Prostitution has ever been, as Priscilla Alexander (1998) notes, “A Difficult Issue for
Feminists,” one that has engendered bitter academic debate and
sometimes nasty political infighting.1
The difficulty of this issue
may be attributed, in part, to the extraordinary challenge of producing an
adequate feminist theory of sex work that is sensitive to the many
different kinds of prostitution that exist and the varied political,
social, and economic contexts within which they occur, and yet can
nevertheless offer a compelling critical framework within which to analyze
sex work itself. Laurie Shrage has cautioned that feminism too often
traffics in the “fiction” that prostitution is “an
isolable phenomenon possessing a single transcultural meaning”
(
1994b, 569). Similarly, Martha Nussbaum warns
that “[p]rostitution is not a single thing. It can only be
well understood in its social and historical context” (
1999, 280). Nevertheless, it is my contention that
feminist theory is not mired in the quicksand of ambiguity when it comes
to offering a theoretical analysis and critique of practices of sex work.
The emphases on particularity and historical context do not thereby render
generalization impossible (and if they did, more than just the theoretical
debate on sex work would be in jeopardy).
2 It
is possible to make some general claims about sex work, because some
things are generally true about sex work worldwide, without
either lapsing into a problematic essentializing of the practice of
prostitution or foreclosing the possibility that these general features of
sex work might change. This theoretical balancing act is not new to
feminism, which has confronted the difficulty, for example, of maintaining
the existence of feminism in the face of the de-essentialization of the
category “woman.”
Shrage's and Nussbaum's
cautions are a call for careful, nuanced analysis, one that can
acknowledge the complexities and cultural differences of various practices
of prostitution. They are not, I suspect, a demand that feminists cease to
offer critical assessments of those practices.
It is in this spirit that I propose to reread the existing feminist
literature on sex work and offer my own suggestion as to how these
positions can be incorporated and redeployed in order to produce a more
comprehensive feminist analysis and critique of prostitution. In this
article, I examine what I see as the three most prominent feminist
positions on prostitution.3
This
homogenization of the debate into three major “positions” is
of course artificial, and an oversimplification besides. As a schematic
framework, however, I think these abbreviations are a fair (if also
necessarily violent) representation of the Western feminist discourse
regarding sex work. I offer them not as an ivory tower
“intervention” into the sex work debate by a self-proclaimed
“expert,” but rather as a contribution to that discussion by
one of its committed participants.
The first, which I will call
the Abolitionist view,
4 argues that
prostitution is a hierarchically
gendered relation, and must be
understood through the lens of male domination and women's
oppression. The second position, which I will call the Sex Radical view,
argues that prostitution is a variety of
sexual activity, and
must be understood through the lens of sexual stigma and marginalization.
Finally, the third position, which I will call the Sex as Work view,
argues that prostitution is primarily an
economic relation, and
must be understood as a form of labor under capitalism. I argue that we,
for the most part, overlook the second position and focus, rather, on
integrating feminism's gendered and economic critiques of
prostitution. I am skeptical that prostitution is best understood as a
sexual practice, in part because I think this view neglects what is
definitive of current practices of sex work for the sake of a naive
celebration of minority sexuality. By contrast, I find the Abolitionist
and the Sex as Work views to be the most powerful theoretical tools at our
disposal, and the perspectives that can most comprehensively account for
what we empirically know about prostitution and two of its definitive
features as it generally exists worldwide—its hierarchically
gendered and economically exploitive status.
5 The constants to which I refer in claiming that sex work is,
in general, hierarchically gendered and economically exploitive are 1) it
is primarily women who work as prostitutes (although child
prostitution, an issue I do not consider here, tends to be less female
dominated); 2) prostitution is frequently the best-paying employment
opportunity for the women who engage in it; 3) prostitution is
nevertheless illegal in most countries, as well as being one of the most
socially and morally stigmatized forms of income generation for women; and
4) by and large, it is men who buy the sexual services
prostitutes offer, an activity to which virtually no stigma attaches (I
leave the issues of trafficking and procurement aside). These facts are
acknowledged by nongovernmental organizations worldwide, no matter what
their position on sex work as such (Brody 1997;
Human Rights Watch 1995; Lim
1998). Throughout this article, then, “prostitution,”
“prostitute,” or “sex work/er” will always
only refer to adult females; and, since I do not address transgender or
transsexual prostitution (a scandalously underdocumented phenomenon
[Namaste 2000]), I will use the words
“female” and “woman” relatively interchangeably.
(For male prostitution, see Aggleton 1999; Marlowe 1997; West
1993.)
Moreover, I argue that this integrated feminist analysis must be
reoriented toward a consideration of prostitution as a function or symptom
of various masculinities. Mimicking the standard legal approaches
to prostitution that criminalize sex workers but not their clients, the
feminist literature on prostitution has by and large considered sex work
as a problem of women's agency, freedom, or sexual
expression. Indeed, there is notoriously little data on the men who visit
prostitutes; most feminist empirical research on prostitution focuses on
sex workers themselves (Høigård and
Finstad 1992; Vanwesenbeeck 1994; partial
exceptions include Bishop and Robinson 2002,
1998; Davidson 1998;
Davidson and Layder 1994). But in order for
there to be a market for women's sexual services, there must
be a demand that fuels and sustains that market. And in order to
understand that demand, we must investigate those doing the
demanding—men themselves. While this approach analyzes prostitution
from a gendered perspective, it diverges from the Abolitionist framework
insofar as it focuses on masculinity, not women or male domination. This
corrects for the Abolitionist failure to consider a crucial consequence of
its own understanding of power, namely, that men too are the constructed
subjects of gender oppression. Rather than implicitly holding men
“responsible” for the existence of sex work (much less
“male domination”), I suggest we view sex work as a
symptom of particular masculine identificatory norms. Indeed, sex
work may exist not simply in order to prop up certain roles or
expectations of women, but rather (or also) to meet the defensive
demands of anxious masculinities, which disguise their need for validation
by producing sexual satisfaction—specifically via the use of
prostitutes—as male privilege or entitlement.
The feminist focus on women in sex work may inadvertently
reproduce the gender hierarchy it seeks to critique, insofar as this
traditionally feminine assumption of responsibility for the burden of
“explaining” prostitution leaves the essential aspect of
men's participation in sex work uninterrogated. By focusing
on prostitution as a problem of women, we only reinforce the notion that
women or prostitutes are the problem. This focus also has the
unfortunate (if unwitting) effect of naturalizing female prostitution as
an inevitable and unremarkable feature of human life. The Abolitionist
account of gender hierarchy does this insofar as it mysteriously exempts
men from the radical process of gender construction to which women, in its
view, are subjected. Sex Radical and Sex as Work feminists, however, also
fail to theorize the masculine half of the prostitution relation, focusing
instead on how women's choices and agency have been constrained by
the Abolitionist theory of complete and total coercion. These feminists
thus argue for the existence of social meanings of prostitution other than
exploitation, such as political rebellion or economic activity. This view
of women's agency has the effect of naturalizing prostitution as an
ever-present “option” for women that does not itself demand
explanation. For Sex Radical and Sex as Work feminists, the problem is not
prostitution but, rather, that women are not free to be prostitutes
divorced from social stigma or economic exploitation. In either
case—whether prostitution is the problem, or social stigma and
exploitation are the problem—the focus remains on the ability of
women to choose sex work and the relative desirability of their
doing so.
