Loose Women, Lecherous Men (35 page)

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Authors: Linda Lemoncheck

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Page 139
against prostitution would reduce violence against them, by making it more difficult for the men they work with, or for, to get away with it. Strippers and porn actresses suggest that if their work were not so marginalized by a sexually conservative politics, they would be better able to take cases to court without being humiliated by the exposure. Because sexual harassment is such a common feature of working women's lives and sexual abuse so pervasive among wives and girlfriends, sex workers see no special reason for targeting them other than the purported sexual indecency in their work.
Indeed, because prostitutes as a group are identified as promiscuous (averaging a reported 1,500 clients a year), female prostitutes have been targeted as a primary cause of the spread of AIDS among heterosexuals. However, the U.S. Department of Public Health reports that while up to 35 percent of sexually transmitted diseases in the United States are related to teenage sex, only 5 percent are related to prostitution. Margo St. James reports that in every age group, the venereal disease rate among prostitutes is lower than the rate among the general public. As I mentioned earlier, sex workers insist that prostitutes have always been careful about sexually transmitted diseases, because disease-free sex is their bread and butter. When they do not use condoms, it is often because they are too financially desperate to insist on them when customers are willing to pay several times the going rate to go without. Police officials are not much more helpful when they confiscate condoms as evidence of solicitation.
108
Moreover, surveys on the transmission of AIDS through prostitution are often biased, targeting IV drug users in the sex industry or prostitutes already visiting HIV clinics. Customers are seldom officially tested, and where prostitution is regulated and legal, prostitutes can be subjected to compulsory isolation and public censure for testing positive for HIV. Thus, sex workers argue that the real AIDS threat is in forcing sex work underground, resulting in a lack of customer education about, and responsibility for, HIV transmission. Sex workers also point to the dearth of education of heterosexual couples on the importance of the use of condoms and the fight by a conservative public to keep condom distribution out of public schools. In a culture in which women's sexuality has been associated with dirt and defilement, women in the industry complain that they are assumed to be the diseased ones, blatantly displaying a sexuality that does not defile the men for whom they work.
109
Women of color in the sex industry feel the bite of racism and classism in the maintenance of the good girl/bad girl standard, since cleanliness and purity are associated in many Anglo minds with upper-class whites: for many white men, "black woman" means "whore." Black women who simply stroll in or near red-light districts are often arrested as prostitutes, and antiloitering laws make it easy to press charges. Consistent with the white stereotype of black males, pimps are often assumed to be black, since black men are regarded by many whites as violent, irresponsible, and sexually powerful. Indeed, such a description fits some pimps, but not all of them.
110
Some sex workers simply say that they are tired of rationalizing their work. If sex work is not always pleasant, at least
it's a job
. They remind feminists that most of us compromise when it comes to work, since the jobs we have are often not our ideal. Moreover, most of us do not work "by choice" but do so in order to support ourselves and our families. Nevertheless, sex workers are talked down to and considered sick,
 
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neurotic, or abused just because they honestly and openly exchange sex for money. Sex workers complain that feminists can only see the reinforcement of male power in commercial sex work and not the power a woman has in making a successful sale. Women of color have argued that activism against the sex industry has been largely a white, middle-class issue, since abolishing prostitution or censoring pornography would only mean more unemployed women of color who do not have the luxury of choosing their line of work and who find white social service agencies alienating, isolating, and ineffective. According to this view, if middle-class feminists were to argue for better working conditions for sex workers, such feminists would have to admit that their own middle class, perhaps some of their own husbands, are sexually exploiting working women. From such a perspective, feminists who tell sex workers what kind of work they should or should not do sound exactly like racist and sexist men who say women ought to make coffee and not laws; and feminists who tell sex workers what kind of sex they should or should not have sound exactly like moralizing prudes. Sex workers say that picketing through their districts and humiliating them on organized tours through strip clubs and porn shops only shows them that feminists do not believe that sex workers' voices count. Such workers demand that feminists either contribute to their cause for better working conditions or simply let them get on with their work.
111
As in other occupations, when sex work is profitable, the mundane or even unpleasant aspects of the work are often more tolerable. When a stripper in a fancy New York club or a call girl for a studio executive makes more money in an evening than she can make in a month of typing, the money itself can be exciting. Sex workers say that because there is big money to be made in the sex industry, feminists should want women to get a piece of what is still a preserve whose economic base is determined primarily by male producers, directors, photographers, club managers, and pimps. When madams like Heidi Fleiss in Los Angeles are arrested for pandering, they are made into media spectacles and moral examples of good girls gone bad. The facts that Heidi Fleiss grew up in an upper-middle-class vegetarian household and that her parents are a pediatrician and a schoolteacher have often been cited to imply that she was not always "that kind of girl."
112
Such denigration is the price, some prostitutes contend, for making good money in an industry that stigmatizes women but not men for commercializing sex.
If pornography is used to coerce women into sex they do not want, the problem is not with the sex industry but with the fact that women are not in positions of economic or social power to refuse. According to this view, legalized sex work empowers women to say yes or no to sex, thereby challenging the belief that women are the proper sexual subordinates of men; censoring or prohibiting the industry does not. Some sex workers contend that if feminists want women to be economically independent, there is no better way to earn a living
and
have power over men than working in the sex industry, whether as producer, manager, or sex worker. Indeed, sex workers point out that legitimizing sex work might even prompt women to be more honest about the negotiations they make in exchange for sex or give women permission to see dating and marriage as the sex work that it is.
113
The English Collective of Prostitutes asserts in its policy statements that laws against prostitution punish women for refusing poverty and deny them the right to
 
