Thanks to Harpy reader heykoukla, who emailed me today on the subject of the British sex-work blogger Belle de Jour, pointing me to a recent post on Belle’s blog about the recent Shapely Prose post quoted far and wide, entitled “Schrödinger’s Rapist.” The SP post is itself worth reading, on the subject of the near-constant low-level awareness of sexual violence women live with. If only I could say the same for Belle’s, wherein her general agreement with the SP post is qualified by the following:
If you’re reading my blog, then you know I’m a long time, dyed-in-the-wool A-number-1 Fan Of Men.
I’m glad she got that out of the way, though I can’t imagine myself saying I’m a Fan of Women because I’m a feminist (it would be absurd, right?), but no matter. Onwards:
Let me state for the record that if being a man was easy, hookers wouldn’t exist. Fact.
She gives no support for this statement and I’m not even sure what this means. Is it her contention that men seek the comfort of sex workers to… escape the violence of the outside word? Baffling.
But fear not: her idea is that the problem here really truly is privilege, because otherwise there is, in her view, no basis to the claim that women face a particularly high level of physical danger:
Bottom line, it takes a particular kind of self-consciously middle-class gynecentric view of the world to imagine that the only physical danger men face is in a war zone. As someone who has lived in more than a few dodgy neighbourhoods – because sponging off my parents was categorically Not An Option – and been privy to the secrets and fears of my male friends, I do not think they have it easier than we of the XX-type. Different, yes. Easy, no.
Ooooohkay. You can sort of imagine how it goes from there. But I’m not really interested in doing just an interblogular hit piece today. No, what’s interesting to me about this sort of thing is how it dovetails with my general skepticism of feminist discourse surrounding sex work.
Let me emphasize here that I am talking about how “feminism” talks about sex work, not the culture at large. Because let’s be clear: in a patriarchy, sex workers don’t get bonbons for being sex workers. They get ostracized and degraded as less than human. As a recent reminder of this: “Belle de Jour” is of course a pseudonym, and she recently identified herself in the press. It appears to have been under some duress, though she hasn’t said explicitly that she was “forced” to come out.
But once I am safely ensconced in conversations with people who agree that sex workers are entitled to human dignity (a regrettable minority), though, I find it hard to get behind the general sort of “chosen sex work” banner that Belle and her ilk espouse. Not for nothing, but I’ve never heard the sort of “sex work is a valid choice” argument come from anyone who wasn’t young, white, cisgendered and relatively well-educated. That is to say: privileged, and thus relatively able to call on certain defenses when necessary. And I don’t understand, and am not sure I ever will, because believe me I have tried, the impulse to insist that this perspective be permitted to enter into a conversation about women’s exploitation. In other words: if she isn’t being exploited, bully for her, but I am not sure why this is relevant to a discussion, say, of human trafficking. And yet there it always is.
I would catch a lot of hell in the feminist blogosphere for this kind of statement, however, or at least some of the fora I frequent. Because at the end of the day, these people say, if I don’t embrace sex work, I am slut shaming those engaged in it.
This confuses me. See, I come back again and again to the same old question: is there a feminist obligation to defend sex work writ large as a practice, or is it merely that feminism demands the defense of sex workers as human beings?
It will come as no surprise to anyone that I fall on the latter side of the fence. While I absolutely would support the “right” scheme for the legalization of sex work – i.e. a scheme designed around the founding principle that humanity does not fly out the window the moment one engages in sex work – it is because I believe the people who engage in sex work deserve the same dignity as anyone, not because I think of sex work as a particularly liberatory practice. Personally, I do not understand how the liberation of women, or anyone else for that matter, can possibly be connected to a practice that contructs their bodies as ones for hire. Yes, I would agree that “sexual purity” is overly personalized and fetishized in this society, and I do not advocate that we start setting out rules for what kinds of consensual sexual behaviour are acceptable. Not only is it offensive to do so, it would be unenforceable anyway.
But: I think if the abortion rights fight has shown us nothing else, it is that the body, in this culture, still matters. What I mean by this is that for all our training in deconstruction and inscriptions, at the end of the day feminism still values the integrity of women’s bodies. I really think it is hard to argue that anyone’s body ought to be leverage in a negotiation. It simply shouldn’t. Call me an idealist, tell me I am using the master’s tools. But I cannot look at any person and think to myself: there’s something I could rent.
