Legalizing Prostitution: From Illicit Vice to Lawful Business (3 page)

They are women who have the spirit of a fighter—in sexual relations and others. While their middle-class sisters are being repressed by conservative values and the sexual double standards, they seem to have more autonomy in their personal and sexual lives. … It is interesting to watch an innocent and obedient young girl turn into a sophisticated and rebellious woman in such a male-dominated society where “good” women are all subservient and respectful to male superiority beyond question.
³⁹

The empowerment paradigm is particularly evident when we move from mainstream, heterosexual sex work to alternative genres or markets. Research on gay male, lesbian, and transgender sex work highlights the ways in which the work can be not only identity affirming for the workers (and customers) but also capable of making a larger statement about the value of these marginalized populations, thereby presenting a challenge to mainstream heterosexist culture:

• A significant segment of the male prostitute population experiences identity-enhancing outcomes from sex work.
⁴⁰

• Pornography historically helped to affirm gay male identity and today holds a fair amount of esteem within the gay community. Joe Thomas describes the “positive value of having one’s own sexual identity—rejected and stigmatized by the status quo—validated by seeing it played out in front of one’s very eyes. … Gay pornography is one of the few venues for seeing gay sexuality presented in a positive light.”
⁴¹

• A unique study of strip clubs where both the dancers and customers are African American women found that the clubs facilitated cultural bonding, consciousness raising, and empowerment among the black women involved. These clubs differ radically from the conventional ones where female dancers entertain a male audience.
⁴²

• A Brazilian study reported that for transgender sex workers, prostitution was the only sphere of life that enhanced their self-image. Prostitution gave them a “sense of personal worth, self-confidence, and self-esteem.”
⁴³
They sold sex not only for the money but also for emotional and sexual fulfillment. In focus groups in San Francisco, researchers discovered that “sex work involvement provided many young transgender women of color feelings of community and social support, which they often lacked in their family contexts.”
Another advantage was that sex work gave these individuals a “sense of independence and non-reliance on others (i.e., managers, co-workers) who might express discrimination or harassment.”
⁴⁴
Sex work was one of the few arenas in which they could shield themselves from societal rejection.

• Research on pornography made by and for women discovered that female producers are often motivated by loftier goals than are their counterparts in the mainstream porn industry. Instead of simply seeking to make money, many of these female artists are motivated by feminist objectives, sex worker activism, and a desire to create materials that challenge conventional male-centered ideals of sexual relations. The researcher, Jill Bakehorn, shows how this work validates the women who create it and is designed to be empowering for the audience as well.
⁴⁵

In each of these cases, we see evidence of how sex work can be embraced and used for either personal validation or as part of a larger identity politics that redefines or inverts the conventional meanings associated with stigmatized vice.

To reiterate, the empowerment paradigm is rarely presented in an absolute way in academic research; few scholars would define sex work solely in terms of empowerment. Instead, researchers identify individuals or populations that have experienced positive outcomes from their participation in or exposure to the sex industry.

The oppression paradigm is embraced by a number of academics as well as, not surprisingly, antiprostitution activists. It is grounded in a particular branch of feminist thinking, radical feminism, and differs from the religious right’s objections to commercial sex, which centers on the threat it poses to marriage, the family, and society’s moral fiber. The oppression paradigm holds that sex work is the quintessential expression of patriarchal gender relations and male domination. Indeed, the very existence of prostitution rests on structural inequalities between men and women: women would not sell sex if they had the same socioeconomic opportunities as men. But prostitution is not only rooted in inequality; it also
perpetuates
inequality both symbolically and instrumentally. Carole Pateman describes the symbolic harm:

The general display of women’s bodies and sexual parts, either in representations or as live bodies, is central to the sex industry and continually
reminds men—and women—that men exercise the law of male sex-right, that they have patriarchal right of access to women’s bodies. … [In prostitution] the sex act itself provides acknowledgment of patriarchal right. When women’s bodies are on sale as commodities in the capitalist market, … the law of male sex-right is publicly affirmed, and men gain public acknowledgment as women’s sexual masters—that is what is wrong with prostitution.
⁴⁶

Not only does the sex industry objectify and commodify women’s bodies; it also gives men the idea that they have a “right” to buy erotic entertainment from women, thus reinforcing women’s subordination to men. Oppression theorists argue that this fundamental harm will persist no matter how prostitution, pornography, and stripping are organized; legalizing these practices in an attempt to “improve” them will not alter the gender inequality that is intrinsic to sexual commerce.

