The Prostitution of Sexuality. Kathleen Barry

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СКАЧАТЬ economic development and advancement, as material conditions improve for communities, families, and individuals, more emphasis is placed on inner life, emotions, and the personal. The self begins to be understood and developed in relation to inner life and emotions.²⁵ Emotions, inner life, and the personal are gendered; they have distinctly different meanings for women and for men. Emotional work and sexual service become part of what men require from women. Men’s emotional disengagement and sexual requirements are not merely a matter of masculinist socialization. Rather, male underdeveloped emotional life and objectified sexual life are produced in power arrangements. In those power arrangements, emotions and sex are reduced to labor that is exploitation of women.

      When sex is a requirement in the line of domestic duties, it is made into a form of labor and a dimension of sexual power in marriage. When sex is accepted as another form of labor, human beings cannot be protected from the destruction of that human sexual experience. Given that the human body is the location of ourselves, its fragility and vulnerabilities require protections. The body is extended into realities beyond it through social interaction, from the inner to the outer world, from self to other, and in this location of the body in the human condition, there is fragility. Then what do we constitute as the norms for its (our) protection? Patriarchal domination of women and capitalist markets that are now internationally interdependent have brought us to fundamental questions of human existence: Not can, but should emotions, sex, and reproduction be rendered into saleable commodities?

      The principle that guides my work is that in confronting prostitution as an exploitation of women, we are also concerned with freeing women from being reduced to sex and reproduction as acts of labor and of market exchange. Janice Raymond has critiqued the marketing of reproduction in Women as Wombs.²⁶ If feminism is to win women’s liberation, then sex and reproduction must be treated as experiences that protect rather than violate human fragility and vulnerability while supporting women as sexual and reproductive beings of their own choosing. I would suggest that the minimum conditions for sexual consent are in sex that is a human experience of personal dignity and one that is enjoyed with respect and pleasure. Neither marriage nor prostitution, as structures of patriarchal domination, institutionally provide for them. Therefore, although women and men may experience sex that does not violate human dignity and personal respect, their experiences are not because of but external to structured patriarchal power. And those experiences do not obviate the fact of women’s class oppression produced in the prostitution of sexuality.

      The logic of the present study, and all of the suppositions of the women’s movements against violence against women and against pornography, assume a new possibility—that sex, when it is a condition of our liberation, will be experienced in the human condition as a human experience, a personal interaction of pleasure, of attachment and affection, of human wholeness, and, for those who choose, for reproduction.

       Proprostitution

      In the small but highly vocal proprostitution movement, some few women are treating their prostitution affirmatively, as “sex work,” as experiences of unrepressed sex that they control. Theirs is not unlike some heterosexual women’s and lesbians’ defense of sadomasochism as an enactment of sexual desire for women; in the movement to promote pornography this group is led by F.A.C.T. and its views are promoted in works like Carol Vance’s.²⁷ Many women actively promote pornographic sexuality as a chosen dimension of their lives while many other women actively claim and positively assert a “prostitution identity.” Are they dehumanized by these dissociations, or are they only claiming a self-chosen identity? If women actively choose pornographic, prostituted sex, can we consider that sex as harmless because it is chosen? These questions collapse the experience of harm into the act of consent, rendering invisible the harm of the prostitution exchange, dissociating it from the fullness of lived experience, and locating it only in human will. This is a variant of liberal ideology, which drives economic markets by elevating individual choice in order to maximize consumerism. In this way, the sex of prostitution is reduced from being a class condition of women to a personal choice of the individual. Under the decadence that elevates individual choice above the common good, chosen patriarchal violation serves capitalist market exchange.

      A feminist analysis of sexual exploitation requires analyzing the class condition of women in relation to actual, lived experience. Developing a feminist human-rights perspective refocuses the question back to the act, to lived experience, to the conditions under which sex takes place, and asks whether or not that constitutes violation. In human rights, the determination of harm must rest on the act, the experience and its representations, not only individually but collectively in women’s class condition. If the act exploits, it is in itself destructive of human life, well-being, integrity, and dignity. That is violation. And when it is gendered, repeated over and over in and on woman after woman, that is oppression.

      But some women in prostitution promote their own sexual exploitation and treat it as a condition of women’s freedom or self-determination. Erich Goode points out, “For most of us to find the behavior attractive, something we would want to participate in, we must ‘neutralize’ the negative status of the behavior or nullify our feeling about participating in it”²⁸ because “most of us find despising ourselves as too painful.”²⁹ Therefore, to neutralize not only the deviant status of prostitution but also the actual harm it produces, to treat that harm as sexy, fun, and a kick, is to valorize it and to promote it. In prostitution that means actively incorporating dehumanization into one’s identity—to live it, embrace it, and ultimately to promote it. What is dehumanized sex, if it is not sex in which one has become disembodied? To actively accept this, to live dehumanization as if it were an original human condition, the act of an intact self, is to live one’s fragmentation, that which kills the human self, as an actively chosen option, as wholeness, as fun, as pleasure.

      Ultimately, the only way to promote such dehumanization for oneself is to promote it for others, assuming that doing so will neutralize its social stigma. Hence a proprostitution movement. Hence the validation of pornographic sex in marriage and intimate coupling. Hence the promotion of lesbian sadomasochism. But promotion of prostitution is not only about trying to change social stigma. Proprostitution lobbying has become increasingly validated in a general climate of dehumanization of sexual relations, what I now consider to be the prostitution of sexuality.

      Promoting prostitution publicly is not the way prostitution will be neutralized and destigmatized. The sexual relations of power constitute the political context for proprostitution movements that publicly affirm the use of sex to exploit women. To “embrace” prostitution sex as one’s self-chosen identity is to be actively engaged in promoting women’s oppression in behalf of oneself. It means that the sex that customers buy, which is an objectified sex that dehumanizes, is what a woman in prostitution promotes when she chooses it as her own identity.

      For women who promote prostitution, neutralization of it requires internalization of all that women who simply survive prostitution have distanced themselves from, have dissociated from themselves, going through each of the steps—from distancing to disembodiment—and then internalizing their opposite, treating the sex as their own spontaneous experience of it. It is the embodiment of prostitution sex even as prostitute women are disembodied while doing it. Women who experience everything from distancing to disembodiment are not rejecting that which for some few women in prostitution is accepted. As prostitution is sexual exploitation, it harms the human self and destroys through sex, dehumanizing women. In other words, to promote the sexual servicing of others through the use of oneself, one must re-embody that which has been disembodied of the original developing self.

      It does not work the other way around. There is not an original, essential, СКАЧАТЬ