Loose Women, Lecherous Men (37 page)

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Authors: Linda Lemoncheck

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Page 147
Feminists are predictably split over sex work's political priorities. While conference pro-industry feminists talk about reform, education, and self-esteem, conference women of color talk about racism, feeding their children, and economic powerlessness.
133
The contention of women of color is that commanding sex work as pleasurable, profitable, or subversive in its exploration of alternative sexual styles will be commendations of both racism and sexism if care is not taken to understand the cultural framework of interlocking oppressions within which such sex work takes place.
Ironically, in their demand that sex work be treated like any other occupation in light of the bread and butter of its eroticism, sex workers underestimate the extent to which the
sex
in their work represents a primary tool for the subordination of women under patriarchy. The husband watching a pornographic video who says, "Honey, I want to do this," is not watching a cooking video to encourage his wife to try out new recipes. The woman whistling at a male stripper is not applauding a male violinist. The customer visiting a prostitute has come to exchange money for
sex
, not encyclopedias. Sex is what makes pornography, stripping, and prostitution so attractive to so many people, and sex is what makes women's and men's personal relations such a complex potential of the unpredictable, the dangerous, the frustrating, the pleasurable, and the political. Without recognizing that sex workers cannot choose to ply their trade outside an institutionalized ideology of sexism and sexual subordination in which their industry plays a part, they adopt the "view from nowhere," which distorts their choices by suggesting that they can be made from within a social vacuum. When sex workers compare their work to nursing or typing, they not only ignore the training and social skills that make such professions those to which a poor and inexperienced woman cannot turn as a last resort; they also fail to acknowledge that sex work is a highly stigmatized and often criminalized occupation to which poor and inexperienced women are forced to turn. Society does not teach women that if all else fails, women can always get attention and money
by typing
; society teaches women that if all else fails, women can always offer
sex
. In offering such comparisons, sex workers downplay the dangers of coercion and abuse that accompany a job with such a high degree of illegitimacy and inferiority attached to it; and they also tend to underestimate the extent to which the economic restriction and sex objectification of women may subvert their efforts at control of their lives. Feminists are doing fundamental consciousness-raising when we urge sex workers who could pursue other lines of work to understand that they choose a profession whose socially illicit nature reinforces the institutionalized marginalization and silencing of women, despite the profits involved. Yet because one of the ways women are politically oppressed is through the linking of moral defilement and inferiority to women's sexuality, what sex workers usually hear in feminists' laments about the oppressive nature of sex work is that sex is morally wrong. While sex workers are justified in objecting to their characterization as symbols of women's oppression, their work symbolizes a powerful means whereby men reaffirm their claim to the unconditional sexual availability of women. Unless sex workers see their work in such terms, they will inevitably alienate feminists whose fight to extricate women from the grip of patriarchy begins with an acknowledgment of its power.
Sex workers are correct in asserting that they cannot control any man's particular penchant for regarding women solely as a means to his own sexual gratification. In
 
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fact, they will say that being such a means is exactly what their job requires. What sex workers deny is that their being treated as sex objects is always, or even often, treatment that enhances their customers' sense of erotic and economic power at the expense of their own. Nevertheless, as a sex worker in an industry still dominated and profit-driven by the cult of macho and the subordination of the female, she must recognize that the power of her market value or her ability to capitalize on the sexual desire of men may be exploited to serve male financial and sexual interests at her expense.
In view of such contradictions, I have argued that we should regard sex workers as both the subjects and the objects of their experience. They create their own burlesque theater; they contract for and write pornographic scripts; they act as therapist, social worker, and confidante to the men they service. Under such conditions it is difficult to describe their work as reducing them to nothing more than "tits and ass." Indeed, the subject/object dialectic that I contend is at the heart of sex work suggests that the reduction of a woman to a sexy body is as much a function of her erotic power as her powerlessness. Therefore, I suggest that a sex worker's choice can be objectifying without always being
victimizing
. Sex workers can be treated as commodities by their customers without being the victims of abusive pimps or exploitative club managers. Sex workers can make a profit from selling their bodies without needing sex work to keep them from starvation. Nevertheless, the words of one former pornography model put the issue of women's sexual exploitation at the heart of the sex work debate: "The thing is, with enough stress or enough need any woman will do things she never thought she would do before."
134
My claim is that all sex work must be described and evaluated from within the social construction of oppressive sexual institutions that circumscribe women's lives. Such evaluations, however, must not so determine women's sexuality that women cannot, even in principle, define for ourselves what is to count as satisfying sex and sex work. To do so would effectively condemn the feminist enterprise of constructive change in heterosexual relations from within the patriarchal institutions in which feminists live. By characterizing sex work in terms of a dialectic between subject and object, sex workers are in a position to use their work as a source for their liberation from the economic and sexual subordination of men. The desire for liberation, however, must be characterized and evaluated in terms of the objectifying gaze that defines the subordinate position from which she would liberate herself. Thus, the subject/object dialectic that characterizes sex work reflects the broader dialectic between gender and sexuality that I believe gives voice to the diversity of women's sexuality. Treating sex workers with a care respect circumscribed by the "view from somewhere different" and convincing sex workers to take the same view toward both their own work and the concerns of feminists is the subject of the following section.
Treating Sex Workers with Care Respect
Is the prostitute the quintessential oppressed woman or the quintessential
liberated woman? Or is the prostitute simply a woman who, like all
women in this society, is struggling to understand and live her own sexu-
ality?
Rosemarie Tong,
Women, Sex, and the Law
 
