Loose Women, Lecherous Men (28 page)

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Authors: Linda Lemoncheck

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Page 111
pornography is legal, it typically remains extremely difficult for sex workers to demand better pay or working conditions or to expose their mistreatment by clients and employers. Poor women of all ethnicities seeking employment comprise a traffic in women who are procured under false pretenses for the purpose of prostitution. In Southeast Asia and the Philippines, "sex tourism" is a thriving industry in which tour operators contract with club owners to provide "hospitality girls" to foreign male visitors and businessmen. Asian mail-order and military brides who are deserted by their husbands often have no other recourse but prostitution.
2
Feminist critics of the sex industry also point out that rape, bondage, and sexual abuse provide the content for some of the more popular pornographic books, magazines, films, and videos. The most popular visual pornography is that which shows real sex rather than simulated sex; thus, penetration by foreign objects, sexual violence, mutilation, even murder become pornography's cinema verité. As one porn model reported, "I knew the pose was right when it hurt."
3
Some feminists emphasize that wives and daughters are shown pornography by husbands and fathers to teach them the sex men want. Racial stereotypes are exploited in pornography through depictions of black women as untamed sexual animals whipped and chained by white masters or of Asian women as exotic seductresses who are passive in their bondage. Pornography's multi-billion dollar industry, much of which is black-market, combined with prostitution's underground economy make the sex industry attractive to drug dealers and organized criminals who cater to illegal but lucrative market demands. Corrupt police both threaten prostitutes with arrest unless they receive regular "servicing" and accept bribes from customers and pimps.
4
Thus, many feminists argue that a sex worker determined to support herself and her family but compelled to engage in socially stigmatized and often dangerous work becomes the victim of a patriarchal system that entices her into sex work paying more than she could otherwise make with the same skills; and her fear of legal incrimination combined with the threat of exposure make it difficult for her to get out. Such conditions have prompted ex-prostitutes like Evelina Giobbe to organize WHISPER (Women Hurt in Systems of Prostitution Engaged in Revolt) in order to document "the violence and manipulation used to recruit and trap women in the sex industry."
5
Moreover, given the pervasiveness and accessibility of strip bars, live sex shows, escort agencies, and adult book shops, including X-rated home video, cable, computer, and telephone service,
6
the sex industry appears well positioned to perpetuate an ideology that all women are the proper sexual subordinates of men, craving whatever humiliation, abuse, or physical violence men are willing to dish out. In the absence of a feminist consciousness that recognizes a patriarchy's often coercive sexual politics, some feminists contend that women depicted in pornography as blissful in their bondage and begging to be brutalized convey the message that any sex can be recreational, pleasurable, and fun
because it is sex
. As Catharine MacKinnon has claimed, "[P]ornography eroticizes and thereby legitimizes forced sex."
7
Women who "choose" to be strippers and prostitutes under economic and psychological duress are mistakenly understood as freely and willingly performing sex work, despite the fact that such work may be the only way they can survive or the only work they see themselves capable of performing. From many feminists' perspectives, such an industry not only degrades individual sex workers from autonomous sexual subjects
 
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to exploited sex objects but also degrades all women, reinforcing a prevailing sexist ideology that encourages the toleration and promotion of sexual violence against women.
Women (and children) report that pornography has been used to break down their self-esteem, train them to sexual submission, season them to forced sex, and intimidate them out of a job. Sex offenders have been reported to imitate the violence they read about in porn. Some feminists have suggested that the sex industry is central to a larger system of the intimidation of women through sex that includes sexual harassment, child abuse, wife battering, and rape. Such an image has prompted Susan Brownmiller to comment that "[p]ornography is the undiluted essence of anti-female propaganda" and Robin Morgan to write, "Pornography is the theory, rape is the practice."
8
From this point of view, the high-class call girl is at best the brainwashed victim of internalized, male-identified sexual values; at worst, she is a neurotic and self-serving collaborator in a system of women's sexual subordination, who lives well from the coercion and abuse that her own sex work reinforces but mistakes a career choice to live the good life for the ubiquity of her oppression.
Feminists who are critical of the sex industry and who are otherwise at odds with moral conservatives over political issues such as AIDS, sex education, and reproductive, gay, and lesbian rights have formed an uneasy alliance with the political right against civil libertarians and sex radicals. Various factions of the political left regard attempts to ban pornography or close nude bars as yet another wave of Victorian sexual repression and renewed attacks on the First Amendment. New Right conservatives condemn sexually explicit material as appealing to "the prurient interest," regarding the moral indecency of sex work as threatening the institution of the family and the fragile moral fabric of the country. Yet many feminists are both dubious of the propriety of the traditional patriarch who defines the conservative's "family values" and suspicious of who is chosen to weave the fabric of the conservative's moral community.
9
Therefore, feminists who oppose male-identified sex work as degrading to women are vociferous in their assertion that a condemnation of women's sexual subordination is neither a condemnation of sex itself nor a political platform in favor of sexual decency over obscenity. In this vein, some feminists have taken great pains to draw a conceptual and moral distinction between "erotica" and "pornography" to permit, if not applaud, the creation of a sex industry that would produce egalitarian, nonsexist, sexually explicit material.
10
Other feminists have rejected this distinction as failing to recognize the essential male dominance that comprises all sexually explicit material produced under conditions of patriarchy. Andrea Dworkin claims that ''in the male sexual lexicon, which is the vocabulary of power, erotica is simply high-class pornography: better produced, better conceived, better executed, better packaged, designed for a better class of consumer . . . but both are produced by the same system of sexual values and both perform the same sexual service."
11
From this perspective, any distinction between erotica and porn collapses, since the patriarchal sex depicted in either case constitutes the degradation and violation of women. As Catharine MacKinnon writes, "In pornography, the violence
is
the sex. The inequality is the sex" (MacKinnon's italics).
12
Despite such differences, feminists critical of the sex industry are united in their suspicion of a multi-billion-dollar commercial enterprise that profits from women's
 