The instrumental dimension is reflected in the argument that exploitation, subjugation, and violence are intrinsic to and ineradicable from sex work—transcending historical time period, national context, and type of sexual commerce.
⁴⁷
As oppression theorists are fond of saying, sex work
is
violence, categorically. The solution is nothing short of the total elimination of prostitution, pornography, strip clubs, and all other commercial sex.

What is striking about the oppression paradigm is its exclusive focus on the
negative
. The leading advocates of this paradigm not only deny that there can be anything positive about sex work but also reject the idea that it can be neutral—revolving around everyday, routine work practices. To concede the latter would be to acknowledge the “work” dimension, which they flatly deny. Another notable feature of oppression writings is the
neglect of male and transgender sex work
, which is jettisoned by the almost exclusive theorizing of prostitution as an institution that victimizes women and girls.

Readers unfamiliar with the sex work literature would be surprised at both the dogmatic tone and the grandiose claims characteristic of the oppression paradigm—a radical departure from conventional scholarly writings. Its advocates frequently offer dramatic sound bites and equate prostitution with practices that are widely condemned:

• “Prostitution is better understood as domestic violence than as a job.”
⁴⁸

• “Prostitution is rape that’s paid for.”
⁴⁹

• “Prostitution, pornography, and trafficking meet or exceed legal definitions of torture.”
⁵⁰

Prostitutes are recast as “sex slaves” and “prostituted women,” thereby erasing any semblance of human agency. Janice Raymond holds that “prostitution is something that is done to women,”
⁵¹
and Sheila Jeffreys expands on this notion: “Anti-prostitution campaigners use the term
prostituted women
instead of
prostitutes
. This is a deliberate political decision and is meant to symbolize the lack of choice women have over being used in prostitution.”
⁵²
Melissa Farley describes this powerlessness in absolute terms: “Prostitution dehumanizes, commodifies, and fetishizes women. … In prostitution, there is always a power imbalance, where the john has the social and economic power to hire her/him to act like a sexualized puppet. Prostitution excludes any mutuality of privilege or pleasure.”
⁵³
This wholesale denial of women’s agency in sexual commerce and emphasis on passive victimhood violates a central tenet of feminism, which centers on women’s intentionality and empowerment.

If female sex workers are passive victims in the oppression paradigm, male customers are depicted as individuals with full agency—as powerful and violent misogynists:

• They “buy women” rather than sexual services.
⁵⁴

• “These men must be viewed as batterers rather than customers.”
⁵⁵

• “Johns are regularly murderous toward women.”
⁵⁶

• “These [clients] are not just naughty boys who need their wrists slapped. They could be more accurately described as predators.”
⁵⁷

One prohibitionist organization has even proposed that all customers be branded “sex offenders” and listed on a sex-offender registry: “This naming is important since it places men who buy sex in the same category as rapists, pedophiles, and other social undesirables.”
⁵⁸

Oppression writers see animus in men’s consumption of sexual services. Donna Hughes writes, “Men who purchase sex acts do not respect women, nor do they want to respect women.”
⁵⁹
Andrea Dworkin goes even further: “When men use women in prostitution, they are expressing a pure hatred for the female body. … It is a contempt so deep, so deep, that a whole human life is reduced to a few sexual orifices, and he can do anything he wants.”
⁶⁰
And Farley declares, “The difference between pimps who terrorize women on the street and pimps in business suits who terrorize women in gentlemen’s clubs is a difference in class only, not a difference in woman hating.”
⁶¹