Rather than wondering what to “do” about women sex
workers, I suggest we investigate the reasons why there are women
sex workers in the first place. If prostitution is to be altered in any
way—if its existence is to become less exploitive, hierarchical,
racialized, and stigmatized, or even if it is to dissipate or be
overcome—the root causes of prostitution must be addressed. Those
causes are not (simply) women's vulnerability, nor are they reducible
to women's enterprising nature or their active self-assertion in the
economic sphere. All of these reasons explain why women engage in
any form of work. Women could not engage in prostitution if it
were not already a sexual and economic category, a “pink
skirt” ghetto to which women workers are always already relegated.
Prostitution exists as a job for women because of men's demand for
it, a demand that needs to be understood in terms of the requirements of
successful masculine identification. This means that neither prostitution
nor men are the “problem” to be addressed in a
feminist analysis of sex work; rather, it is cultural formations of
masculine identity that require scrutiny and interrogation. This
investigation and analysis is the essential precursor to a successful
transformation of women's exploited, stigmatized, and subordinated
sexual labor into the possibility of a practice of freedom.
PROSTITUTION AS EXPLOITATION
Kathleen Barry is feminism's preeminent spokeswoman against
prostitution. The foundational premise of her work is that prostitution
epitomizes women's subordination and constitutes the foundation of
patriarchal male domination: “[W]hile pornographic media
are the means of sexually saturating society, while rape is paradigmatic
of sexual exploitation, prostitution, with or without a woman's
consent, is the institutional, economic, and sexual model for women's
oppression” (1995, 24; 1979; cf. also Jeffreys 1997
and the writings of Janice Raymond).6
Raymond's writings on prostitution may be found online at
the Website for the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW;
www.catw.org), a fiercely anti-prostitution NGO that Barry founded, and
Jeffreys and Raymond codirect.
While Barry is the best-known feminist critic of prostitution, she is
not, to my mind, the best elaborator of the theoretical assumptions that
undergird her position. For example, she uselessly defines prostitution as
“sexual exploitation sustained over time” (1995, 29) and refuses the possibility of meaningful
consent under conditions of male domination (1979, 1995), yet cannot
explain what constitutes exploitation, aside from coercion (which
must be ubiquitous under patriarchy anyway, given the impossibility of
consent). Although Barry's later work drops the problematic trope of
slavery, she is unable to provide an adequate account of the conditions of
power, freedom, and agency under which she believes desire and consent are
produced, and that therefore govern women's and men's lives to
the extent that prostitution cannot be defined as anything other than
sexual exploitation.
If Barry's work does not supply its own theoretical basis, then
we must look elsewhere to explicate her position. In my view, the most
powerful elaboration of the theoretical underpinnings of Barry's
critique is to be found in the work of Catharine MacKinnon. Although
MacKinnon is not primarily an anti-prostitution activist,7
her theory of gender and sexuality animates
Barry's critique of prostitution, and therefore a consideration of
MacKinnon's theory in this regard will help to clarify Barry's
position at crucial moments of ambiguity.
8 Certainly MacKinnon's major writings (1987, 1989) postdate
Barry's initial foray into theorizing prostitution (1979). However, without MacKinnon to provide the basis
for her critique of prostitution, Barry's theory of gender oppression
would never get off the ground. Moreover, MacKinnon similarly compresses
all forms of oppressive behavior into manifestations of a single dynamic,
such that her analysis of pornography (for which she is most famous) can,
in my view, be applied to sex work as another crystallized form of male
domination.
The starting point of MacKinnon's theory is that there is no such
thing as “just sex”; that is, there is no original or natural
“way sex is” that is somehow presocial or precultural.
“Sex” here means sexuality, which includes, but is
not limited to, sexual activity of whatever variety. Indeed, sex here also
refers to gender, for MacKinnon claims it is impossible to
distinguish between the various phenomena of sex/gender/sexuality,
since all are products of power relations. Power constitutes gender
(understood as either social identity or biology “simply”),
which creates and determines sexuality, which classifies bodies and
behavior as “masculine” or “feminine.” There is no
“just sex” for MacKinnon because there is no
“before.”
This means, then, that all existing sexual relations, including
prostitution, are in no way a reflection or organization of
“natural” sexual desire. Barry concurs on this point, noting:
“There are no biological givens about sex that are not social and
political constructions. In that sense society precedes biology”
(1995, 22). There is no “reason”
rooted in the constitution of bodies, generalized patterns of behavior, or
biological necessity for the sexual relations that we observe and in which
we participate. Rather, MacKinnon argues, these relations are due to
various imperatives and organizations of power, which, in our particular
historical context, are forms of male power. Thus sex, sexuality,
and gender are by necessity male constructions, and it makes no
sense to talk about a separate “women's sexuality,” for
it is not as though women could ever locate a sphere that is outside,
beyond, or before the realm of male power in which they could construct
it. Because men make the rules, men also limit the available options. To
choose among them is indeed to make a choice of some sort, but it is in no
way women's own.
It is unclear whether or not Barry subscribes to as totalizing an
understanding of male power as MacKinnon's.9
Denise Schaeffer (2001) insists that
MacKinnon's system is not, in fact, total, emphasizing two key
passages that she claims amount to a “careful qualification”
of it: first, a sentence in which MacKinnon claims that patriarchy is only
“nearly perfect,” and another where she mentions a
“shadow world” that women inhabit wherein they might glimpse
the truth of their condition. These rather ambivalent
“qualifications” are nevertheless belied by a preponderance of
determinist passages throughout the entirety of MacKinnon's
writings; to take only one (wholly representative) example:
“[T]here is no such thing as a woman as such; there are
only walking embodiments of men's projected needs. Under male
supremacy, asking whether there is, socially, a female sexuality is the
same thing as asking whether women exist” (1989, 119).
As already noted, Barry does not
present any theorization of the larger dynamics of male domination as she
understands them. However, we have some indication that Barry
must subscribe to a MacKinnon-like framework, when she writes (in
a typical passage):
Can women choose to do prostitution? As much as they
can choose any other context of sexual objectification and dehumanization
of the self…. [W]omen actually do
not consent to prostitution or any other condition of sexual
exploitation—in rape, in marriage, in the office, in the factory,
and so on. (Barry 1995, 33; original
emphases)
Although neither Barry nor MacKinnon explains how or why women's
choices have become so limited, both nevertheless agree that choice is a
meaningless concept under male domination.
Barry also lacks an independent analysis of how and why the sexual
exploitation of women is so pervasive. This is the crux of
MacKinnon's theory and, to my mind, the major contribution of her
work to feminist theory. For MacKinnon, male power is distinctly
sexual, but not because men have it “as a sex” over
women “as a sex.” Men's power is sexual because it
creates the categories of sex itself—male power creates the genders
man and woman. Moreover, it does not create them equal.
The establishment of the genders man/woman is also the establishment
of the genders active/passive, strong/weak, subject/object,
dominant/submissive. MacKinnon concludes that men have not simply
produced inequality—they have made it sexy:
“Dominance eroticized defines the imperatives of its
[sexuality's] masculinity, submission eroticized defines
its femininity” (1989, 130). In order for
sex to happen at all, in any form, MacKinnon argues, relations of
hierarchy—of dominance and submission—must be present. Her
conclusion: no power, no inequality, no sex. By extension, then,
prostitution constitutes a purified form of male power: an industry of
women paid to be subservient to male sexual demands. What MacKinnon writes
of pornography also explains the dynamic of prostitution:
“Possession and use of women through the sexualization of intimate
intrusion and access to them is a central feature of women's social
definition as inferior and feminine” (1989, 195).
