Loose Women, Lecherous Men (32 page)

Read Loose Women, Lecherous Men Online

Authors: Linda Lemoncheck

Tags: #Social Science, #Feminism & Feminist Theory, #test

BOOK: Loose Women, Lecherous Men
7.41Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
 
Page 127
Moreover, sadomasochistic pornography featuring dominatrixes and their whips might express men's sexual submission or symbolize their fear at the power of women, but some pornographic movies and videos also depict women submitting to all manner of sexual abuse in a culture whose sexual ideology characterizes women as men's sexual objects who want and deserve to be sexually dominated by men. Until relatively recently, wives and girlfriends could not expect to press successful charges of rape against their partners, in part because of such ideological beliefs. It would be more than a little ironic to find that men feel so threatened by, much less powerless in the face of, women's sexual rejection of them that their only recourse is to murder, rape, batter, harass, and humiliate women worldwide.
70
Furthermore, it is clear from sex workers' personal descriptions that not all pornography depicts only
simulated
rape and abuse; among other things, some viewers' arousal (and pornographer's profits) will be a function of whether viewers can be convinced that what they see depicts an actual event. Harry Brod believes that pornography is both an expression of men's public power as members of the institutionally dominant gendered class and an expression of their lack of personal power; however, radical feminists have contended that such distinctions between public and private politics only serve the interests of men by characterizing women as capable of greater freedom of choice in the domestic privacy of their "personal" lives than institutionalized discrimination, patriarchal family values, and husbands' sexual intimidation actually allow.
71
I believe that feminists can effectively argue that at least some products and practices of the sex industry are degrading to women; but we must be prepared to show, without begging any normative questions, that such practices somehow fall to treat women living under patriarchal constraints as moral equals who deserve what I have called care respect. Engaging in sex work in which the primary purpose is to satisfy men's sexual desires, to be depicted as doing so, or to endorse doing so will not be considered degrading unless we can show that the social location of either the sex work or the sex work's depictions endorses the degradation of women. Because many feminists believe that patriarchy defines just such a location for modern prostitution and pornography, sex work in these industries is thought to be degrading as it is currently practiced.
However, I have suggested that considerations of individual social location
within patriarchy
are vital to determining the nature and scope of the sexual degradation of sex work. Such contextual considerations appear to be absent in the description of depictions of sexual subordination in the Minneapolis ordinance written by Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon. These include: "women presented dehumanized as sexual objects, things, or commodities; or women presented as sexual objects who enjoy pain or humiliation; . . . or women presented in scenarios of degradation, injury, torture, shown as filthy or inferior, bleeding, bruised, or hurt in a context that makes these conditions sexual."
72
Dworkin's and MacKinnon's ordinance would thereby appear to condemn objectifying or violent sexually explicit material that might be used in aversive sex therapy as well as material that simply happened to be sexually stimulating to its audience, even in educative or explanatory contexts. This is particularly odd, given Dworkin's publication of her own novel
Mercy
, which depicts considerable acts of violence against womenostensibly as a contribution to the feminist debate over pornographybut which could easily be read for the ex-
 