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make money.
114
Arrests only reinforce dependence on pimps who can arrange bail, attorneys, and child care; constant surveillance of known offenders often drives women to other cities, where pimps are enticing in the absence of a known support network. Constant fines and bail fees encourage a revolving door whereby prostitutes are forced back out on the street in order to pay their fines, prompting some sex workers to accuse the state of being the biggest pimp of all. Runaways from parental abuse tend to stay in underground sex work largely because public agencies and police charged with their protection are legally required to notify their families of their whereabouts. According to sex workers, the money spent on arrests alone could be used for support services for women, including alternative job training, child care, continued education, and counseling. The fact that such broad-ranging support is not forthcoming is evidence, according to this view, of both a cultural dependence on and abhorrence of prostitution. Indeed, many feminists are convinced that antipornography and antiprostitution campaigns drain energy away from more productive feminist efforts to secure adequate employment, education, housing, and health care for women who would then be better able to resist men's exploitation and abuse. As Betty Friedan admonishes her more radical antiporn sisters, "Get off the pornography kick and face the real obscenity of poverty." Sex workers believe that feminists can "save" women from sex work only if they help women secure enough education and job skills to make their own decisions about how to live.
115
On the other hand, many sex workers admit that minimum-wage job training or its equivalent will fail to draw women away from the real profits, independence, and flexibility in much of sex work. From this perspective, the view that pornography is a propaganda tool to degrade women is a trap feminists fall into that blinds us to the real profits to be made in the industry. Moreover, simply to ban all sex work underestimates the real humiliation and desperation of women who cannot feed their children or pay their rent without sex work. The prohibition of sex work simply drives it underground, making it a feeding ground for drugs and crime. Sex work advocates want the world to admit that the sex industry is here to stay: as retired stripper Amber Cooke has said, "People will actually pay for sex, and that makes it a valuable commodity to a woman. That's her right. As long as people are willing to buy sex, there will be people who choose to make their living in the sex trade."
116
Thus, say sex workers, they should be accorded proper social status, unionization, and protection under the law.
This is not to advocate legal
regulation
of sex work, however. Sex workers and feminists alike point out that state regulation of prostitution has been historically oppressive to women. In regions like Nevada, where prostitution is legal in communities under 250,000, prostitutes are licensed with the state and confined to brothels for their work. Any criminal offense constitutes the automatic withdrawal of the license, yet the social stigma of being a prostitute remains public record for any future employers, loan officers, or landlords to check. Her regulation not only limits her hours of work but also limits where she can socialize after hours, making brothels places of confinement, not employment. Police are notorious for using such regulations to make regular sweeps of brothels for minor infractions in order to bring a fresh supply of prostitutes into town for regular customers. Such sweeps are often racist: in Las Vegas, where prostitution is illegal, black prostitutes are often not allowed into the
 
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casinos or hotels where white prostitutes mingle; instead, they return illegally to the street, where they are picked up, do more jail time, and pay more fines than whites. Street life is the lowest paying work for prostitutes, comprising a reported 1020 percent of all prostitution, yet 8595 percent of prostitution arrests are off the street. The percentage of women of color among all women arrested for street soliciting is much greater than the percentage of women of color working the street. Women of color picked up for soliciting constitute 85 percent of all prostitutes who serve jail time.
117
Licensed prostitutes are the subject of frequent mandatory venereal disease checks to which their customers are seldom subjected. A positive test for HIV can mean loss of a job and an identifying photograph in the local newspaper. Priscilla Alexander notes that California's confidentiality laws preclude such exposure, but AIDS fears projected onto prostitutes may challenge them. There are typically no regulations on condom use and no requirements that brothels provide disability benefits, health insurance, or pensions. Strippers and porn actresses complain of exploitative "consultant" contracts that provide no benefits but restrict their dress, hours, and activities in ways that make them more employees than independent contractors. Licensing strippers has the same discriminatory effect on alternative employment that licensing prostitutes does. While nude dancing is illegal in many cities, club owners may require it to compete with underground clubs who offer it; but when police raid the clubs, it is the dancers who are busted. Sex workers note with some irony that while feminists would restrict sex work in the name of preventing violence against women, the least restrictive prostitution laws are those that have been correlated with the least violence or theft against prostitutes and the least juvenile prostitution. Feminists aligned with sex workers point out that while sex work regulations are purportedly designed to protect prostitutes and facilitate their work, the laws nevertheless exist within a cultural ideology whose sexual double standard and sexist attitudes subvert the law to reinforce women's unconditional sexual access to men.
118
Despite the admitted risks and real dangers of the job, however, many women who are sex workers claim that their work is personally and politically liberating. They contend that their work gives them an economic independence, freedom, and flexibility that they could not obtain otherwise. Sex work is regarded as financially empowering when a woman controls a valuable commodity for which a man is willing to pay. By the same token, sex work can be sexually liberating in that it is work that severs the bonds between sex and love and hence affords female sex workers the opportunity to explore a sexuality of pleasure and entertainment not confined to intimacy or monogamy. Some sex workers argue that feminists are hiding behind issues of degradation and violence against women because we are unwilling to confront the potential for liberation in our own sexuality. From this view, the fact that a sexually repressive society has rejected anonymous or casual sex is no reason for women to reject it too. In this respect, sex work can also be politically liberating in that it conveys a message to women and men that women are the sexual subjects of a woman-identified life. Thus, roller hockey team owner Jeanie Buss is reported to have posed for
Playboy
as a way of celebrating her divorce, advertising roller hockey, and (ironically) compensating for her father's constant company of Playboy "bunnies" when she was growing up. In this way, sex work is believed to be subversive of the sexual status

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