Loose Women, Lecherous Men (36 page)

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Authors: Linda Lemoncheck

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Page 143
quo and radical in its goal of freeing women from the subordination, humiliation, and abuse that accompanies women's economic and social dependence on men.
119
However, many sex workers admit to creating an intentional barrier between themselves and the dominant culture for their own protection. Prostitutes risk their livelihoods by coming out politically in favor of workers' rights and the abolition of laws against prostitution. Women in the sex industry who are found to be organizing, striking, or agitating are quickly blackballed: jobs become scarce, and fellow workers become frightened and stay away. Exposed sex workers risk loss of alternative employment, housing, custody of children, scholarships, and loans and alienation from friends and family. The sex industry remains a netherworld where many women seek shelter from abusive spouses and families. Thus, it is even more important from the sex worker's point of view that feminists take the time to uncover, in a conscientious and caring way, their individual stories of survival.
120
From this perspective, feminists who regard sex workers as either victims of an overpowering patriarchy or collaborators in collective brainwashing are themselves collaborators in refusing individual women the freedom to define their sexuality and their economic lives in their own terms. If all heterosexual prostitution, stripping, and pornography is based on male power backed by force, then autonomous choice for women within the industry collapses. When Pat Califia points out that dominatrixes and others on the s/m game do not mock the oppressed but, rather,
are
the oppressed, her aim is to give such women tools to fight their sexual oppression, not to condemn them to it. Compare Califia's comments to those of Catharine MacKinnon, who accuses the editors of
Powers of Desire
of false consciousness for thinking that they can define and express a distinctively women's sexuality under patriarchy: "Women often find ways to resist male supremacy and to expand their spheres of action. But they are never free of it. . . . From pornography one learns that forcible violation of women is the essence of sex."
121
Most adult sex workers have very strong views about the abuse of children in pornography and prostitution and do not deny that the kind of work women and men do in the sex industry has its exploitative and violent side. Sex workers argue, however, that such dangers are present in order to silence women who would dare to use their own sexuality as a source for economic and erotic power. Degrading sex work inevitably results in degrading the commodity that sex workers offer; thus, women whose real poverty makes sex work their only option or whose sex work has liberated them from incest or abuse at home have been effectively stigmatized by feminists simply for trying to make a living. From this perspective, therefore, feminists who would deny sex workers their work are doing precisely what a patriarchy interested in keeping women economically dependent on men, and dividing women against themselves, would want. Sex workers only hear contempt in patronizing comments to the effect that to save an otherwise wounded pride, sex workers simply do not want to confront the reality of their victimization. For example, Catharine MacKinnon observes: "Women who are compromised, cajoled, pressured, tricked, black-mailed, or outright forced into sex (or pornography) often respond to the unspeakable humiliation, coupled with the sense of having lost some irreplaceable integrity, by claiming that sexuality as their own. Faced with no alternatives, the strategy to acquire self-respect and pride is: I chose it." Compare such comments to those of for-
 
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mer porn actress Candida Royalle: "I was never forced or coerced to do
anything
. . . . [Antiporn feminists] don't want to hear that
I made the choice to do this
" (Royalle's italics).
122
Sex workers and sex radical feminists also warn that sex-related materials vital to public education about AIDS and family planning, agendas for the promotion of gay and lesbian rights, and sexually explicit materials that could enhance the exploration and enjoyment of women's sexuality are all endangered by a feminist diatribe against sex work. Feminists like Alisa Carse worry that censoring pornography will only serve to restrict a feminist liberation of sexuality by supporting "a strenuous politics of silence and repression."
123
Moreover, sex radicals argue that if feminists encourage women to breach the boundaries of traditional erotic and social territory by being lesbians, then feminists must support sex workers, many of whom are lesbians, in their own challenge of the sexual landscape. Indeed, women-only escort services, strip clubs, erotic videos, and lesbian pornographic novels represent a small but growing segment of the sex industry, and safer sex initiatives using sexually explicit depictions have begun to take off in gay male and lesbian communities. Heterosexual and lesbian women who use pornography report that it allows them to detect their own repressed sexuality and confirm existing desires and empowers them to define their own sexual agendas. They increasingly demand erotic videos with real plots, showing women living full lives of which pleasurable, mutually satisfying sex is a part. Lesbian porn and prostitution mirror radical lesbianism outside the industry in aiming directly at subverting the sexual ideology that says only men get to have pleasurable, recreational sex. There has also emerged a category of bisexual pornography aimed at subverting prescribed sexualities without identifying exclusively with men or women. From a sex radical view, women of all classes, ethnicities, and sexual preferences must work together in a sex-positive, not sex-negative, approach to free women's pursuit of the sexual subjectivity and economic self-definition that is at the heart of sex work.
124
Objectification without Victimization
My contention is that the extent to which sex workers are the defining subjects of their sexual lives is the extent to which they can begin to transcend patriarchal limitations of their choice of work and male-identified definitions of women's sexuality. A woman's socially constructed sexuality under conditions of male dominance is so closely identified with
who she is as a person
that when she sells her sexuality, she appears to sell her
self
namely, her subjectivity, her agency. Moreover, if sex in such a culture turns good women into bad, then the degradation of a woman, through the identification of her with her sexuality, is a fundamental one, affecting her identity as a self-determining moral agent.
125
When feminists complain that sex work is degrading to women, many of us do so in the belief not that sex work cannot be pleasurable for women but that such pleasure resides in the identification of women with a subordinating, male-identified sexuality that does not allow women to explore our sexuality in our own terms.
Sex work is pleasurable, profitable, and liberating for women in an environment where women's options for both work and social status compared to those of men are
 