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sexual objectification but defends the private use and public expression of women's sexuality in the name of a less repressed erotic life. Especially for radical feminists, who regard the male appropriation of women's sexual and reproductive life as pivotal to women's oppression, what is proffered as sexual liberation is all too often equivalent to men's sexual freedom to control women, thereby repressing, if not silencing, women's voices as girlfriends, wives, mothers, and wage earners. Indeed, some feminists have suggested that both conservative and liberal male hierarchies conspire to keep women oppressed by simultaneously telling every woman that she should be sexually subordinate to one man in marriage and that she should be sexually available to any man who wants her: the classic double message to the "good" girl who is "best" when being "bad."
13
All of the above suggests that there is substantial evidence to support the claim that the sex industry is a paradigm of the institutionalized sexual subordination of women. However, from both within and without the sex industry, women have been organizing to change the image and conditions of the sex worker and her work. Some feminists note that violent pornography comprises a relatively small percentage of the total amount of sexually explicit materials on the market and that pornography is increasingly bought by heterosexual women who have the financial and political bargaining power in their relationships with men to demand a type of pornography that suits their own sexual tastes. From this perspective, feminists claim that women ought to be able to enjoy pornography without at the same time conveying the message that women like being abused. Lesbians have become much more visible producers and consumers of woman-identified pornography in an effort to provide the lesbian community with its own alternative for erotic arousal. From this point of view, given the variety of sexual styles portrayed in pornography and available through prostitution, sex work can liberate women who are not in the trade to explore their own sexual styles and to learn new ones. Indeed, some women in the sex trade contend that if a woman is given the money and the permission to use prostitutes, she will.
14
Many strippers and prostitutes report that they enjoy the money, the flexibility, and the independence that their work offers. Many of them are neither pimped, poor, nor wildly promiscuous, but working women with their own preferred clients, hours, and bosses. Such sex workers report that they are not coerced, abused, or mistreated, although they acknowledge that these are some of the hazards of the profession. They contend that allowing prostitutes to file criminal and civil charges against their clients, along with stricter enforcement of fair wages and working conditions for strippers and porn actresses, would greatly reduce the risks typically associated with their work.
What these sex workers demand are their rights as workers to legal protection and the negotiation of the terms and conditions of their work. As women who advocate financial independence, sexual self-determination, and protection against sexual abuse for all women, they consider themselves feminists as well as sex workers who acknowledge the intimidation and abuse of sex workers worldwide but who reject feminists' and moral conservatives' identification of all sex workers as victims. From this perspective, if prostitution gives a woman the financial independence to choose what to do with her life, feminists who value women's sexual agency and self-definition must not condemn women for pursuing sex work. Therefore, sex workers are
 
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skeptical of feminists whose apparent moral and practical insensitivity to the diverse daily needs of individual sex workers makes them look like the same reactionary sexual puritans that feminists disavow, especially if romance novels, music videos, and fashion magazines may be equal if not greater culprits in the perpetuation of women's sexual oppression. From this viewpoint, attacking the sex industry in order to save its victims is precisely the kind of patronizing moralism that feeds a patriarchy's obsession with defining women's sexuality in men's terms.
15
Sex radical feminists join ranks with sex workers when radicals accuse feminists critical of the sex industry of reinforcing the traditional heterosexual values of monogamy, intimacy, and romance that stripping, pornography, and prostitution flatly reject. From a sex radical perspective, feminists who are unable or unwilling to confront their own sexuality and who see little if anything that is not degrading about sex work under patriarchy are the natural allies of a sexual conservatism that condemns the anonymous, recreational, pleasure-seeking sex in sex work. Moreover, many feminists from a variety of theoretical perspectives believe that such an alliance results in the association of feminism with an antisex moralism that makes feminism unappealing to women who consider themselves both politically liberated
and
sexually adventurous.
16
For a feminist philosopher of sex interested in approaching the topic of sex work from the "view from somewhere different" introduced in chapter 1, speculating about whether or how the sex industry may contribute to women's sexual liberation is no simple matter. Feminists appear to side with what would otherwise be their political opponents and disagree vehemently among themselves. Some liberal feminists want to abolish current discriminatory prostitution law and protect the legal rights of sex workers; others would abolish prostitution altogether and reform those laws that limit women's economic and political access. Some socialist feminists consider pornography an ugly by-product of capitalism that is best gotten rid of by a socialist economy of moral egalitarianism and community responsibility, while others see a new vision of pornographic eroticism brought about by men's and women's renewed acquaintance with nonalienating labor.
17
Radical feminists differ on the distinction between pornography and erotica. Antiporn radical feminists differ over whether pornography is primarily about violence or about sex and whether sex education, censorship, or the filing of civil sex discrimination suits are the best solutions.
18
While most feminists find at least some form of sexually explicit material unobjectionable, this stance typically disallows s/m porn and depictions of consensual pedophilia. Such a stance consequently draws the ire of sex radicals, who grow tired of defending their sexual difference against the charge of false consciousness.
The variety of opinion within the sex industry is equally wide-ranging. Male and female porn producers (and feminists) have remarked that pornography often parodies itself and pokes fun at antiporn feminists. How else, they ask, could one interpret the 1978
Hustler
cover photo depicting a woman's torso and legs being run through a meat grinder with the caption, "We will no longer hang women up like pieces of meat"?
19
Women who are managers, lawyers, and publicists of porn producers often find feminist antipornography rhetoric irrelevant to what
they
experience: women and men signing contracts to work long hours, doing strenuous work that not everyone has either the stamina or the ability to do, and being well paid for

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