our era, regarding the environment and nuclear warfare. The promotion of “masculine” values over “feminine” values continually underestimates the importance of behaviors associated with femininity such as cooperation and an ethic of care, which are not essential but constructed aspects of femininity, but the subordination of all things feminine in this society also subordinates these ascribed characteristics, which may in fact be the ones that would be most helpful in solving the delicate and interrelated problems of our contemporary society. The subordination of femininity in Patriarchal, “traditional” value structures, and the undervaluing of more cooperative and altruistic strategies may be harmful for the progression and survival of our species, given the globalized natures of our age, which require compromise and collaboration over selfish competitive dominance.
Culture is constantly evolving, and even the most tenuous religious traditions are repeatedly reinterpreted to suit the needs of the time and context. Therefore, it is not inconceivable that the Patriarchal values that once served us best in the race for global dominance may not be the best values for maintaining a peaceful and fair global order, once something of the sort can be fairly established. There are significant reasons to believe that further evolution of human society would benefit from a shift towards a more matrifocal manner social organization. It is also possible that liberalizing individual choice in the composition of families to better support motherhood within community would promote greater welfare for all. Changes in technology trigger social reorganization and the creation of new value systems, and current technologies are targeted to a more collective philosophy of crowd-sourcing open data, and democratically, collectively, not hierarchically, creating community-based web solutions to social problems. Perhaps this reflects the beginnings of value evolution from one of “masculine” linear order to “feminine” cooperation.
Vast changes have occurred in the lives of women just in the past two generations. The advent of modern medicine, birth control, the curing of many diseases, the prolonging of life, the safer and more hygienic deliveries of newborns, as well as the invention of household appliances decreased the amount of time women must spend in maintaining the household, and the social need for women to remain as housewives diminished greatly. With the advancement of the Civil Rights and Women’s movements of the 1960’s, women fought for and won equal education and employment. Some people have questioned whether women are now better off, since today’s working women seem to be juggling a double workload, yet wages relative to prices have depreciated so that the average working class family now requires double income in order to live modestly well, therefore most wives and husbands are both compelled to work by economic necessity, whereas in the past, the husband’s solo wage would have sufficed for the whole family. Therefore, some argue that women’s entry into the workforce disproportionately hurt working class families. Among the middle class and bourgeoisie, the ability to choose whether to engage in the workforce or stay at home is an indisputable overall benefit for women, but among the working class, the depreciation of each individual’s income relative to prices in society may result in more work and an overall loss in welfare.
However, even though the benefits of women’s liberation are not distributed evenly across the social classes, there are surely many positive consequences for all: with a longer life span and less time required to be devoted to traditional household labor, women are now empowered to enjoy a fuller life, with more knowledge, experience, and free time. She has the ability to choose for her career for herself or become a career mother. By these incontrovertible benefits alone, one can be certain that women are now definitely better off than before, and it is the advancement of technology that makes it possible for her to enjoy this better life, and procure jobs alongside men that require not physical strength but mental dexterity, thus enabling her to be his equal.
Thus the future of whether or not “feminine” values or “masculine” values will prevail in the ordering of society also will depend greatly on which technologies come into popular use. Regardless, it seems that old traditional manners of looking at things, are no longer sufficient to cope with the ethical puzzles of the present day. After many centuries with relatively few changes in technology from generation to generation, our century is one of such rapid change that traditional roles and values as derived from religion are no longer compatible with our understandings of modern science and beliefs for the efficient and fair organization of society. Though traditionalists and religious fundamentalists continue to advocate for obedience to sacred texts and rituals, competing with liberalized social values that are rational, fair, and democratic, igniting confusion within society and rifts between conservative and liberal, old and new.