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circumscribed by a feminine stereotype that relegates women to the private, domestic, sexual, and reproductive sphere and men to the public, professional, intellectual, and political one. Men's power in such a culture is the power to define the public world as more valuable than the private and to convince women that our real value lies in the sexual and reproductive roles that fulfill men's interests and men's needs. Professional career women can still be expected to take responsibility for child care and housework, hiring other women to perform the necessary day labor; sexual harassment, violence, and abuse, no matter what a woman's social or economic status, are reminders of her primary gender identification as the sexual subordinate of men. In a culture that fully approves of women only when we are heterosexually attractive, women will appear "naturally" to gravitate to those social and economic roles that portray us as the proper sexual objects of men as a way of gaining prestige, social acceptance, and financial support. Such prestige is tenuous, however, as I pointed out in chapter 2, since a woman's socially constructed sexuality, reconceptualized as the "nature" of woman, is as much an excuse for her degradation and abuse as for her approval by men. Thus, when women choose sex work, they do so within a political hierarchy that circumscribes their legitimate social and economic choices in terms of women's natural and proper sexual subordination to men.
Women who choose sex work under such ideological conditions must be regarded as both the subjects and
objects
of their sexual experience. They remain subjects in that even sex workers victimized by poverty or blackmailed into sex work are women whose eroticism derives in part from their being perceived as women whose wills can be subordinated and controlled. Moreover, many self-identified sex workers enjoy what they do, agree to basic terms and conditions of work that earns them a supporting and sometimes superior income, and take pleasure in the personal satisfaction of a job well done. Nevertheless, all such women are also the male-identified objects of a subordinating sexuality that is reinforced by the prevailing culture and made real by rape, sexual harassment, battery, and abuse that are justified by appeals to female inferiority. A woman's willingness to model sexual bondage or abuse, to portray rape for sport, or simply to parade naked in high heels before high-paying, fully clothed men is a sign to many feminists of just how successful her indoctrination into her own subordination has become. From such a view, the sex industry functions as a medium of social control for insuring women's sexual compliance and reinforcing our political silence. As Catharine MacKinnon points out, "[W]ho listens to a woman with a penis in her mouth?"
126
Such control is particularly defaming, according to some feminists, because while Jews and blacks have been treated like laboratory rats or plow horses, no one ever assumed that those persecuted
wanted
to be treated that way. Therefore, even the work of the most self-identified female sex worker will be circumscribed by a subject/
object
dialectic that commits her to examining how her actions encourage and reinforce the prevailing sexual ideology.
For example, when sex worker Valerie Scott says that most of her married clients still love their wives but that sometimes men just need a sexual change of pace,
127
she fails to situate her prostitution within a sexist ideology in which women have no similar outlet for our adulterous peccadillos nor a way to maintain our status of "good girl" if we had. Thus, even if Scott is right that "lust will never replace love," so that truly loved wives need not be threatened by prostitution, she does not take re-
 
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sponsibility for the fact that her prostitution reinforces a sexual double standard that deprives women's sexuality of an eroticism fully defined in our terms. As Anne McClintock points out:
Sure, men don't get enough sex; but then neither do women. Men have privileged access to the global emporium of porn and prostitutionnot to mention that hardy perennial the double standard. Women's desire, by contrast, has been crimped and confined to history's sad museum of corsets, chastity belts, the virginity cult and genital mutilation. Alongside women's erotic malnourishment, men's sexual scarcity looks like a Roman banquet.
128
Given this double standard, the power the prostitute says she has over her customer is temporary and socially invisible relative to his; thus, Scott may fail to see how easily her power can be subverted to empower her customer's sex objectification of his whore
and
his wife (
and
his secretary
and
his girlfriend . . . ). The fact that sex workers tend not to share their real horror stories in public and consider violence to be one of the risks of the job suggests that even their occasional abuse and humiliation by men has to some degree undermined their ability to be liberated from it.
129
It also suggests that while no one likes to be a victim, sex workers must recognize that they do not act in social isolation from a patriarchal culture of sexual violence and submission given tacit approval by women who appear to choose their own objectification.
When feminist women of color object to stereotypical depictions of them in pornography, especially s/m porn, they see women who pose for such depictions as women who accept their identification by both black and white males as sexual slaves and bestial whores. Alice Walker suggests that pornography bonds black men to white men
as men
, so that black women are no longer sisters in a common struggle with black men against racial oppression but sexual objects to be consumed. Alice Mayall and Diana Russell complain that racism in pornography is largely ignored because it is made sexy, thus desirable and pleasurable. When black women complain about their portrayal in pornography, they are attacked by black men as aligning themselves with a feminist movement of white, overprivileged "hags."
130
From within such a cultural milieu, the facts that the proportion of black prostitutes in countries like the United States and Canada is much higher than their percentage in the general population, and that they typically comprise the majority of street prostitutes where the life is most dangerous and least lucrative, bespeak a racism in education, housing, and employment that forces black women into the streets. Nina Lopez-Jones claims that many madams, escort services, massage parlors, and clubs refuse to hire black women; services that do hire them tend to keep minimum quotas that restrict black women to streetwalking.
131
Since street work is highly visible, women of color not only are more frequently arrested but, ironically, also serve to reinforce the black stereotype entertained by many whites of the insatiable sexual animal. When women of color are hired by escort services, they are advertised as especially hot or submissive, and men who call such services ask for them specifically if they want "kinky" sex. Perhaps this image is reinforced by the fact that while white women make up the majority of women depicted in pornography, women of color tend to fall into the "special interest'' categories of s/m, bondage, lesbian sex, and sex with children.
132

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