It strikes me that in a world where we were all considered fully human, nothing tied very closely to our bodies would be for rent or sale. You may say that sex is just work, but the connection between my work and my body begins and ends with my fingertips. Sure I use my brain, my legs to walk there, but other than that, it demands very little of me.
Of course we all live in a world that is capitalist, and people have to eat, I agree. I guess I just don’t know that feminism can sign up for capitalism quite so easy. As a professor of mine once said in another context, this notion that it’s okay to express value in dollar signs turns the world into eBay. And I like eBay for cheap jewelry, I guess, but I don’t particularly want to live there.
See, to come back to Belle: I think of her view as a somewhat purely capitalist one. she’s just earning a living! It’s economically sound! (Paging Levitt and Dubner!) Why are people so uptight about it? The danger is illusory, or at least exaggerated by people who want to keep women’s sexual agency in check!
I guess all I have, for that sort of thing, is this: I think your concern is misdirected. If you want to go after the Christian right for wanting to rescue you as “fallen women,” I’m on your side. I will defend your right to safety no matter where you are and what you are doing. But I will also continue to consider the people who purchase these services as engaging in an essentially objectionable activity. I will continue to consider the commodification of human beings essential to the continued practice of sex work, and I will lament that commodification. And if that makes me the uncool kid on the playground, so be it.
I don’t know what dominatrices (thanks spellcheck) say about sex, I imagine it depends on which one you ask, and I don’t really care what they say about it, I don’t think my argument that sex is not a special case depends on it. I don’t understand how I’m trying to have it both ways. It’s a job; it means different things to different people. Some people feel like heroes at work and some people feel like slaves in all kinds of professions.
JD, I personally don’t think sex work implicates the whole person, but the way that our world has set up the sex work industry certainly does. The fact that sex work exists at the margins- you can’t just do it and then go home to suburbs- that it is easily recognizable as a short-hand description of an immoral or dirty person, in a way that “waitress” or “miner” just doesn’t, demonstrates that those who enter sex work do have their whole identify commodified by the industry.
JD, you don’t think that the fact that men can purchase women might adversely affect women are treated? I don’t see how body image (which I think is what you mean by Vogue editors) is concrete, whereas sex trafficking is too nebulous to affect you.
Well, JennyK, with your latter point, we are back to individualism, and I’m not sure that the marginalized and the oppressed, women or no, have ever gotten very far under its banner. I mean, libertarianism sounds great until you start realizing that it means none of us is expected to have any responsibility to anyone else.
JennyK – In a theoretical world where there was no rape culture or patriarchy, I would say sex work could be like regular work. I wish I lived there, but I don’t.
JD, I think you are having it both ways in the sense that you are insisting that the big context (i.e. patriarchy) should be irrelevant and the small context (i.e. two people consensually doing whatever) should be, but I don’t understand how these are separable. You further seem to be contending that there is a liberatory element by implying that the devaluation of genitalia, for example, would dismantle the patriarchy. But somehow it does that while eluding context in the first place.
Spark, I object to your phrasing that “men purchase women.” This links a woman’s SELF, her whole value, with a sexual act in a way that makes me really uncomfortable and I disagree with as a factual matter. A man is purchasing a sexual service, not a person. The worker DOES go home at the end of the day and is still her own person. The only (or maybe main) reason she can’t is because of the stigma and illegality of her work, as skip to my lou points out.
I definitely think that sex work has a lot of negative externalities. But I think a lot of work has negative externalities which is the point of that particular comment, and you rarely see the level of discomfort with other such professions as you see with sex work.
J.D., wealth managers and Vogue editors don’t entirely escape my wrath, but what they are doing is on a totally different scale. A Vogue editor is commodifying you in a way by putting such emphasis on the outwards image you project to the world and telling you that the way to improve that image is by buying certain products or buying into certain ideas. But prostitution is the crassest extreme of commodification.
Not to pile on JD. Your point about reifying patriarchy by approaching sex work differently than other labor is well taken. College Callgirl wrote a really excellent post sometime ago (can’t find the link right now) about how her “I choose-my-choice” prostitution affected her over time, destroying her sense of boundaries and instinct for self-protection. I can’t find the link now, but that’s what I’m thinking of when I argue that it’s not possible to perform sex work in a vaccuum.