Women are in the workplace now and we see ourselves as equals to men in every way. This radical new way of looking at ourselves and the world is not very old relative to human history, but one sure hopes that it is here to stay. Its incompatibility with many traditional and religious values creates great social tension and the increasing need to replace or radically reinterpret sexist religious ideologies in the development of a system of thought in which women enjoy equal status with men. It is now clear that the education of women worldwide would be the best measure for improving human development. Educated women tend to have fewer children; and with our global overpopulation crisis, this would a positive change. The human species is not occupying the same space in nature as we were millenia ago, as we have to be far more careful how we handle our resources and deal with conflicts between nations, therefore the old traditional wisdom of scriptures, which were true for the long periods of human history, such as the Catholic injunction to multiply and have as many children as possible, are no longer beneficial for human welfare. With these vast changes in the human condition, traditional scripts simply may not offer the guidance that religious seekers desire to navigate the complicated decisions and ethical contradictions of modern life.
Certain traditional outlooks, which are contrary to scientific evidence, are simply hard to sustain in an age of growing access to knowledge and confidence in science. Furthermore, the exclusion of gay couples from the current institution of marriage, makes it inconsistent with the progress of changing social perceptions on the rights of LGBTQ people, which will inevitably lead to more questioning of the institutions of church and marriage.
The half-way revolution of sexuality present in our society today holds many contradicting values that cause confusion, particularly among the younger generations, as to what constitutes the appropriate limits and codes on sexual behavior in an age of rapid sexual liberalization. Women’s liberation movements need now to face the most pivotal question regarding gender differences and labor organization: the gender inequalities inherent in the Patriarchal construction of family and possible alternatives, how to recognize and properly reward labor in the private sphere, how to create better social conditions for motherhood, and what to do about the obvious double standard and gender oppression of the Madonna/Whore division. By reflecting on the irrational outcasting of the whore, one is compelled to reexamine the unjust attitudes towards female sexuality throughout history and reevaluate the current socioeconomic conditions of marriage in light of historical injustices. Acknowledging the equality and dignity of the prostitute to other women is one crucial step necessary for the progression of feminist thought.
THREE. Greater Social Implications
A. The Family at Question: Reproduction and Childcare Roles
Building on the arguments raised in the final chapter of the previous section, reexamining the ethics of prostitution necessitates a reevaluation of the moral arguments against promiscuity. If we are to accept that promiscuity is natural to human behavior throughout history and there is no inherent moral offense in engaging with multiple partners, a premise that we must accept in defense of the moral integrity of the whore, then we discover that within the ethics of polyamory, or the love of multiple partners in a non-harmful way, necessarily brings to question possible alternative constructions of the modern family. These are the greater social implications brought to light when we reconsider Patriarchal gender values.
Would people be better off if they were allowed to choose whatever family composition and sexual arrangement would be best suited to achieve their own ideals of happiness? If two women wanted to raise a child together, should they be allowed to legally be recognized as a family unit? What about three women? What about a collective family of three women and three men, perhaps with one man and one woman choosing to stay at home, to manage the household, and raise the children, while the other four work? What if individuals were able to freely choose what they want to identify as a family unit? Would the increase in size of the family from the isolated nuclear unit help address the problems of private sphere labor created by the gender imbalances in heterosexual monogamy? Would having multiple couples/partners in marriage ease the burden of contemporary working-motherhood? Policy theorizers seeking to alleviate the problem of unfair burden upon working mothers tend to turn to governmental solutions originating from public aid to mothers. What about encouraging collective and voluntary solutions such as the building of multi-nuclear-family households? Though it is salient to think about the possibility of polyandrous and polygamous arrangements, the kind of mutual aid that would be beneficial through the building of multi-family social units does not necessitate any amendment of current structures of marriage; as things are right now, couples as well as single parents can still choose to aid each other, by sharing a home and household responsibilities, and sharing in the care of children.
Can we imagine the impact of a redefined family model in society? Can people become better off if able to independently decide on the size and membership of household or family units for joint material survival, reproduction, and child-rearing? Would this be beneficial in creating a greater sense of community, which is often missing from the ever-increasing isolation of modern life? Or would increasing household size decrease the benefits of privacy and autonomy in a way that actually diminishes overall happiness? Is it even conceivable for so drastic an alteration in basic social organization to take place given how firmly rooted the values of monogamous family are within our Patriarchal models of society?
