The Prostitution of Sexuality. Kathleen Barry

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СКАЧАТЬ prostitutes that involved arresting more than 12,000 women in 1992, 10 more prostitute murders occurred.⁴⁰ None of these murders has evoked the wrath that Wuornos’s killing in self-defense provoked.

      Serial murders of prostitute women are periodically reported. From late 1977 to early 1978 a Los Angeles strangler brutally raped and murdered several women; most of his victims were prostitutes. During the same period many street walkers in northern England were victims of a “ripper’s” mutilation murders. Serial murders of prostitutes have continued, and in 1992, 9 prostitute women in Detroit, all crack cocaine users, were strangled and left in empty buildings. Their bodies were nude, and they were bound and gagged. Some bodies when found were badly decomposed, having been in the abandoned buildings at least 6 months.⁴¹

      Meg Baldwin summarized prostitution murders, giving a sense of their scope:

      Forty-eight women, mainly prostitutes, were killed by the Green River Killer; up to thirty-one women murdered in Miami over a three-year period, most of them prostitutes; fourteen in Denver; twenty-nine in Los Angeles; seven in Oakland. Forty-three in San Diego; fourteen in Rochester; eight in Arlington, Virginia; nine in New Bedford, Massachusetts, seventeen in Alaska, ten in Tampa. . . . Three prostitutes were reported dead in Spokane, Washington, in 1990, leading some to speculate that the “Green River” murderer of forty-eight women and girls had once again become “active.”⁴²

      As Jane Caputi points out, “serial sexual murder is not some inexplicable explosion/epidemic of an extrinsic evil or the domain of the mysterious psychopath. On the contrary such murder is an eminently logical step in the procession of patriarchal roles, values, needs, and rule of force.”⁴³

      Murder, bottoming out, rape, and prostitution itself are consequences of dehumanized sexuality, a condition of oppression. When liberal legal constructions of human will are invoked to determine if, when, and where violation occurs, the dehumanized sexuality of patriarchal oppression is dissociated from the individual violations. Cause and consequence are dissociated. Domination prevails.

      As I found in Female Sexual Slavery, the agents of that power are men who may function individually or in concert with each other,

      considering the numbers of men who are pimps, procurers, members of syndicate and free-lance slavery gangs, operators of brothels and massage parlors, connected with sexual exploitation entertainment, pornography purveyors, wife beaters, child molesters, incest perpetrators, Johns (tricks) and rapists, one cannot help but be momentarily stunned by the enormous male population participating in female sexual slavery. The huge number of men engaged in these practices should be cause for declaration of a national and international emergency, a crisis in sexual violence.

      To this list should be added the sexual liberals who promote pornography as free speech and prostitution as consenting sex.

      The emergency I identified in Female Sexual Slavery has not yet been recognized. By the end of the twentieth century masculinist society has found the answer in the normalization of prostitution in the prostitution of sexuality. Women’s human rights violations are becoming conditions of normal sex, confirmed in women’s consent and answering the question posed by the Marquis de Sade in the eighteenth century, “But where is one to find free slaves?”

2 Sexual Power

      Lisa Mamac, born in a rural farming village in the Philippines, tried to escape the inevitability of marrying there and raising her own family in the poverty in which she grew up. Like many women moving from rural to urban areas as their country is industrializing, Lisa left her village for a large city with plans to go to school. Rural to urban migration socially dislocates women and girls as patriarchal power in traditional societies provides almost no possibilities for women outside of marriage or their family. Under these conditions women are made particularly vulnerable to sexual exploitation. Away from home and on her own, Lisa fell in love and then became pregnant, only to learn that the man she was involved with was already married. He left her and she struggled alone with her infant, who died at 8 months. She tried to go back to school but did not have the money. Finally she became involved with a man who said he would put her through school. But he didn’t. In October 1981, Lisa met a man who was a chief prosecutor in the court of justice of the region in which she lived. He told her of a high-paying position as a receptionist in a 5-star hotel in the Netherlands. He arranged for her to have the job. As women are marginalized from the developing economies of their industrializing countries, emigration often appears to be the only way to survive.

      Most women trafficked into prostitution are from rural areas and have been in brief marriages or liaisons with men who abandon them.¹ When Lisa arrived in the Netherlands, she was put into a brothel. Like many women trafficked into prostitution, Lisa’s only chance for help was to appeal to customers to help her escape. In 1983, one customer listened to Lisa’s story and agreed to help her. But it was 2 years before police investigations led to a police raid on the brothel. Once she was free, with the support of Philippine groups in the Netherlands, women’s organizations there, and women’s groups in the Philippines, in 1985 Lisa Mamac began the struggle to win justice in her case. In 1988 Jan Schoemann was expelled from the Philippines and was convicted in Dutch courts of trafficking and sentenced to serve two and a half years in prison. His Philippine counterpart, Nestoria Placer, a former government official, was freed by the Philippine court in 1991. The judge in the case turned the blame back on Lisa Mamac and “her glaring immoral conduct manifested by her unusual inclination for illicit sex” in contrast to Placer, whose “character is beyond reproach and whose public life remains unblemished.”² In 1993, the case was on appeal.

      Lisa Mamac, caught in the vulnerability of women migrating from rural poverty, was trafficked into prostitution. At the same time, prostitution was being industrialized in her own country. Sex industrialization had been set in motion to service the military, particularly of the U.S. Subic Naval Base and Clark Air Force Base. Furthermore, Lisa was trafficked from the Philippines to the Netherlands, one of the Western countries that has taken the lead among post-industrial nations in legalizing and normalizing prostitution. Lisa Mamac’s exploitation in prostitution encapsulated all of the stages of sexual exploitation that I have identified in this work: (1) trafficking in women, (2) military prostitution, (3) sex industrialization, and (4) normalization of prostitution.

       Historical Stages in the Deployment of Sexual Exploitation

      Patriarchal power is singular in its reduction of women to sex, but varied in its political and economic strategies for deploying sexual subordination. Sexual exploitation is differentially shaped according to the economic development of each region, which determines how sex is constructed and deployed to subordinate women. Therefore, there is no one strategy of patriarchal power and sexual politics.³ While each of these 4 stages of sexual exploitation are found in any historical period or in any stage of a country’s economic development, they also constitute progression, one leading to another with economic development and prosperity.

      1. Trafficking in women prevails especially in pre-industrial and feudal societies that are primarily agricultural, where women are excluded from the public sphere. Women’s reduction to sex is a fact of their status as the property of their husbands. Under such conditions women are governed by marital relations of power through the exploitation of their unpaid labor in the home, their reproduction, and their sexuality. They are privatized СКАЧАТЬ