@JD – Meh, I’m not sure I’m with you there. At the moment my homework makes me feel like a slave but I’m certainly capable of recognizing that, my feelings of being trapped notwithstanding, there are many important differences between being a college student and being a prostitute or any sort of sex worker.
I do think that prostitution is currently situated in such a way that women who have sexual intercourse for money are participating in something essentially patriarchal — studies of johns have revealed at length how much of the attraction is not in the fucking but in being able to pay a woman such that she is then obligated to fuck you, and that is true regardless of how much they’re paying. In some sense we’re erasing the clients from this conversation. How the clients approach the workers determines a ton about how the workers are situated and right now that approach is (in general) anything but respectful.
PS, I definitely don’t think that patriarchy is irrelevant. I just think that it (the big P) affects all kinds of labor, all of our labor, that sex work is not a special case of it, or if it is it is because of patriarchy, and so our response should be not to reinscribe the idea of its specialness but to work to normalize it and strip it of its shamanistic power within patriarchy.
Naw I don’t feel piled on. I’m just working it out for myself. It’s helpful.
JD, I really don’t think that sex work implicates the whole person. I don’t think that sex is, by itself, a sacred ritual only to be engaged in under precious circumstances. But sex is never by itself. The way that sex work has been established in our society- at the margins, in dangerous and exploitative conditions, in way that implicates the whole human’s existence- demonstrates that it has been explicitly set up as commodifiying.
We can change that by saying “look how empowered you can be when you engage in sex work if you love it!” or by saying “holy fuck, sex work exploitation a huge number of women, let’s end that”. The former I think is only more likely to draw more women in to the latter.
I don’t know how it’s reinscribing specialness to point out that my support of sex workers as human beings will not affect their johns looking upon them as stimulative objects in a patriarchy. I mean, I think you’re asking a lot.
And also, I mean, I don’t understand how your system of thought here gives you the normative grounds to want to get out of patriarchy.
baraqiel just said what I was trying to articulate. “Purchasing women” is a provocative phrase, but I think that’s the mentality of men/johns.
Sorry for the above double post. I couldn’t see my first comment.
And that last paragraph is meant to read that I think encouraging the view that sex work is empowering is only more likely to result in more exploitation and violence against women. It only benefits the perpetrator.
PS, I think that if sex work was de-stigmatized, and women were empowered to become consumers of sexual services instead of the almost exclusive providers of it, that sex work would mean something different. If men’s sexual services were valued as highly as women’s, it would also make it mean something different. It wouldn’t mean patriarchy; it wouldn’t mean gender-based inequality. Maybe you are thinking, “that’s not what I asked.” But it is the best way I can think of to respond.
JD, do you think discussing rape as a particular crime that’s different from, say, getting punched in the face feeds into patriarchy and biological determinism?
Skip, I def don’t want to say sex work is empowering, necessarily. Just that it is not inherently, de facto DISempowering, by its nature. It’s work, like any other, which can kill you or give you independence depending on the conditions of your labor, your wages, your freedom in the workplace, etc.
Spark, I think I’m in love with you. You are very good at concisely, cleverly making the points that get bottle-necked in my head and come out as AARGGHHGH.
Spark, I guess it depends on how it is being talked about. My instinct is no, I don’t think it does.
Well, but JD, if it isn’t empowering, it isn’t a liberatory practice. Which is what I was saying. Non-liberatory practices aren’t useful, to me, in feminism.
The more I think about JD’s argument, the more I think you could apply it to any analysis that sees men and women’s experiences as different. Like saying “women are treated differently” perpetuates that treatment. But saying we are equal doesn’t make it so either. I guess if we took our analysis and said, “Women are treated differently, therefore we should protect them through sex-specific laws and encouraging the idea that sexuality is a beautiful thing only to be experienced w/in marriage” etc etc, then yes. It’s not the starting point–acknowledging that sex work is damaging to women–but where you go with it.
@JD – sure, I agree with you, but I’m not sure that’s useful. Or to rephrase: yes, I believe it is true that in a world without patriarchy, having sex for money wouldn’t be oppressive. But, pointing that out is not (in my view) productive, because we’re so far from that world. This is why I prefer to talk about other forms of sex work than actual penetrative intercourse for money in order to make a point about sex work not being inherently oppressive because I think that those are closer to being not oppressive right now.
