The Prostitution of Sexuality. Kathleen Barry

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СКАЧАТЬ subordination in the early years and cuts off female potential for development. The negative effects of present normative teenage sexual behaviors overwhelmingly impact on girls’ experience of and success in school. Thirty-three percent of girls and 12% of boys subjected to sexualization do not want to go to school, and 32% of girls and 13% of boys do not want to talk in class because of their experiences. Other effects disproportionately impacting girls are that after being sexually harassed many find it hard to pay attention in school and difficult to study. Twenty percent of the girls’ grades have dropped and 17% are thinking about changing schools.²²

      Every year, Ed Donnellan, a high school teacher, conducts a survey with female students who range in age from 14 to 17.²³Donnellan uses this survey for consciousness raising about sexual exploitation. In 1992, of 70 students surveyed, 17% reported that they had been subjected to intercourse against their will. And 57% reported being kissed against their will while 25% indicated that their genitals had been touched against their will. In 1993, 9% had intercourse against their will while 78% had been touched in their thigh or crotch against their will.

      Donnellan’s survey produced other responses from students. One 14-year-old told him privately that she had sex with 13 boys in the previous 9 months and “I don’t even like it.” The widespread sexualization of women through pornography and the media has intensified teenage male expectations of sex and female teenagers’ experience of social pressure to be sexually active, believing that they can’t say no.

      When I spoke to Donnellan’s class, some students asked what they should do if they find pornography when they are babysitting. I suggested that they call a friend or trusted family member to come over, stay with them and accompany them home, but not to remain alone in the company of a potential sexual exploiter. Some of the girls feared that such protection would appear to be too extreme a response, making them appear weak or uptight, a fear that extends to pressures for sexual relations.

      There is little evidence of the effect of early sex on identity development in adolescence. But as coercion is increasingly normalized, the roots of female dependency can be found here. Rather than in some natural or essential design of femaleness, here is where the foundations are for girls’ and women’s difficulty in marking separate identities of their own, the basis for autonomy, independence, and, of course, equality. Here are the contemporary foundations of sexual subordination and gender inequality.

      On one hand, those who promote sexual exploitation emphasize women’s choice to prostitute and to engage in pornography. On the other hand, campaigns against sexual violence make women’s consent the primary issue. Both approaches separate the sexual power of male domination from the system of patriarchal oppression by which men as a class subordinate women and thus reduce them to a sex class. Consent—either its willed assurance or its denial—does not determine, identify, or cause oppression. When violence is separated from oppression, violation of consent must be established in order to establish a woman’s victimization. Such legalistic construction of victimization, which fails to recognize patriarchal political oppression, incessantly places women and girls in the position of claiming sexual violation from an increasingly passive, non-interactive role—as beings acted upon by brute force and therefore violated. Yet subjection to that kind of force is part of a continuum of sexual exploition and oppression, and it is not necessarily the most frequently occurring element. Consent to violation is a fact of oppression. Any oppression. All oppression.

       Sex as Labor?

      The prostitution exchange is the most systematic institutionalized reduction of woman to sex. It is the foundation of all sexual exploitation of women. It is the prototype, the model from which all other sexual exploitation can be understood. Put another way, if this practice is not recognized as sexual exploitation and as a model for the sexual subordination of women, then all other forms of sexual exploitation will be ineffectively addressed, many going fully unrecognized as sexual exploitation.

      In the normalization of the prostitution of sexuality, it is not surprising to find that prostitution is increasingly considered to be merely another form of labor. Considering prostitution as merely another form of labor raises the question, what kind of labor? Slave labor or exploited labor of feudalism or class exploitation of capitalism?

      Slave labor is condemned universally because it deprives human beings of freedom and of the gains from their labor, and child labor is considered to be work that not only denies freedom but is developmentally premature. If, for example, consent was the criterion for determining whether or not slavery is a violation of human dignity and rights, slavery would not have been recognized as a violation because an important element of slavery is the acceptance of their condition by many slaves. So deeply is the self-hatred of racism and sexism encoded.

      Various theories of labor and analyses of labor markets treat capitalist labor as the exploitation of surplus value, revealing inequalities and dual labor markets. Consider labor in the production of the commodity of human services. In between unremuner-ated, exploited domestic labor that includes emotional labor and private sex exchange exists a range of personal services that are marketed—psychological therapy, counseling, and physical therapies, including massage. Human services begin with distinctions and differentiations—demarcations of what is saleable. Psychological therapy and massage each identifies appropriate treatments for particular conditions that are provided for a price. They may be meant to improve emotional and personal life, and the purchaser may receive emotional and/or personal satisfaction and even pleasure from them. But the therapist is not selling emotions, desires, drives or other aspects of their person. The difference from prostitution is that these services do not invoke sex; in fact, professional ethics in these fields require of the service providers that all protections against sexualizing the services be accorded their clients or customers.

      The question of whether paid sexual exchange is exploited as labor does not fully address the question of whether certain experiences and actions should be conditions of labor at all. Dangerously, feminism has not yet asked about sex what marxists and socialists have asked about labor. Marxists ultimately envision labor freed from capitalist exploitation and laborers owning their own labor power. Can feminism, without contradicting its commitment to liberation, envision women as free sexual laborers sometime in the future? As prostitution becomes the model for patriarchal sexual relations of power, the unasked, unexplored, and seemingly hopelessly mired question surfaces: What do we as women want sex to be? How shall we socially construct sexuality as a condition of our liberation?

      The recent research on women’s unpaid domestic labor that addresses that part of it that is emotional labor²⁴ has confounded this issue and the answers to these questions, as it tends to adopt the terms “sexual labor” or “sex work.” The terms “sex work” and “sexual labor” imply that sex, if it were not exploited by traffickers, pimps, and industries, should be labor, or a condition of laboring, work that anyone should be able to engage in at a fair wage with full benefits of social services. In the absence of political consciousness of the exploitation of labor by capitalists and by husbands, the term “sex work” becomes imbued with a sense of normalcy.

      There is an even larger question beneath this debate: Is emotional labor exploited because it is unremunerated, or is it exploited because emotional and sexual life have been reduced to mere servicing, to a labor that sustains gender power relations? Women’s subordination in general and sexual exploitation in particular raises the question asked earlier: What in the range of human experience should be considered as labor? And how do we achieve a condition of unexploited labor?

      And beyond reducing the human experience of sex to labor, the promotion of “sex work” is specifically gendered: services are bought by men, provided for men—services that are not СКАЧАТЬ