Page 128
press purpose of sexual arousal.
73
Sarah Wynter's definition of prostitution, alluded to earlier, equally condemns the sexual commodification of women, who are degraded from their status as persons by "exploitation and abuse." However, given the positive testimonials of prostitutes described in this chapter's overview as well as Judith Hill's previously cited claims about the nature of degradation, Wynter cannot assume that all prostitution, much less all sex work, is necessarily exploitative and abusive of its workers or that such exploitation constitutes their degradation.
Furthermore, neither Wynter's definition nor the Dworkin/MacKinnon ordinance answers the question of
why
treating a woman as a sexual object, thing, or commodity is degrading. While many feminists often equate a woman's objectification with her degradation, treating a person as an object is not in and of itself objectionable; people who own treasured mementos and prized pets sometimes treat them better than they treat other people. Paula Webster suggests, in a positive vein, that all porn actors are objectified by being represented as paradigms, fantasies, or cultural icons of a sexuality challenging traditional notions of sexual conservatism. Many sex workers describe their work and themselves in terms of bodily barter without any sense that they are being treated, or are treating themselves, inappropriately. As one prostitute puts it, "I think women and men and feminists have to realize that all work involves selling some part of your body. You might sell your brain, your might sell your back, you might sell your fingers for typewriting. Whatever it is that you do you are selling one part of your body. I choose to sell my body the way I want to and I choose to sell my vagina."
74
Feminist film critics have viewed pornography as the extreme instance of the voyeuristic, fetishizing male gaze that dominates film direction, production, and viewing. Yet this criticism implies that all film actresses are collaborators in men's sexual perversions; and such complaints interpret men's viewing of film, especially pornographic film, as perverse, reinforcing the moral conservative's attacks on sexual deviance.
75
Diana Russell locates the objection to pornography in the fact that women are not portrayed as "multi-faceted human beings deserving equal rights with men." A similar line is taken by John Stoltenberg whose sexual ideal is "when the integrity within everyone's body and the whole personhood of each person is celebrated whenever two people touch."
76
But how would even the most tame of erotic photographs portray me as a lover
as well as
a committed vegetarian and a philosophy professor? Do I fail to treat the cashier at the supermarket as a person when I simply treat her as a cashier? Philosophy may be a deep part of my personhood, but I may not want to discuss Cartesian dualism in bed; I may simply want to
have sex
.
Locating the degradation in the "sexual" of the expression "sexual object" is also problematic. Defining the sexual as degrading defeats any feminist attempts to promote the erotic, instead of the pornographic, in heterosexual sex. Furthermore, it invites the sexual puritan charge that obscenity, not subordination, is the issue. Merely describing some sex acts as degrading invites the contextual criticisms noted earlier:
how
and
for whom
is
which
sex degrading? Ann Garry and Robert Baker suggest that being a
harmed
object is what is degrading about being a
sex
object. Their point is that there is a conceptual connection in the way we think about sex, between being a (female) sex partner and being harmed. According to Garry and Baker, this conceptual connection is reflected in such language as "Screw you!" and "Up yours!"
 
Page 129
and captures the complaints women make when they are treated as sex objects. However, conceptually connecting sex with harm that men do to women appears to condemn all heterosexual sex, not just the degrading sort, reinforcing the view of sex workers that antipornography feminists are anti-heterosexual sex.
77
Moreover, as I noted earlier, a woman can be harmed without being regarded as an inferior or subordinate and without being regarded as a commodity and not a person. Therefore, if we address only the "sex" in "sex object," without addressing her complex "object" status, those contexts that turn a woman's objectification into her degradation remain indeterminate.
Along similar lines, in their Minneapolis pornography ordinance Dworkin and MacKinnon describe sexual objects as "women presented in scenarios of degradation," indicating subordination of some type. However, this begs the question as to what makes being an object degrading. Being depicted as filthy, bleeding, bruised, or hurt may be disgusting to view but may not show that the person being hurt is being degraded. Many feminists do not see that expressions like "I choose to sell my body" indicate precisely the dialectical subjectivity in the commodification of women's bodies under conditions of male supremacy which prompts pro-industry sex workers to assume that the charge of degradation must be a charge of sexual conservatism.
I have suggested that if feminists wish to argue that at least certain forms of sex work constitute degradation or the endorsement of degradation, then we must locate sex work within an institutionalized ideology of men's sex objectification of women without begging the question of whether sex work endorses women's subordination or abuse within such constraints. Prostitution, pornography, and stripping will reinforce the erroneous message that women are the natural, proper, and willing sexual subordinates of men only when that message is already an integral part of the gender stereotypes and social role expectations of the culture in which the sex work exists. Furthermore, such expectations combine with economic discrimination against women to narrow many women's choice of work to sex work. This is precisely the criticism that Carole Pateman lodges against Lars Ericsson's claim that prostitution is the free and informed contractual selling of a service, not an instance of sex inequality.
78
Saturation of explicit sexuality in a culture whose sexual ideology is oppressive to women has the effect of desensitizing the consumer: women and men become more accepting and imitative of what Naomi Wolf refers to as "beauty pornography" in fashion magazines and advertising, which increases our tolerance of hard-core pornography, thus our tolerance of real violence against women.
79
Nevertheless, to say that sex work is degrading to women is misleading, since this implies that the degradation somehow originates from the work itself and not from within the social milieu in which sex work is practiced. By recognizing that the endorsement of women's degradation is a function of our society's social construction of sexuality and not a function of commercial sex work, women can legitimately use sex work to subvert and transform the construction of sexuality that is oppressive to them.
The adoption of the "view from somewhere different" that I have described in the preceding chapters recommends that a feminist philosophy of sex locate women's sexuality, among other things, within a male-identified social framework whose sex-
 