I kind of feel like your reference to sex educators as sex workers, baraqiel, is different than your point re “penetrative intercourse” – there are other kinds of “prostitution” that do not involve that specific practice. Or so I’m told.
But I mean, PS, your job or my job might not be examples of liberatory practices, but people don’t go around telling us we are hurting women by doing our jobs or that they wish our job could be eradicated from the earth. Right? Aren’t we saying there is something different about sex work? I’m not sure which point you are addressing I guess. Maybe I am getting confused. I may need backup soon.
“[Sex work] is not inherently, de facto DISempowering, by its nature.”
Of course it’s not. But we don’t live in a vacuum. We live in a culture that treats sex as special, whether we individually consider it “sacred” or not. Personally, I don’t think sex is “sacred,” but the patriarchy is bigger than me as an individual.
yvanehtnioj, thanks! This is a tough topic.
@PSoul – No, you’re right, but I’m having difficulty with drawing a linguistic distinction here that’s exactly what I mean. I don’t think the terminology exists to say what I want to say (especially since johns can conceive of themselves as respecting prostitutes that they clearly don’t respect, and because I don’t want to use degrading terminology for the women that aren’t engaged in what I’m talking about). The distinction that I want to draw is between workers who are engaged in sexuality the same way that personal trainers are engaged in athleticism and…everyone else who does sex work (not that it’s their fault that they’re not in the former group). Any suggestions?
But I’m not claiming my job is feminist. Also I do probably hurt women by doing my job. I don’t understand how it advances feminism to be sensitive/dishonest about that. I get that at the outset you were saying that amounts to a Marxist critique of labour, and, well… fine.
I kind of think you’re displaying a tendency I find infuriating in others (though you I know are in good faith): you claim that by my refusing to ratify sex work as a practice, I am somehow ratifying patriarchal/reactionary views about women’s bodies. I’m not, any more than you’re sanctioning exploitation by telling me some sex workers enjoy their jobs.
I do think that jobs that put people in immediate physical danger, or license people to use other people’s bodies in such close quarters, do present more serious problems than jobs as, say, a deli counter clerk. I think it’s silly to equate them, and overly abstract, which is what I thought this emphasis on context was supposed to combat: abstraction. What I am saying is you seem fine with totalizing (either all work is oppressive or it’s not) when it suits your point.
I should add that I am not eager for a post-feminist world either in which sexual pleasure is a bodily function on the level of urination. And so yes, I am in some ways a biological essentialist, but then the total rejection of essentialism is a little too much, right? MacKinnon has a line somewhere, about how death, inconveniently, is a biological universal, at near 100%. I’m also not sure how we can totally leave reproductive function and hell, ORGASMS out of this.
Although if any of you ladies are getting orgasms from mere handplay I need the deets.
First time commentator here to say: Hurrah! I wish I had time to expend on how much I agree and why, but I don’t and will have to limit myself to loud, enthusiastic clapping!!!! Also, I cannot co-sign the last paragraph enough:
“If you want to go after the Christian right for wanting to rescue you as “fallen women,” I’m on your side. I will defend your right to safety no matter where you are and what you are doing. But I will also continue to consider the people who purchase these services as engaging in an essentially objectionable activity. I will continue to consider the commodification of human beings essential to the continued practice of sex work, and I will lament that commodification. And if that makes me the uncool kid on the playground, so be it.”
So very, very, very well said!!!!!!
PS, I lie back and think of post-patriarchy.
Thanks fuschia and welcome!
Okay, and now that I’m just replying to myself continuously: I mean, wouldn’t the insistence that sex be recentered as the mutual pursuit of pleasure be far more of a de-stigmatizing force on so-called “fallen women” who do, actually, enjoy sex work than simply ratifying all sex work sight unseen?
And baraqiel I think the simple distinction here is that sex workers actually perform sex on their clients, and sex educators demonstrate.
I guess I am uncomfortable accepting the idea that sex is universally “special.” Partly this comes from my religious background. Growing up I was told that because sex is special and should always be “procreative and unitive” which means no contraception, no gay sex, no sex outside marriage, no masturbation, no anal sex, no oral sex. To get away from those teachings I had to assure myself that sex is only special if and when and how I say it is, and what I do consensually with someone else is no one else’s business. So it seems hypocritical for me to say that transactional sex is the one thing that crosses over that line.
sorry y’all, work calls. you’ve been extremely helpful to my thinking. thank you.