There are a number of critiques of MacKinnon's work that may be
consulted for an elaboration of its various difficulties (Brown 1995; Cornell 1991;
Haraway 1991; Harris
1990). However, if this account of MacKinnon seems in accord with
Barry's critique of prostitution, the two nonetheless diverge when we
ask them each the question, “What, specifically and fundamentally,
is wrong with prostitution?”10
This difference is one that is often
overlooked in examinations of MacKinnon's writings: unlike Barry,
MacKinnon is offering a
structuralist Marxist analysis of gender
relations, while other Abolitionists rely on a
humanist analysis
(whether Marxist or not). Thus MacKinnon, by definition, has no answer to
the question of what is wrong with prostitution. She is explicit that she
is not offering a moral critique (
2001, 710;
1989, 138, 196;
1987);
nor is it possible, within the parameters of her system, to rely on a
normative ideal of who or what women “really” are on the basis
of which to criticize the damage that male domination perpetuates against
them, since there is no “before” power to which we can appeal.
Prostitution (like pornography) can be problematic for MacKinnon only
insofar as it perpetuates the mystification of gendered, hierarchical
imperatives of power. In other words, prostitution is a clear example of
men's constructing women as sexually available and subservient, and
yet this construction is itself rendered invisible as an act of power
through various modes of naturalization.
11 This is Marx's critique of ideology and mystification,
which MacKinnon has deftly applied to the existence of gender inequality
and oppression.
Insofar as prostitution seems natural and
inevitable, male domination has succeeded in essentializing its
imperatives, thereby rendering women's oppression invisible and
masking its own productive power. Like sex, there is nothing essential
about it that might render it intrinsically objectionable.
Barry's texts, by contrast, refuse this amoral reading. What
emerges from Barry's work is precisely what Denise Schaeffer (2001) argues must be present in
MacKinnon's work if it is to be coherent—namely, a notion of
selfhood that is possessed of integrity and capable of agency. Barry
writes:
When the human being is reduced to a body, objectified to
sexually service another, whether or not there is consent, violation of
the human being has taken place. The human being is the bodied self
that human rights is meant to protect and human development is intended to
support…. In the fullness of human experience, when women are
reduced to their bodies, and in the case of sexual exploitation to sexed
bodies, they are treated as lesser, as other, and thereby subordinated.
This is sexual exploitation and it violates women's human rights to
dignity and equality. (1995, 23–24;
original emphasis)
In explicitly adopting a human rights perspective in her later work,
Barry argues that prostitution is wrong because, as sexual exploitation,
“it harms the human self and destroys through sex, dehumanizing
women” (1995, 71).
For Barry, objectification and violation are synonymous—to treat
another person “as a body” and not “as a human
being” is to violate her. This reliance on a self that is degraded
through the practice of prostitution is a familiar argument, and the
bedrock claim of much anti-prostitution feminism. Carole Pateman's
famous answer to the question of what is wrong with prostitution is that
precisely because of the close connection between the self and gender,
prostitution can never be a healthy or nondegrading occupation for
women:
When a man enters into the prostitution contract he is not
interested in sexually indifferent, disembodied services; he contracts to
buy sexual use of a woman for a given period…. Womanhood
… is confirmed in sexual activity, and when a prostitute contracts
out use of her body she is thus selling herself in a very real
sense. (1988, 207; original
emphasis)
For Ryan Bishop and Lillian S. Robinson, sex work is the quintessence
of alienated labor, labor that is “alienated in the emotive sense:
that is, separated and causing separation from authentic
feelings, giving rise to isolation and revulsion” (1998, 247; original emphasis; cf. their identical
locution in 2002, 19). The implication is that
there is some locus of “authentic feelings” from which the sex
worker becomes alienated, causing “isolation and revulsion.”
And in arguing for a valorization of masturbation as one means of reducing
the pervasiveness of prostitution, Julia O'Connell Davidson claims
that if masturbation were “valued in the same way that heterosexual
coupling now is,” then “we would all be in a position to
recognize and realize ourselves as sexual subjects, without turning anyone
else into an object” (2002, 95).
Unfortunately, the self on which these feminist critics of
prostitution rely is an ideal that remains unexplicated. This leads to
significant problems—most obviously, it is unclear what else human
beings are besides bodies, which would thereby make it
illegitimate to treat them as only bodies (or
“objects”). Barry implies there must be something
else, since she defines objectification as treatment in which a person is
“reduced to a body” (my emphasis). But if we have no
account of the self, we can have no idea why objectification is a
problematic way of treating someone. If feminist critics do not present an
independent account of a self that somehow exceeds or is distinct from the
body, the force of their argument remains tautological, not
normative—objectification is bad because it has already been defined
as violation.
The root of this tautology is the Abolitionist understanding of social
meaning, which so saturates the self that there is no need for an
independent account of it, since to be a woman under male domination is to
be an object by definition. Clearly, then, this holds for women
in prostitution. Male domination, as the hegemonic discourse,
simply forecloses the possibility that prostitution could ever mean
anything to anyone besides the exploitation of women. Thus,
objectification is always violation: Male power so totally
creates sexuality that it determines the entirety of its social meaning,
whether individual choosers acknowledge that meaning or not. Because
“women” and “men,” like prostitution and other
sexual practices, are social entities, and because the realm of the social
is governed by the hegemony of male domination, there is simply no space
for any other meanings (or selves) to proliferate.12
Thus, Barry's objection to objectification cannot stand;
it relies on a self which, on her own terms, does not and cannot
exist.
The ability of male domination to reproduce itself in the Abolitionist
account is staggering, but it is in fact MacKinnon's and Barry's
theories that foreclose the possibility of innovation in social
meaning. Their absolutist positions mysteriously focus exclusively on the
meaning and nature of women's choices and identities under
patriarchy. This conspicuously fails to acknowledge the ways in which men
are produced as men under hegemonic gender discourses. Because
power is described and understood as “male
domination,” men are somehow “responsible” for the
production of women as passive, violable, and so on. But if
sex/gender/sexuality are as radically constructed as MacKinnon and
Barry insist, men too must be the constructed subjects of
masculine power. Who, then, instituted male domination? After all, men
first needed to become “men” in order to figure out what
“men as a gender want sexually.” What does it mean to say that
power is masculine if there is no base or “substance” that
exists before that denotes who these men are, to which power is,
in MacKinnon's scheme, inextricably linked?
This gap between power's effects and power's instigators
suggests that domination, whether defined as “male” or not,
cannot belong to some preexisting substrata of malevolent men who are
busily plotting the domination of those they produce as
“women.” Although it is true that men generally possess
greater physical, political, and economic power than women, they are not
therefore exempt from the coercive structures of gender identification
that “male domination” produces for them, too. Masculinity is
no more “natural” than femininity, and it is no more primary,
first, or “before” to be dominant than to be submissive. This
means that although male domination may produce prostitution as primarily
and specifically a job for women, and on the other hand also
demand female sexual purity (hence, the derogatory usage of
“whore”), nevertheless men as clients of sex workers
are also produced by “male domination.” The idea that
men's sexual desires are more urgent, more powerful, and more
numerous than women's certainly contributes to tacit acceptance of
prostitution; the notions that men are actors in the world, better suited
to displays of courage and bodily strength, and the romantic or sexual
aggressors, are also reliable expectations of masculinity that shore up
the image of men as buyers of sexual services. Yet it is important to
remember that definitions of masculinity, even when those identifications
look oppressive or domineering, are no more “intrinsic” or
“natural” to men than any other kind of identification. Men
are no more suited to these identificatory categories than women are to
the roles of “virgin” and “whore.”