As of now, these questions are purely hypothetical. The only fact that should be acknowledged is that gender roles and the performance of sexuality are currently changing quickly and drastically all over the world, and these changes in the stability of traditional gender roles are affecting the nature and composition of family structures. The questions related to prostitution and women’s sexuality highlight the assumptions that are made invisible within the Patriarchal marriage framework. To consider the ethics of prostitution and the equality and dignity of the sex worker is to understand and acknowledge women’s right to sexual self-determination, and negotiate the conundrum of private and public sphere labor. The possibility of alternatives familial structures that provide greater support to women and children than the current nuclear family model is interesting to think about, though currently only remotely tied to the question of sex work. However, even to imagine any alternatives to Patriarchal sexual values is to begin to subvert its moral hegemony, which inevitably bring many other questions to light.
B. Global/Racial Questions of Class
As women take on greater responsibilities in the work place, they often hire nannies and housekeepers to do undesirable household work. In cosmopolitan cities such as New York, the brunt of this labor is taken on by migrant domestic workers from the global South. The racialization of gendered work does not break down the essential inequality between public and private sphere labor, but instead helps well-off households to commodify and hand off what is continually devalued without eliminating its gender-specific characteristics, and may reinforce in the eyes of the wealthier children, the associations between race, gender, and social status.# It is the children of these migrant laborers back in the homeland who often have to pay for the externalities of exported female labor. These children grow up without the care of their mothers close at hand. In the Philippines, migrant women are criticized for bringing harm upon their children, even though the remittances of female migrant labor contributes to a large percentage of national income.# However, the steadily increasing migration of female domestic workers also brings about a revolution of gender roles in these countries, as women become the primary wage earners of their households and gain in power relative to men.
Migrant sex labor is also subject to racial injustice. Payment in the sex industry, even on a local level, is highly stratified according to race, such that caucasian sex workers are generally paid more for their services than non-caucasian workers, particularly dark-skinned workers. Racialized stereotypes are often fetishized, and sex workers of color and foreign origin may choose to profit by playing to these stereotypes, but perhaps at the ideological cost of reinforcing these stereotypes, which can be harmful. The global sex trade reinforces images of white male dominance through sex tourism. The trafficking of sex workers to wealthier countries, the majority of which are cases of voluntary migration for better work opportunities, also creates stratification of women in host countries based on origin, often racialized origin. The fact that gendered labor, whether domestic or sexual, is lower-paying and considered of lower status than traditional male labor, has an especially negative impact upon third world women of color who are sometimes fetishized for “traditional characteristics” that are “native to their cultures” which make them better suited for caring labor that is lower paid, whether in nannying, housekeeping, or sex work.#
Associations between sex slavery and third world sex workers, particularly Asian sex workers, further undermines the possibility of agency and self-determination for these women and men. Human rights activists who take an abolitionist stance against all prostitution do not effectively combat the oppressive working conditions of migrant sex workers when they dispatch raids to “rescue” them, and deport workers back to their home countries, where the economic situation is such that workers often seek readmission, legal or illegal, back into the country where they had been working, in order to earn a better livelihood.# Thus, a sex-positive outlook on prostitution that does not morally devalue women who choose to voluntarily engage in the industry is necessary in order to focus attention upon the smaller percentage of women and children who are legitimately trafficked and enslaved into nonconsensual sexual labor, and effectively improve conditions.
Human rights and feminist activist groups with an abolitionist stance, usually originating from Western countries, often hold a prejudicial and condescending view upon third world women, and have been reluctant to acknowledge the possibility of the voluntary choice sex labor by third world women as the best possible economic option. Their imposition of Patriarchal morality upon the assumed motives and conditions of these third world sex workers effectively silences them instead of helps them. However, within many of these countries, female sex workers have collectivized to form organizations combatting the legal oppression and social stigma of the sex industry. SANGRAM, a sex worker’s collective in India, and EMPOWER, a sex worker organization in Thailand, are examples of sex-positive sex worker activist organizations in which workers represent themselves. These “third world” sex-positive feminist organizations are frequently larger and better organized than similar organizations in the United States and Europe, showing that the defense of the rights of women is certainly not limited to or even led by the intellectual domain of Western feminists, who can perhaps benefit from taking a cue from these women.