Well, does “pleasurable” mean “special”? Particularly in the context of women enjoying sex, when they were traditionally taught not to?
JennyK, what if you introduce consent into the mix? In prostitution, a woman isn’t having sex because she wants to have sex–she’s having sex because she needs money. Even if the woman in the example is choosing to make money this way instead of waitressing, it’s still a situation where a woman is having sex for a reason other than her own sexual desire.
@PSoul – I don’t think it’s that simple, though. You can educate someone by performing an activity with them rather than demonstrating it for them. And I’m not exactly talking about only educators. I think sex workers who help people work out kinks and fetishes in such a way that they can have a satisfying sex life with a partner (in whatever form that takes — either by participating in that kink habitually or by helping the partner learn how to do so) fall into this category as well. Again I think the comparison to a trainer is an apt one — sometimes trainers demonstrate things one can do independently, sometimes they physically manipulate their clients’ bodies, sometimes you see a trainer for the short term, sometimes you see a trainer for years, etc. Perhaps I should coin the term “sexual trainer” although that sounds slightly more S&M-y than one might hope.
I think traditionally the “specialness” of sex has had very little to do with pleasure, particularly women’s pleasure.
Indeed, JennyK, but I think we can reframe, is what I am saying. I am not arguing for traditional “specialness” in this context.
P.S. Thanks for playing, JD, come back later!
Spark, but that still brings it back around to something unique about sexual activity. I mean, I write briefs because I need the money, not because of my own brief-writing desire. (Though, I’m obviously not getting much done today!)
Pilgrim, I’m not sure I get it. Are you saying that sex is degrading when it is done for reasons other than desire? If that is what you’re saying, it makes a lot of sense to me in a practical sense, but in the abstract, see my comment to Spark above.
What I am saying is not that it is degrading, but rather that it reifies the notion of sex that limits the act to an actor and an acted-upon, so to speak.
@Spark – Meh. This is an argument I’ve heard before, but people have sex for all sorts of reasons, not all of which are down to sexual desire. Not all of those are oppressive, either (disclaimer: not trying to get into a conversation about whether or not blowjobs are patriarchal). In this sense I do think you’re making an exception for sex as apart from other bodily functions/needs (about which, to be fair, we have other specialized neuroses).
This is not specifically to yell at you, baraqiel, though you are the most recent and immediate culprit (I do it too): I feel that participants in a debate should not “meh” each other. I am trying to enforce this in my life now.
Er. Okay. Sorry! I will excise that syllable from my Harpyness vocabulary.
No worries. I am retroactively legislating, so to speak.
Wow, you take a nap and all hell breaks loose.
On reading these posts, it seems to me that two things are going on. We’re not supportive of sex work (as opposed to those who do it) because the vast majority of females who perform it are doing so for coercive reasons. In that sense, it’s analagous to sweatshop work and child labor. It’s not the same, of course, but the concerns about volition, fair treatment and pay, safety and security on the job and so forth come from the same place.
Secondly, we’re concerned that the nature of sexual intercourse is such that it cannot be performed as an economic transaction without the performer being commodified. Even if the work is completely voluntary and well paid, the very act of exchanging money for sex turns it into an expression of patriarchy.
Is that a fair restatement?
I just don’t see how it advances feminism if we say “well, we think things should be this way, but the Patriarchy doesn’t, so we can’t”. If we believe that it’s possible to see sexual transactions for money as not an expression of male power but rather as a commercial transaction between equals, why don’t we advocate for that? We wear makeup and 3 inch heels, and if the patriarchy thinks we’re easy or whatever because of it, tough. We do it because we want to and because we enjoy doing it. Sexual slavery is only one of the many kinds of slavery to which men subject women; if we eliminated that from the picture, would our view of sex-for-money be different?
As Holmes said, these are deep waters, Watson.
“As Holmes said, these are deep waters, Watson.” No kidding.
Pilgrim: “[Sex without desire] reifies the notion of sex that limits the act to an actor and an acted-upon, so to speak.” I can’t disagree with that statement. But I’m not sure its incumbent on people to conduct their sex lives in a way that doesn’t reflect undesirable social paradigms.