I return to the importance of denaturalizing masculinity in the final
section, because I think it offers the key to a successfully nonmoralizing
redeployment of the gendered critique of sex work. I turn first to examine
two different groups of feminists who deny the fatalism of
MacKinnon's and Barry's approaches, and argue that prostitution
must be understood as more than simply a gendered phenomenon.
PROSTITUTION AS SEX/WORK
Dissatisfied with Barry's and MacKinnon's monocausal account
of prostitution, two major responses have developed from within the
feminist and sex worker activist community. The first is animated by Gayle
Rubin, who rejects the idea that sexuality is a mere by-product of gender
(oppression), arguing that sex, too, “is a vector of
oppression” (1984, 293). Rubin calls for a
radical theory of sexuality, one that is “not reducible to, or
understandable in terms of, class, race, ethnicity, or gender” (p.
293). Her “sex-positive” position has been profoundly
influential in shaping the feminist debate over prostitution, and can be
seen as foundational to “pro-sex” and/or Sex Radical
perspectives on prostitution (e.g., Califia 2002, 2000; Nagle 1997; Queen 1997a,
1997b), just as MacKinnon's analysis
grounds the anti-prostitution feminist position.
By contrast, the editors of and contributors to the collection
Global Sex Workers (Doezema and Kempadoo
1998) argue for an understanding of prostitution as a form of
labor, thereby taking the expression “sex work”
literally. According to Kempadoo, “we view prostitution not as an
identity—as a social or a psychological characteristic of women,
often indicated by ‘whore’—but as an income-generating
activity or form of labor for women and men” (1998a, 3). These writers thus acknowledge both the
gendered nature of sex work—“Today the majority of the
world's sex workers are women, working within male-dominated
businesses and industries” (p. 6)—and the problems of
exploitation that occur in the sex industry—“the exploitation
of sexual labor is intensified under systemic capitalism, leaving it open
to similar kinds of pressures and manipulation that any other waged labor
faces” (p. 8)—without either categorizing all prostitution as
violence against women or forgoing a critique of the often brutal
conditions under which women (and men) work in the sex industry.
Both of these positions refuse the Abolitionist contention that
women's engaging in prostitution is simply or only exploitation. When
MacKinnon or Barry argue that women can never be understood to consent to
prostitution, they are claiming a single, universal, determinist cause of
both the existence and meaning of prostitution for women: male
domination. Sex Radicals and Sex as Work exponents deny this monolithical
meaning, arguing instead that prostitution both means something
different than what the Abolitionists argue, and that this is possible
because women themselves contribute to the production of that
meaning (Zatz 1997). Rubin's assertion that
sex, too, is a vector of oppression dislodges the patriarchal stranglehold
on power that MacKinnon and Barry claim to document. If sexuality has its
own modes of value and stigmatization, then prostitution can also be
understood as a punished or problematic form of sexual activity. While
this stigmatization may coexist with gendered forms of power and
domination, it is importantly also a by-product of the cultural discourses
of law, medicine, religion, and psychology, all of which argue for the
sanctity of sexual relationships, the importance of monogamy for physical
and psychic health, and the refusal of exchanging money for sex as a
degradation of the human being. Notes Rubin: “Like homosexuals,
prostitutes are a criminal sexual population stigmatized on the basis of
sexual activity” (1984, 286).
The Sex as Work position, by contrast, simply tables the debate about
social meaning altogether. Prostitution may in some cases be exploitive,
and may in some cases challenge the gender or sexual status quo, but
neither of these is due to anything about sex work itself as sex
work. As labor, prostitution may be exploited or it may be
unionized, and workers may have more or less bargaining power, freedom of
movement, and desirable working conditions. But sex workers do not, as
sex workers, carry the burden of determining the meaning of sex and
gender relations on their shoulders. This successfully nonmoralizing
position makes room for the possibility of all sorts of social meanings of
prostitution, dependent upon the particular historical and geopolitical
context in which it occurs, without forgoing the task of critique. Within
this framework, sex work could be both transgressive of gender
expectations and exploited as labor, or thoroughly reificatory of
feminine sexual norms and yet utterly uncoerced.
Rubin acknowledges the distinction between sexuality and economic
activity, noting that “[s]ex work is an occupation, while
sexual deviation is an erotic preference” (1984, 286). Despite this, some Sex Radical feminists
argue explicitly for an elision of the differences between erotic
orientation and occupation. Joan Nestle (1998)
has claimed that prostitutes and lesbians are powerfully linked by the
challenges they pose not only to male definitions of appropriate female
sexuality but also to feminism itself, which, she argues, similarly
polices the bounds of appropriate womanhood: “Both dykes and whores
have a historical heritage of redefining the concept of woman” (p.
250). Jill Nagle also analogizes sex work with lesbianism, implicitly
claiming that both are “options” whose only drawbacks are in
social condemnation:
[T]ry juxtaposing the statement “No woman
with other options could possibly choose sex work” with “No
woman with other options could possibly choose lesbianism.” Elements
of these arguments sound nearly identical: Why risk the stigma, give up
privileges, take on pariah status, to do something many believe is
aesthetically if not morally offensive? (1997,
6; cf. Queen 1997a, 1997b)
Indeed, Nagle presents homosexuality and sex work as analogous
practices of sexual deviance, which are deliberate political acts:
Like the bisexual woman, the proud harlot, the lesbian
feminist stripper, and the part-time whore working her way through grad
school all suggest that women can choose the less socially
sanctioned of the good girl/bad girl boxes, and can do so out of
liberation rather than compulsion, or can refuse the dichotomy entirely.
(1997, 6; original emphasis)
Carol Queen presents a slightly more nuanced account of how chosenness
of deviant sexuality can come to be seen as an erotic orientation, noting
that “queer whores seem most likely to define sex work as part of
their sexuality, acknowledging the sex they have for money as desirable
and one component of their sexual makeup” (1997a, 186). She thus goes to some length to emphasize
that sex work can be an enjoyable and sexually stimulating form of
income:
What do the whores who are content with sex work like about
it? Besides the most obvious answer (the money), the sex-positive,
feminist sex worker may cite flexibility and independence, working for
herself, the recognition of her sexual power, getting to have sex outside
the confines of a relationship, having a lot of sex and/or sexual
variety, pride in stepping outside the restrictions imposed on “good
girls,” pride in sexual prowess or exhibitionism, an increased
ability to set limits, and opportunities to explore her sexuality through
roles and fantasy. (1997a, 187)
Queen's key claim, which informs her fundamental objection to the
Abolitionist position, is that it is sex negativity that makes
prostitution a generally wretched existence. Sex workers have it rough
most often, on her account, because of their internalized fear and hatred
of sex itself:
As an activist in the sex-work community, I have met well
over a hundred prostitutes, as many exotic dancers, a few dozen
dominatrices, and a number of models and porn actresses—far more
than have most anti-sex work activists and even most sex researchers. Just
one factor stands out to distinguish those who live well, with no loss of
self-esteem, from those who may find sex work a difficult or even damaging
career choice. Most of the former have sufficient sex information and are
sex-positive. (1997b,
128–29)
Indeed, if (women's) sex negativity were vanquished, she argues,
an egalitarian, gender-blind sexual market would emerge, wherein persons
of every gender are free to become both patron and solicitor of sexual
services (Queen 1997a, 204).