The silencing of the third world sex worker via universal assumptions of victimhood, and the assumed impossibility of agency or conscious choice, is also used to devalue the efforts of first world sex worker organizations. Whereas third world sex workers are considered to be incapable of true “Free Choice” due to the economic coercion of poverty, first world sex workers are also dismissed for being overprivileged and unrepresentative of the typical sex worker. Critics of first world sex workers often argue that the “reality” of sex work for “most” women is more like the (imagined) story of the typical third world victim. Thus, even those who are willing to acknowledge that it is possible for first world prostitutes who have some kind of agency in their choice of this stigmatized profession, frequently dismiss the case of first world, privileged sex work for being a small minority voice within the global sex industry. Therefore, the unity of the voices of first and third world sex workers is required in order for either to be legitimately recognized.
Economic coercion plays a role in influencing the choices of all poor people, in both the first and third world. However, how someone responds to that economic coercion, whether through accepting a lower-wage menial job, or taking on riskier but higher-wage sex work, is an exercise of agency by the worker.
C. Marginalization, Social Stigma, Alternative Treatment of Deviance
Poverty, social marginalization, and organized crime, are common backgrounds for the life of sex workers. To a certain extent, stereotypes about sex workers as being likely to be connected with mental illness, drug use, or other aspects of informal markets, are in fact true. While seeking to fight absolute generalizations about sex workers, it remains important to acknowledge that these conditions do exist for a great percentage of people involved in this industry, and that better social service and outreach need to be coordinated.
However, it is the social stigma of sex work that often pushes these workers deeper into the fringes of society, and criminalization only increases harm. To improve these conditions, it is important to address poverty and the anti-societal attitudes of marginal cultures at their root. Prison reform is necessary because the existing system is expensive and inefficient. Tied to the imperative of decriminalizing prostitution is the overall need for reconsideration of how society deals with deviants, criminals, and pariahs.
Until sex work is truly destigmatized and becomes more socially acceptable, there will remain a high social cost for people who choose to enter the line of work. The risks and lack of respectability in the work make it a rather undesirable industry for most people, who would not want to become socially isolated from family and friends through practice. Therefore, those who do get involved with sex work in spite of the costs, do tend to have a history of trauma that is social, psychological, or material in nature. However, many exceptions also exist.
The correlation between sex workers and lifestyles of fringe society makes for a chicken or egg puzzle, in which the direction of causality varies from individual to individual. Currently, to be an advocate for sex worker rights should also entail a concern for the improvement of conditions for all who inhabit society’s margins, in order to define better and more humane solutions.
D. Religion, Democracy, and Scientific Modernity
Political theorist Carole Pateman, who wrote about the fraternal contract of the public sphere that excludes the naturalized private sphere, situated the origin of Patriarchal oppression of women in Judeo-Christian religion.# She wrote that the Bible’s treatment of Eve as being created after all of the animals, out of Adam’s rib, and to serve as a companion to Adam, is the ideological site of Patriarchal construction. Adam is both the father and dominant partner of Eve, and she is to blame for the downfall of all mankind, fatefully condemned to the punishment of giving birth in pain. Not only is Eve’s sin, the disobedience of Patriarchal injunction in search for knowledge, constructed to be the original sin for which all posterity must pay, thereby justifying a certain misogyny for her ultimate guilt; but Eve’s very femininity, her motherhood, is constructed as a form of punishment that she must suffer in duty to her companion, for whose sole pleasure she was created.
This condemning construction of the original woman, mother of humankind, makes Judeo-Christian an inherently Patriarchal institution and ideology that is incompatible with true gender equality without great reinterpretation, and is in fact both the root cause and the moral justification for the oppressive treatment of women in Patriarchy. Throughout Western history, women’s alternative constructions to religion and spirituality have been persecuted as witchcraft and black magic. The identity of witch has repeatedly been used to punish women who dare to deviate from Patriarchal thought. Women who lived alone in the margins of society: widows, wallflowers, whores, those unable to bear children, and those were relatively isolated from social relationships, were most vulnerable to accusations of witchcraft. A great many women of knowledge, who had special understanding of the use of natural medicines, were also accused of witchcraft because their knowledge and independent utility undermined the Patriarchal knowledge system. The arbitrary scapegoating of the witch was used in particular to discipline and control women’s behavior and prevent them from straying too far from mainstream social thought.
