The Prostitution of Sexuality. Kathleen Barry

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СКАЧАТЬ assume that sexual dehumanization is the original human condition.

      Typically the proprostitution lobby, fronting for the international sex industry, has been credited with neutralizing the negative status of prostitution by promoting legal and social acceptance of it. If, then, accepting one’s prostitution and incorporating it into one’s identity requires only “deviance neutralization,” it is because prostitution is identified as “deviant” instead of as the human-rights violation and dehumanization that it is. Prostitute organizations are absolutely right in wanting that deviant label removed: as long as prostitute women are the deviants, all of the women who accept sexually objectified sex and incorporate it into their identities are protected from having to incorporate into their identities the recognition of themselves as prostitutes.

      In the sexual objectification of women, the problem is more complex than the theory of “deviance neutralization” suggests, for this theory requires that what one does be understood as deviant in the society. Prostitution has been considered deviant, but through the prostitution of sexuality it is losing its deviant label because it is increasingly the normalized experience of sex. Therefore, when women in prostitution defend and promote their activity as work, it is not that they are merely trying to neutralize a deviant category that has been assigned to them. They are requiring that their sex exchange for money be treated merely as sex. When they achieve their goal, then equal acceptance of every form of sexual objectification and dehumanization that goes under the overall designation of “sex” will achieve the prostitution of sexuality. This is how the sex of prostitution is normalized.

      In the normalization of pornography, and the prostitution of sexuality, the experience of sex is no longer relevant in determining whether sexual enhancement or sexual degradation has taken place. Normalized prostitution is a product of liberal individualism where free will or consent prevail.

      In the prostitution of sexuality we can find the basis for the developing support for the proprostitution movement from many women who are not prostitutes. Nonprostitute women’s promotion of prostitution is about something other than destigmatizing prostitution. The wider support for prostitution from nonprostitute women has to do with reinforcing the distinction between prostitute and nonprostitute women, especially as it becomes indistinguishable in the sexual acts through the prostitution of sexuality. In other words, as prostitution sex becomes recognized as the prostitution of “normal” sexuality, the only way nonprostitute women know that they indeed are not whores is by insuring that some women are sustained in a separate category, whether they call it prostitute, or they call it “sex work.” Through non-prostitute women’s promotion of prostitution, the separation of prostitute and nonprostitute is maintained. Knowing those women who do “sex between consenting adults” as “sex workers” protects other women from being seen as whores when they are doing that same sex in their marriages, in dating, or in anonymous, unpaid liaisons.

       Sexual Relations of Power

      To locate all of sexual exploitation within the real, lived experience of patriarchal oppression is to speak about power. In his search for a theory of sexual power, Foucault came close in his History of Sexuality. Establishing that the term “sexuality” originated in the nineteenth century, he located sexual power in history rather than ahistorical biology. He rejected the marxist tendency to identify power only as an overarching power of the state or as a general class condition, in other words, to identify power only as public and social. He theorized on sexual power at a level of analysis that invokes the personal, private, social domains that have been ignored by earlier theorists of sexuality.

      Sex as power, Foucault told us, is ubiquitous—it is everywhere at once “not because it has the privilege of consolidating everything under its invincible unity, but because it is produced from one moment to the next, at every point, or rather in every relation from one point to another.”³⁰ Foucault gave us a middle ground of theory in which the sex relations of power can be recognized as “a multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organization.”³¹Consequently, he found that the domain of sex and power is not driven but rather constitutes

      an especially dense transfer point for relations of power: between men and women, young people and old people, parents and offspring, teachers and students, priests and laity, an administration and a population. Sexuality is not the most intractable element in power relations, but rather one of those endowed with the greatest instrumentality; useful for the greatest number of maneuvers and capable of serving as a point of support, as a linchpin, for the most varied strategies.³²

      Yet, in order to understand how sex is constructed into power, we need to get at it where it operates without becoming lost in its individualized components. The problem with Foucault’s theory is that in seeking to elucidate sexual power at the micro level, he abandons attention to the collectivized conditions that produce classes of power.³³ Sexual power operates at all levels. It is constantly being reproduced in sexual relations that are at once private and coupled and at the same time collective, institutional, and public. Important to Foucault’s contribution is his recognition that in sexual relations “power is everywhere, not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere.” But he eliminates structure, and by doing so, he dissolves the hierarchy of power, making power amorphous. In defining power, he makes it undefinable and his theory diminishes responsibility for power.

      As Foucault tells us, sexual power is everywhere and comes from everything, but its agency is secreted in its ubiquity. For Foucault, “there is no subject”; the agents of oppression elude identification. What is important about Foucault’s definition of power is that he reveals the difficulty in exposing sexual power as it is constantly “produced from one moment to the next” in the intertangled web of the “multiplicity of force relations.” However, because Foucault does not directly confront power as gender-structured hierarchal relations, in the context of sex in marriage, in prostitution, in structured inequality, his theory achieves what he sought to avoid. His definition of power merely reinforces masculinist theories of power that obscure that privatization and personalization of patriarchal power by considering power primarily at the level of the state.

      However, Foucault is correct that there “is no binary and all-encompassing opposition between ruler and ruled” in the sense that such oppositions suggest that the one who has power is acting, thus making the oppressed who is acted upon a passive figure. But there is interaction and reciprocity in the relations of power. Power is produced through interaction, and that interaction includes the participation of both the “ruler” and the “ruled,” the oppressed who are acting, historical, and temporal, even though the ruler thinks and behaves as if they are not. Exploring interaction makes it possible to reveal power, and this is particularly true in the sexual relations of power. In women’s shelters, as women recount the interactions of privatized abuse, consciousness exposes and makes public previously obscured power relations.

      Power is not exclusively enacted among opposites, by one gender on the other, as men and boys are not excluded from sexual exploitation as individuals. The evidence that men and boys are in some cases sexually exploited is not a negation of sexual power that is a female class condition. Rigid adherence to false binary oppositions (individual men and boys versus individual women and girls) conveys the contrary (that men and boys are not equally exploited) and then makes the exception, the sexual exploitation of boys, into the rule.

      However, Foucault’s rejection of binary oppositions are not based on the same assumptions as those of the feminist theory I am presenting here, which looks beyond oppositions to understand the complexities of sexual relations of power. For Foucault and his followers, rejecting СКАЧАТЬ