Other Sex Radical feminists acknowledge the distinction between
sexuality and economic activity, arguing that prostitutes offer a
therapeutic service, akin to service work of all sorts (child care,
domestic labor, flight attendant, etc.). This position presents the
prostitute as a skilled laborer ministering to the needs of a vulnerable
population seeking company and human contact, a population perhaps too
undesirable or otherwise unlucky to find sexual fulfillment through more
traditional, noncommercial avenues (Califia
2000, 264–65; Chapkis 1997, 75). A
few even celebrate prostitution as a kind of sacred ritual of goddess
worship, a practice of spiritual healing that confers sexual energy and
positivity on both its practitioners and its clients (see the discussion
of Annie Sprinkle in Chapkis 1997,
“Afterword”; Queen 1997a). Whether
as therapy or spirituality, however, prostitution in this analysis is
solely about sex: Prostitution is stigmatized and criminalized because of
sex negativity; it promises sexual fulfillment to all seekers, which is
their right; it is empowering for the sex-positive prostitute who
celebrates her professional duties; and, if it were to become available to
all, promises a kind of sexual egalitarianism wherein perhaps even payment
for sexual services would wither away, and all would engage in their own
consensual sexual pursuits without shame.
Sex Radicals' overflowing valorizations of sex work as an
exciting, fulfilling, and socially beneficial career option stem, I think,
from these feminists' desire to produce a new meaning for
prostitution—to redeploy “whore” in an empowering way,
just as the epithets “queer” and “dyke” have been
taken over by gay and gender activism. This makes sense in the context of
the elaborate legacy of anti-prostitution feminism, whose determinist
accounts of “male domination” seem to foreclose the
possibility that the meaning of prostitution could ever change, much less
be changed by sex workers themselves. To acknowledge this
attempted redeployment of sex work, however, is to acknowledge the very
privileged site at which the Sex Radical position is being articulated in
the United States. Queen's list of the positive aspects of
prostitution is, in fact, a list of benefits for a particular
subset of sex workers, who already benefit from their social
positionings as white, well educated, not homeless or otherwise
economically vulnerable, and situated in both the richest country in the
world and the most sexually liberal city in that country, San Francisco.
These are sex workers who have a fair amount of power in determining what
they do and who they are, such that they can, more or less,
redeploy the meanings of these choices. Nagle acknowledges her perspective
on this count (Nagle 1997, 2), yet by itself,
this acknowledgment is insufficient for formulating an adequate Sex
Radical feminist analysis of prostitution.13
Indeed, what is at stake in defining prostitution as a
deviant sexual practice? And who gets to be included as a sexual
transgressor, and who (because of class, race, nationality, or immigrant
status) is necessarily left out? Does the Sex Radical analysis unwittingly
reward its own practitioners with the distinction of having the most
radical politics, or as engaging in the most cutting edge practice of
queerness?
Moreover, as Kempadoo points out, the conditions of global capitalism
and the international relations between developed and developing countries
are at least as constitutive of prostitution as the hegemonic discourses
of gender or sexuality. The politics of race, geography, and
migration are crucial for understanding the existence of sex work
throughout the globe:
The emerging global economic order has already wreaked havoc
on women's lives…. Skilled and unskilled female workers
constitute the main labor force in the new export-oriented industries
… where they are faced with poor working conditions, are
continually threatened with unemployment due to automation, and experience
mass dismissals due to relocations of whole sectors of the industry. In
many instances, minimum wage, health[,] and safety laws are
overridden by the transnational corporations in these new production
zones, leaving women workers in particularly hazardous situations.
Furthermore, with disruptions to traditional household and family
structures, women are increasingly becoming heads of households….
With dwindling family resources and the western emphasis on the
independent nuclear family, women must also increasingly rely on the state
for provisions such as maternity leave and child-care, yet fewer funds are
allocated by governments for social welfare and programs. Informal sector
work and “moonlighting” is growing and engagement in the
booming sex industries fills a gap created by globalization. (Kempadoo 1998a, 16–17)
Understanding prostitution as merely or purely a gendered or sexual
relation abstracts from these economic constraints, the international
geographic and political relations that have produced them, and the issues
of race and migrancy that determine which workers can work in which
sectors, often leaving migrant women and women of color at the bottom of
the labor pool.
Queen, Nagle, Califia, Nestle, and Chapkis all write about sex work
from the perspective of their own experiences with it. This is an
animating principle of Sex Radical feminist scholarship on
prostitution—the groundbreaking collections of Sex Radical essays on
sex work consist primarily of sex workers' first-person narratives
(Delacoste and Alexander 1998; Nagle 1997). Such testimonies are valuable accounts of
women's experiences of sex work, and are crucially important for the
documentation of a dehumanized and largely invisible population. By
themselves, however, these narratives offer no systematic theorization of
the factors that produce sex work as both the most profitable form of
labor for these women, and one that is always available to them and
primarily only to them, no matter what their own legal status or
the legal status of sex work itself. The activist figureheads for Sex
Radical feminism, as sex workers themselves, direct remarkably little of
their investigative energies toward the conditions under which many
other women become sex workers, conditions that include poverty,
racism, drug addiction, youth, runaway status, migrancy, responsibility
for supporting a family, gendered wage gaps, unemployment, market shifts,
and globalization. The Sex Radical view erases these vulnerabilities,
literally whitewashing them under the rubric of sex-negativity.
Similar errors pervade the Sex as Work position. Although these
feminists are much better at analyzing the dominant structures of race and
capital that adversely affect the women who are prostitutes,
nevertheless there is an odd conflation of otherwise incompatible Marxist
and liberal arguments, wherein labor can be both exploited and yet freely
chosen. For example, Marjan Wijers explains the inherently paradoxical
nature of attempting to exert control over one's life as a poor
person under capitalism, noting that a “great many of the women who
become a [sic] victim of trafficking end up in this
position because they do not want to accept the limitations of their
situation, because they are enterprising, courageous and willing to take
initiatives to improve their living conditions and those of their
families” (Wijers 1998, 77). This
observation is significant for Wijers, not because it highlights
workers' powerlessness under capitalism, but rather because it shows
that “women who have become victims of trafficking cannot be
classified as passive or stupid victims” (p. 70).
Other contributors argue that women may turn to prostitution not out
of poverty, but simply because no other job pays the kind of money that
sex work offers. This is meant to highlight women's agency, insofar
as it shows that women need not be desperately poor in order to pursue sex
work actively. Amalia Lucía Cabezas rightly points out that this
sort of agency is gendered: While Cuban men who migrate to the United
States in search of money and opportunity are seen as self-sufficient and
worthy of respect, “[t]his large space of tolerance is not
offered women who participate in sexual commerce. Their motivations may
vary from travel, entertainment, and clothes to meals, consumer goods, and
the vital daily necessities that make survival in this period of crisis
possible” (Cabezas 1998, 84; cf. Kempadoo 1998b). Importantly, Cabezas notes that these
motivations explain why anyone enters the ranks of wage labor,
even if the jobs are dangerous or unpleasant:
These are some of the same reasons why most people work in
boring, hazardous, and exploitative jobs, and why people choose to improve
their economic circumstances through strategies that include marriage and
migration. In the early 1990s, many even risked their lives crossing the
shark-infested ocean in makeshift rafts. (Cabezas
1998, 84)
She nicely illustrates the ways in which economic necessity is
gendered, disadvantaging women twice over as both economically vulnerable
and stigmatized insofar as they attempt to overcome that vulnerability by
engaging in sex work. Her conclusion, however, is to protest the fact that
women cannot safely or respectably “choose” sex work as a
viable means of self-support, arguing that “policies and studies
must aim to create the most advantageous conditions for women workers to
sell their labor with the recognition that women's sexual labor is
their own. It does not belong to the capitalist patriarchy or the
state” (p. 86).