Continued conflicts in the contemporary era between the Church and scientific theories of evolution, as well as controversies over women’s right to control their own bodies through abortion and prostitution, and general social justice movements for the equal rights of women and homosexuals, makes religion the most controversial clash between traditional social structures and modern attempts to create more democratic, scientific, rational, and fair manners of social organization based on improved knowledge and human understanding. The Church has long been quick and brutal to suppress the free expression of thinkers who are not in line with their ideologies. After such a cruel history of instigating warfare and torture, and continually serves as ideological fuel for the most dangerous conflicts in the world.
The need for the construction of alternative forms of spirituality, ritual, and community in the 21st Century has been headed by women, who often search for inspiration within nature, like many pagan, non-monotheistic sources of spirituality. Their “New Age” expressions of a female-centric spirituality bears much resemblance to the witchcraft persecuted in the past. If we are to hold as true Carole Pateman’s premise that gender inequality in Western society is based on Judeo-Christian Patriarchy, then the construction of alternative female-centric spirituality in this age is an act of feminism that is necessary for the redefinition of public and private spheres.
A system of belief and community guidance that is compatible with the progression of modern science, that honors women’s sexual self-determination, and that destimatizes the whore, is necessary for the healing of all women from Patriarchal oppression.
Manifesto
A. Collective action in the absence of order…
Since prostitution is highly stigmatized, and generally criminalized worldwide, it exists largely within an informal economy outside of the protection of law. This marginalization is unjust. The criminalization and stigmatization of sex workers engaged in consensual commercial sex, the legal persecution of this victimless crime, causes harm upon sex workers and violates their human rights. In the absence of legal frameworks, mutual aid strategies such as collectivizing, bartering, skillsharing, consensus-building, security watching, free services, education, and open culture can be employed to empower this community underground. Mutual emotional support to combat the structural violence of stigma should be freely and securely available. The collective monitoring of black markets for labor abuses among clients and employers needs a safe space for expression and circulation.
B. The Vision for An Anonymous Online Collective of International Sex Workers
This is a call for existence of an anonymous online collective that unites as:
• A safe space for sex workers to support and empower each other through consciously fighting internalized stigma. An online forum and collective information resource that respects sexual self-determination and economic choice, and encourages sex workers to express and trust in their own experiences and ideas.
• A network for mutual aid in health care, legal and financial services, education, housing, childcare, and access to media and capital.
• A trade union that promotes independent and collectively-run sexual businesses, such as cooperatively-owned dungeons and clubs, and alternative pornography. A blacklist of unjust, non-transparent, and/or discriminatory businesses that exploit workers. A resource that enables ethical sex consumerism.
• An outreach service to sex workers in various industries and locations, providing anonymous information and support.
• A political alliance for the decriminalization of consensual sex. A human rights organization that uses underground networks within the industry to combat all forms of nonconsensual sex, such as sex slavery, human trafficking, and rape, which is antithetical to the sexual dignity and empowerment of all people.
• A means for sex workers to organize anonymously on a national and international level to build a greater sex-positive movement for true gender equality, human rights, and sexual choice. An aggregator for world news related to sex work, the postings of various sex worker organizations worldwide, and a promoter of intercultural communication and alliance.
• A forum and art space for sex worker self-expression through independent publishing, artistic work, and the expansion of gender and sexuality theory via the sex-positive lens.
• A socially just space that recognizes that global conditions of sex work differs greatly between different classes, trades, venues, geographical locations, and nations. A web 2.0 social network that seeks representation of different nationalities, races, classes, gender/sexuality constructions: from street walkers to high-end escorts, from strippers and massage workers to rent-boys, LGBTQ, and BDSM professionals.
Resources, Appendix
including: on website, and future publications of AK Manifiesta: specific case studies, statistics, policy analyses, legal frameworks in different countries