Sensationalism is abundant in this body of literature. Anecdotal horror stories are a staple of these writings and are clearly designed to arouse readers’ indignation. Reports, websites, and journal articles feature quotations
from women who have had horrible experiences that are presented as typical. The authors frequently write in a dramatic or alarmist manner, sometimes unwittingly objectifying women themselves. One of Jeffreys’s books on the sex industry is titled
The Industrial Vagina
, and Farley writes, “When women are turned into objects that men masturbate into, profound psychological harm results for the person who is acting as receptacle.”
⁶²
Similarly objectifying is Farley’s assertion, “Her self and those qualities that define her as an individual are removed in prostitution and she acts the part of the thing he wants her to be.”
⁶³

Oppression theorists often make bold claims simply
by fiat
—as self-evident, absolute principles. At times, the reasoning is confusingly circular. Consider this passage from an article entitled “Pornography as Trafficking” by prohibitionist icon Catharine MacKinnon:

In the resulting materials, these people are then conveyed and sold for a buyer’s sexual use. … Each time the pornography is commercially exchanged, the trafficking continues as the women and children in it are transported and provided for sex, sold, and bought again. Doing all these things for the purpose of exploiting the prostitution of others—which pornography intrinsically does—makes it trafficking in persons.
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The slippage between “materials” and “persons” is striking. Conflation is even more conspicuous in MacKinnon’s argument that “the pornography industry, in production, creates demand for prostitution, hence for trafficking, because it is itself a form of prostitution and trafficking.”
⁶⁵
Distinctions are erased in order to render all types of sex work part of the same syndrome of oppression.

While the oppression paradigm is founded on grand ontological characterizations of sex work, some of its proponents also make specific empirical claims that, taken together, present an image of
concentrated, manifold victimization
. Such claims include the following: that
most
prostitutes enter the trade when they are 13–14 years old, were physically or sexually abused as children, were tricked or forced into the trade by pimps or traffickers, are subjected to routine violence while working, use or are addicted to drugs, suffer severe psychological problems, and desperately want to exit the sex trade.
⁶⁶
When these claims are generalized to “most” sex workers, they are fallacies: they are largely or wholly drawn from nonrandom, unrepresentative, and small samples of the street-based population. In other words, we cannot even say that these generalizations apply to street prostitution, let
alone the various types of indoor prostitution. The claims are based on doubly skewed samples.

Moreover, there are studies that challenge each of the aforementioned claims. Regarding age of entry, some studies of street prostitutes find that a majority began selling sex while under age 18, but other street-based research reports that a minority began to sell sex prior to age 18 and an even lower number at age 14.
⁶⁷
A study of 557 street and indoor prostitutes working in three Dutch cities found that the median age of entry into prostitution was 27 for non-drug-using female workers, 25 for drug-using female workers, and 24 for transgender workers (the entry range was 20–33 years old).
⁶⁸
Studies based exclusively on indoor workers report diverse findings as well. A survey of 815 prostitutes working in six different types of establishments in Thailand found that only 1.5 percent were under age 18 at the time of the survey, and 9 percent reported that they were under 18 when they first started selling sex; the average age of the study participants was 28.3 years. The researchers attributed the low number of underage workers to vigorous police enforcement. Similarly, very few of these workers had tried drugs.
⁶⁹
Regarding childhood experiences of abuse, a sample of 127 street and indoor workers in the Netherlands reported that 16 percent of the sample had experienced sexual abuse by relatives and 9 percent by nonrelatives prior to age 16—far fewer than what oppression theorists claim.
⁷⁰
Regarding the claim that extremely high percentages of prostitutes are assaulted, robbed, raped, and otherwise victimized while working, there is counterevidence reporting much lower rates, especially in studies of indoor prostitution (discussed further in
chapter 2
). The key point is one of
variation
across studies in the proportion of prostitutes who began working while underage, who use drugs, who have been victimized while working, and so forth. The large research literature on sex work shows that the grand generalizations of oppression theorists are simply fallacies.