What these Sex as Work feminists choose to highlight about
women's economic situations is the fact that in the face of
oppressive economic and cultural conditions, women nevertheless
choose prostitution as a form of work. Sex Radical feminists
similarly celebrate the moment of choice as a kind of political resistance
to sexual marginalization and stigma; indeed, choice is at the root of
both groups' political activism. Such faith in the efficacy of
choice, however, must implicitly rely on the idea of an at least
semiautonomous agent who not only exercises choice, but also has some say
over the meaning of that choice. Sex Radicals achieve this
elision between choice and the social meaning of choice by focusing too
narrowly on a subset of sex workers privileged by race, class, and
education. These women do come closest to achieving the status of
the autonomous agent our liberal politics sets up as the norm, just as
childless, well-educated, well-off white women come the closest to
approximating the male norm in employment (and thus come the closest to
earning his salary). We cannot mistakenly extrapolate these conditions,
however, to the majority of sex workers, who are neither all white nor
well-off, and often neither childless nor in possession of the benefits of
a college degree. Moreover, these Sex Radical prostitutes are hardly
positioned to extrapolate their self-made definitions of prostitution to a
venue outside their own local clubs and social circles. This community of
meaning—as significant as it is—may not extend beyond the
boundaries of (certain areas of) San Francisco.14
The major obstacle to the idea of sex work as political
radicalism is the issue of translation: How is the spectator—in
particular, the john—who is not submerged within the worlds
of feminism and/or sex radicalism supposed to recognize a subversive
sex worker? How much is his recognition impeded by the receipt of the very
sexual services he demands?
Similarly, although Sex as Work feminists acknowledge prostitution as
a form of labor, and even the coercive nature of labor itself under
capitalism, nevertheless these observations are marshaled in order to
serve a political project wherein women must be increasingly able to
exercise their choice of sex work, regardless of the existence of
coercive structures. This position conspicuously lacks any critique of
labor per se, a necessary and obvious task given its Marxist inheritance
(Marx argues, of course, that all wage labor is compulsory insofar as it
is necessary to survive [1977,
272–73]). While it is indisputable that women can and do choose
to be sex workers, just as workers around the world can and do choose to
work in sweatshops, factories, hotels, nightclubs, bars, and hair salons,
what is missing from the Sex as Work position is a critique of the
compulsion and exploitation of wage labor itself under capitalism. If, in
fact, prostitution is one more kind of dangerous, illegal, and
exploitative labor to which the poor, migrants, women of color,
gender/sexual deviants, and other marginalized persons are inevitably
relegated under strained (and even “normal”) economic
conditions in the capitalist market, then what is needed is not a defense
of women's ability to choose sex work, or an interpretation
of sex work (or any labor) as “free choice,” but
rather a critique of the economic, racial, and gendered power relations
that coincide to produce sex work itself as the most lucrative option (and
often because of its illegal status) for so many at-risk
workers.
Sex Radicals and Sex as Work feminists are surely right that as a
public policy, Abolitionism harms sex workers much more than it helps
them. “Rehabilitation” of prostitutes only deprives women (who
in many places are not traditionally expected or sometimes even allowed to
work) of the most lucrative employment available, sending them in search
of scarce positions in various other industries with just as poor (if not
poorer) working conditions, and for significantly and predictably lower
wages. Moreover, Sex Radical and Sex as Work feminists' worthy goals
of easing punitive criminal and immigration laws will alleviate some of
the most damaging harms of trafficking and international sex work for
women.
These policy positions, however, neglect the more radical critique
that the practice of prostitution demands. The emphasis on choice seems to
suggest that our only goal can be the mitigation—not
transformation—of coercive structures, and therefore only the
facilitation—not overcoming—of women's participation in
prostitution. Systems of domination—like capitalism, for instance,
but also gender and racial hierarchy, not to mention immigration law and
police regulation—thus become naturalized, insofar as these
difficulties are seen as extrinsic to the practice of sex work (and
all labor under capitalism), rather than constitutive of it. They
are thus impervious to change. Although the possibility of transforming
such pervasive and pernicious systems of domination like sexism, racism,
and economic exploitation may seem an impossibility, we cannot allow our
theories to compromise in the face of this formidable task. Absent the
transformation of the more fundamental relations of gender hierarchy,
racism, and (global) capitalism, it is highly doubtful that the practice
of prostitution could ever be anything but harmful for women.
These problems are not incidental to prostitution, any more than they are
incidental to domestic labor, secretarial work, cleaning services, child
care, or social work. It is because of these relations of power
that such professions are produced as “options” for women, as
the jobs that most men do not (want to) do. That women—but
especially poor women, migrant women, and women of color—are
relegated to such economic strata without question or comment belies the
reality that, unlike the free agent our liberal politics valorizes, women
are indeed not free to “choose” just anything.15
To argue thus is not to suggest that
sex work is inherently loathsome, nor is it to declare all prostitution to
be disreputable or anti-feminist work that no one in her right mind ought
to pursue. The former claim is obviously untrue, as we have seen in
various Sex Radical accounts of sex work. The latter claim is one that I
believe irrelevant to feminist research. Feminism is not inquiry into the
morality of women's choices and behavior; rather, it
considers women's ability to choose and act in freedom, as social,
economic, and political equals.
The question thus becomes how to theorize the constrained
choice to become a sex worker, without moralizingly declaring all sex work
to be exploitation or violence against women. This cannot be accomplished
through the Abolitionist reliance on a humanist ontology (for this is the
root of their moralism), but neither can it be accomplished by relying
(however implicitly) on a liberal notion of the autonomous agent, a
fiction that obscures the very structures of power and domination that
render its realization impossible. MacKinnon's theory comes the
closest to offering a nonmoralizing analysis of power and coercion, but,
as I have argued, it also fatalistically forecloses any possibility of
political change. This fatalism is the result of her failure to consider
two very important consequences of her own theory of gender oppression;
namely, that men too are the constructed subjects of male domination, and
second, that if there is no “before” power, then men cannot be
held “responsible” for the existence of male domination.16
That MacKinnon so consistently overlooks the
production of men under “male domination” implicitly grants a
founding assumption of the power hierarchy she claims to critique; namely,
the given-ness of the male perspective as the perspective, the
norm from which “woman” deviates. The one-sidedness of her
analysis thus shores up the dynamic of male domination that, she argues,
must be effectively overcome if feminism is to succeed (1989), suggesting that it is indeed MacKinnon herself
who produces the fated and eternal dominion of male power.