Page 130
ual double standard
circumscribes
women's sexuality in terms of the subordination of women. But when feminists
require
sex work to be degrading under such constraints, feminists may be guilty of reinforcing a view of sex work that oversimplifies and overdetermines particular cases. Laurie Shrage makes the important point that in a society whose role expectations for women are that they deserve no more than sexual subordination by men, commercial sex will ring a false note. However, while not condemning all commercial sex work in all cultural settings, Shrage then concludes that prostitution will be oppressive for all women living under the patriarchal constructs that support the subordination of women. My quarrel with this line of argument is that if prostitution is oppressive under patriarchy, such that
without being oppressive it would not be prostitution
, prostitutes' arguments that their work is sexually or economically liberating under patriarchy must be dismissed out of hand. Feminists like Longino, Dworkin, and MacKinnon who condemn pornography appear to make the case that pornography is degrading to women only after they have assumed that pornography unequivocally depicts and endorses degradation. Feminists will reinforce the very victimization we wish to transcend if we describe sex work solely in terms of those role expectations that are oppressive to women. What I will argue in the next section is that sex work admits of a general characterization in both subject
and
object terms that can accommodate the variety of interpretations of it from women both within and outside the sex industry.
The Subject/Object Dialectic of Sex Work
As much as feminists have described sex workers as commodities and not persons, there is much about sex work that suggests an agency, personhood, or subjectivity that is in dialectical opposition to sex workers' treatment as sex objects. This is especially clear under conditions that are not outrightly coercive or abusive; but even when conditions are less than ideal, a dialectic between a sex worker's subjectivity and her objectification remains. Sex workers sign contracts, accept payment for services rendered, and act out scenes, not always or even often, of necrophilia or fetishism, but of
people having sex
. Customers who visit prostitutes and not boutiques specializing in sexual paraphernalia do so because they want sex with a
woman
, not an anatomically correct rubber doll. Strippers are enticing precisely because they are scantily clad, seductive women, not windup toys or automatons. Alan Soble points out, "To be aware of the woman [depicted in pornography] as one who is licking her lips in anticipation of sex or as an invitation to engage in sex, is to affirm rather than deny her humanity. . . . [T]he ordinary viewer of pornography responds somewhat to the woman's
showing
him her body or its parts; he responds to an action performed by a person expressing intentions."
80
Particularly in prostitution, part of the arousal can come from feeling power over a woman who willingly accepts payment to be objectified. Agency "cattle calls" in which photographers choose women for their bodies, breasts, or buttocks reduce such women to their body parts in the way portrait artists reduce women to their faces: it is this
woman
with this body that is required. Sexualizing her body parts or politicizing her objectification to further distinguish the two cases is crucial. Nevertheless, such distinctions do not obliterate the fact that stripping, pornography, and prostitu-

Other books

Forever Changed by Jambrea Jo Jones
The Hunger by Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch
The Dragon Healer by Bianca D'arc
Constantinopla by Isaac Asimov
April & Oliver by Tess Callahan
The Perfect Stranger by Anne Gracie