I therefore suggest that if we are to understand the multiple ways in
which women's choices in and around sex work are constrained, we must
return to an examination of prostitution as a function of gender
hierarchy, albeit not in the way in which any of the
Abolitionists recommend. Instead, I propose we consider sex work as both a
product of masculinity and a practice that (re) produces masculinity as an
identificatory norm for men. The three most prominent feminist
perspectives on the problem of prostitution approach women
themselves as the conundrum to be deciphered—the paradox of
“women as sex workers” is what theorists and researchers have
sought to explain. I suggest that we reverse perspectives and seek to
explain the problem of “men as consumers of women's sexual
services.” Understanding sex work as a function of masculinities
offers a crucial unifying framework by which to understand the almost
historically universal development of a sexual market in which women cater
virtually exclusively to the needs and desires of men. This offers new
possibilities for understanding the social meaning of prostitution, and it
opens up potential for radical transformation of its exploitive and
oppressive conditions.
MASCULINITY AND RADICAL TRANSFORMATION
The Sex as Work position offers a crucial reminder that prostitution
cannot simply be understood as a by-product of relations of gender and
sexuality. By focusing on prostitution as a form of work, Sex as Work
feminists are able to resist the Abolitionist reduction of all
prostitution to women's subordination, and yet remain flexible enough
to accommodate important observations regarding the gendered nature of
this work. Although it is reasonable to believe that women, like all
workers, engage in sex work because they need to support themselves and
others, nevertheless we must also interrogate the very existence
of prostitution as a form of work for women to begin with. Occupational
segregation is nothing new; documenting its existence (and its concomitant
gendered wage gap) has been an important task of feminist economists for
some time. Surely we can ask the same sorts of questions about
prostitution. This particular form of work seems to cry out for such
feminist scrutiny: Why is this form of work so readily
available—and so lucrative—for women workers?
Although many of the contributors to Global Sex Workers
neglect a sustained focus on gender, Kempadoo offers a striking insight in
this direction when she describes prostitution as a practice in which
“women and men … service vast sections of the worlds'
male populations and render what many consider vital to the
well-being of manhood” (Kempadoo
1998a, 3; my emphases). This important observation that sex work is
“vital” to the maintenance of masculinity suggests that we
must consider not only the economic or materialist underpinnings of the
existence of prostitution, but also the gendered nature of power
relations, such that sex work (even, as Kempadoo notes, when it is
performed by men) is a market that is dictated and perpetuated by
men's (sexual) needs. As Julia O'Connell Davidson and Derek
Layder have noted: “Though ostensibly a commercial exchange, because
sex is so powerfully attached to ideologies about gender, biology, and the
proper relations between the sexes, the transaction between prostitute and
client is not a simple market exchange” (1994, 216–17).
An integrated feminist analysis of sex work would acknowledge
prostitution as a form of economic activity, but it would not abstract
from the fact that this economic activity is engaged in primarily by women
in order to service men. Indeed, this integrated feminist analysis would
ask such questions as: What drives the market for sexual services? Who are
consumers of sexual services? What influences consumers' choices with
regard to sexual service providers, sexual services sought, preferred
location(s) for pursuing sexual services (e.g., rural/urban,
domestic/foreign), and amount spent on sexual services?
That there is shockingly little empirical data to answer these
questions reveals just how naturalized the existence of prostitution is
for so many researchers. That these questions have only begun to be asked
by feminists suggests the degree to which the hierarchical racial, gender,
economic, and sexual relations that govern prostitution's existence
are (perhaps unconsciously) viewed as so overwhelmingly powerful as to be
considered impervious to change. Rather than interrogate these power
dynamics themselves, therefore, researchers have focused on the symptoms
of power and the best means by which to alleviate these symptoms. The
“problem” of prostitution is thus most often considered to be
a quandary about what to “do” about women sex workers, a
question framed as a choice from among the three traditional policy
options of abolitionism, decriminalization, or
legalization/regulation. But this policy approach assumes that
prostitution is a perennial feature of human life, a cultural formation
that transcends culture, a relationship rooted in the natural categories
of masculine and feminine, male and female.
By shifting our economic analysis of prostitution away from questions
of women's agency and sexuality and toward questions of men's
buying power and habits of sexual consumption, not only will we learn
dramatically more about the character of sex work throughout the world,
but we may also begin to see it as a cultural and economic formation that
is subject to change, reform, and transformation. As Holly Wardlow has
recently argued, it is difficult to fit every practice that involves women
exchanging sex for money into the widespread (and primarily Western) sex
work paradigm (2004). This is because the
“globalization of terminology like sex work …
assumes particular kinds of subject positions, motivations, and gendered
identifications that may not be accurate for all women who exchange sex
for money” (p. 1037).
Yet thinking of sex work in terms of men's
“subject positions, motivations, and gendered identifications”
solves this difficulty. Wardlow describes the practices of
“passenger women” among the Huli in Papua New Guinea, women
who leave home in an attempt to abandon patriarchal family relations, and
in the process have sex with numerous men, sometimes receiving a few
dollars or small items in exchange. Wardlow notes that two of the major
presuppositions of the feminist conceptions of sex work simply do not
apply here—first, that women are sexually desirable objects, and
second, that sex might be a form of work. Indeed, Huli culture believes
men to be the objects of beauty and sexual desire, and dismisses
the idea of paying for sex with women as ridiculous and contemptible. As
Wardlow observes, this raises the more crucial question of why
such sex for money exchanges happen at all. Significantly, she suggests
that Huli men pay women for sex in order to construct a specific form of
masculine identity:
At a broader level, Huli men are paying passenger women for a
certain kind of masculinity that they associate with being modern. Young
Huli men are often told that they must choose between one of two
“roads,” or ways of living in the world—nupela
rot (the new or modern road) and rot bilong tumbuna (the
ancestors' road). To adhere to the ancestors' road requires a
man to build a house for himself and one for his wife; he must cook for
himself, certainly when a wife is menstruating but ideally all the time;
and he must learn the lineage myths and genealogies that serve as cultural
capital during land disputes. Modern masculinity, in contrast, is
associated with insouciance about gender-related taboos, obtaining
knowledge through school and urban experience, cultivating a conquest
orientation toward women, and displaying a certain degree of autonomy and
transcendence of clan identity. Paying women for sex is a means for men to
assert this modern masculinity: it shows that they worry little about
women's bodily substances and that they can gain access to women
without enmeshing themselves in the heavy web of kinship obligations
entailed in marriage. (2004,
1028–29)
Although Huli passenger women's practices of sex work defy
conceptualization by any of the three feminist positions set out in this
article, nevertheless we can see these women as acting within a framework
wherein all of their actions (both as sex workers and otherwise)
can be understood as (dis)confirming various forms of masculine
identification for the men they encounter. To become a passenger woman, as
Wardlow argues, may be a form of resistance to certain expectations of
female behavior (e.g., that she will marry the man chosen for her) that
reinforce the authority and legitimacy of male patriarchs. This means that
a passenger woman's father or clan leader may experience a
depreciation of his power or a destabilization of his masculine
identification upon her exchange of sex for money. As we see, however, the
man who pays this same woman for sex may experience a
confirmation of his own modern, contemporary masculinity.
Understanding sex work from the perspective of masculinity in this context
successfully diverts attention from the passenger woman to the gendered
cultural configurations of power as the “problem” to be
deciphered by feminist analysis. We see how the very category of
“passenger woman” itself may have been produced through the
unwitting intersection of various masculine desires, and the ways in which
women's falling into this category can both serve and undermine
different forms of masculine identification.
Noah Zatz has suggested that a primary difficulty with conceiving of
prostitution as work is answering the question of what exactly is
produced by it (1997, 283). This
difficulty is solved, however, if, following both Wardlow and Kempadoo, we
see that the major product of relations of prostitution is particular
formations of manhood or masculinity. Amongst the Huli, as we have seen,
the men who solicit passenger women do so in order to confirm or produce a
self-image of modern manliness. By contrast, as Davidson and Taylor have
demonstrated, white Western sex tourists pursue business and holiday
excursions to Southeast Asia in order to live out a “racially
fantasized male power,” a masculine identity that can be seen as
“the flip side of dissatisfaction with white Western women,
including white Western prostitute women” whom these men find too
self-determined and resistant to their desires (1999, 38). As Bishop and Robinson have shown, the
Internet diaries of sex tourists to Thailand reveal the ways in which
their solicitation of Thai prostitutes serves the function of
simultaneously confirming and erasing the authors' “dominant
subject position, which like all dominant subject positions gets cast as
progressive, liberating, commonsense, unquestioned, natural, logical, and
unmarked” (2002, 21).17
This experience of “unmarked” power cannot, in
this case, be divorced from the nature of the medium through which it is
conveyed—the Internet. However, Davidson has suggested it is
possible that men's use of prostitutes gives them access to a kind of
male community they otherwise lack, whether through the tourist groups
they spontaneously (but reliably) form together while abroad, by bragging
to other men at home about their exploits, or, as Bishop and Robinson
document, by reading about one another's travels on the Internet
(1998, 173–74).
Finally, limited
survey data from a small group of convicted johns in West Coast America
indicate that these men's primary reasons for pursuing prostitutes
were their desire to be with a woman who “likes to get nasty”
and who is in some way “illicit or risky” (
Monto 1999, 80; cf.
Davidson
1998). Although all of these data are limited in scope,
nevertheless we can see how they offer nascent insights into the ways in
which masculine gender and sexual identities lead to prostitute
solicitation for geographically specific groups of men.
Significantly, the American study found that no matter what the
motivation of the prostitute solicitor, his reason for seeking out
prostitutes was intensified and ranked as more important if he was a
repeat customer (Monto 1999:81). In other words,
the more often these men visited prostitutes, the more their motivations
and incentives for doing so were strengthened and reinforced, confirming
the suspicion that prostitution is not only a product of masculine desire
and identification, but also a practice that confirms and reproduces it.
While first-timers were nervous at the prospect of approaching a
prostitute—indeed, some of the study participants had been nabbed by
police decoys their first time out—repeat customers were not only
more comfortable approaching prostitutes, but also more than twice as
likely to feel “shy and awkward” about or “have
difficulty” forming relationships with nonprostitute women. This
suggests that men's use of sexual services may have a polarizing
effect—it not only separates them out from other men, but also
alienates them from nonprostitute women, insofar as it reproduces an
already-existing anxiety regarding noncommercialized sexual
relationships.
Since not all men seek out prostitutes, and not all men who seek out
prostitutes do it (simply) because they are seeking sex (alternative
reasons include companionship and care, or power and control), it is
crucial that additional empirical research be directed toward critical
scrutiny of prostitutes' clients. Davidson's
1998 research, wherein she analyzes the results of client
interviews with men from eight different countries, suggests both the
difficulty of understanding what exactly men “want” from
prostitution, as well as determining what they “get” from it.
Indeed, a sizable proportion of the men interviewed
actively—although not necessarily consciously—understand or
construct their interaction with sex workers as being about something
“more” than just money. Davidson writes:
One of the striking features of interview work with clients
is just how many of them wish to construct some kind of fiction of
mutuality around their encounters with prostitutes. Clients often want to
believe that, although the prostitute is a paid actor, in their
particular case she enjoys her work and derives sexual and/or
emotional satisfaction from her encounter with them….
[S]exual excitement often hinges on a paradox wherein the
fantasist must simultaneously remain conscious of the fact that he or she
controls and authors events and yet conceal this knowledge from him- or
herself. (1998, 158–59)
Queen's observations about her own clients are similarly
striking, insofar as her experience suggests that men do not always get
exactly what they “want” from prostitutes:
Not every client comes to me joyful or even leaves
joyful—in fact, with many men I see the curtain descends right after
orgasm, and their open emotions close, their countenances go blank. Some
are bitter about women, about sex. Their schizophrenic upbringing as men,
after all, taught them that sex is wrong and that they should be
able to have all of it they want. They are engaged in a hurtful dance with
women that is powered by resentment and prolonged by their (and
women's) inability to communicate successfully about the forbidden
and the intimate. (1997a, 198)
Her observations, of course, are particular to her clients, presumably
American men living on the West Coast. But both Davidson's and
Queen's observations, coupled with the data offered by Monto, suggest
the complexity of formations of masculinity, masculine heterosexual
desire, and the ways in which these produce motivations to seek out
prostitutes.
There is, of course, no single, universal masculinity (just as there
is no single, universal practice of prostitution), and no one description
will resonate with every cultural formation of masculinity throughout the
world. Moreover, it is important to remember that the masculine
identification(s) reinforced by prostitution may differ from a
culture's more general masculine identifications, because obviously
not all men (or even most men, in many cultures) visit prostitutes. It is
possible that the identification (re)produced by prostitution consolidates
certain aspects of masculine identity, or produces a pathological
form of mainstream masculinities by emphasizing some aspects of it to the
exclusion of others. Specifying the relationship between these two
formations, then, requires expanded empirical research not just into the
solicitors of prostitutes, but also into the formations of masculinity
that the larger culture demands and produces. Whether differences along
these lines will emerge or not remains to be seen; nevertheless, it is
crucial that they become part of our inquiry into the consumers of sexual
services and their desires that drive the sexual market.
I think it is only by considering prostitution as a function of
masculinity that sex work can be seen as a category that itself requires
explanation, and therefore a political, cultural, and economic formation
that is susceptible to transformation and change. This is not to say that
prostitution is not or should not be considered a legitimate form of work,
one that must be a viable and exploitation-free option for women who
choose it. It is to say, however, that in order for prostitution to be a
viable and exploitation-free option for women, it must no longer be an
illegal, criminalized, stigmatized practice constituted by hierarchically
gendered, racialized, and economic relations. Which is simply to say that
if prostitution were a viable and exploitation-free option for women, it
would not be prostitution anymore. It would, as Sex Radical feminists
argue, be something else entirely—a practice of sexuality, perhaps,
or therapy or spirituality. The abstracted, “philosophical”
definition of prostitution as an exchange of sex for money denies the
situatedness of prostitution as labor, as the labor of
women, and in particular the labor of migrant women, women of
color, and economically vulnerable women. To yearn for the day when any
and every woman might be able to embrace an exploitation- and
violence-free practice of prostitution as her profession is to desire that
which is as yet unthinkable—for what would prostitution be
without these things? Would it still be work? Would it still be work
for women? Because the definition of prostitution does not reside
somewhere outside of its concrete historical occurrences, but is rather
embedded precisely and only within its practices, there can be no
answer to these questions without further empirical research and analysis
of prostitution as a function of masculine identity and desire, for it is
these that drive the market for women's sexual services. Only then
will we begin to grasp the possibility for radical political
transformation, for a women's labor and sexuality that can become
practices of freedom.