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In other words, there is no real stereotype of who a prostitute woman is
she could be any of us.
Rachel West,
"U.S. PROStitutes Collective"
The debate over the meaning and morality of sex work is a debate easily polarized by sex workers and feminists alike. Some feminists accuse sex workers of overestimating the agency and autonomy of sex work in a social milieu whose institutionalized ideology defines women as the sexual subordinates of men. Some sex workers accuse feminists of overemphasizing the status of woman as victim in a patriarchal society, such that women have no possibility of subverting the sexual status quo to meet the needs and goals of women. Some feminists argue that sex work symbolizes male dominance backed by force; sex workers argue that such a description makes all consent to sex work and all nonviolent sex work meaningless. Feminists accuse sex workers of mistaking an internalized patriarchy for sexual freedom; sex workers accuse feminists of recreating an oppressive patriarchy by not affording sex workers the means to their own sexual liberation. Indeed, from a sex worker's perspective, if women's brainwashing by men is so complete, then the feminist agenda itself must be suspect. In short, feminists accuse sex workers of not gendering their sexuality; sex workers accuse feminists of not sexually liberating our politics of gender. My claim has been that recognizing sex work as a dialectical relation between subject and object means recognizing the dialectic between gender and sexuality that negotiates the tensions between those who regard sex work as oppressive to women and those who regard sex work as liberating to women. Such a dialectic affirms that sex work can be objectifying at the same time that it can provide workers with a subjectivity and potentially liberating sexual agency. The dialectic between gender and sexuality affirms that sex work within patriarchy can be self-determining at the same time that sex work can be degrading in a culture in which women's sexuality has historically been circumscribed by men's subordination of women.
Such an analysis is consistent with the view of Irene Diamond, who warns that overemphasizing the violence in pornography makes porn evil without challenging traditional attitudes about sex but that conceiving of pornography solely as sexually explicit material cannot account for the ways in which pornography functions to maintain and encourage the domination of women.
135
It is also consistent with the suggestion by Rosemarie Tong quoted at the beginning of this section that a sex worker need not be construed exclusively as either oppressed or liberated but can be regarded as a woman struggling amid the objectification and subjectivity of her work in order to find some meaning and value in it.
In this section I introduce what it would mean to treat sex workers with the care respect outlined at the end of chapter 3, in order to capture the dialectical elements of women's sexuality and sex work described thus far. I will suggest that feminists' "world"-traveling to a sex worker's social location can help feminists acknowledge, understand, and promote the agendas of sex workers who wish to use their profession as a source for personal growth, entrepreneurial profit, or economic survival. In addition, I will show how Marjorie Weinzweig's notion of autonomous relating to others and Joyce Trebilcot's notion of taking responsibility for one's sexuality can
 
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help a sex worker situate her work within the larger social context of men's sexual subordination of women. Thus, by listening to each other with the particularized sensitivity and social responsibility implied by a sexual ethic of care respect, both feminists and sex workers can better promote our common goal of sexual self-determination for all women.
Recall from chapter 3 that treating a person with care respect means not only valuing her as one among many unique individuals worthy of respect but also valuing the particular ways in which she is unique. This perspective allows us to acknowledge the shared partiality of social location in all of us as well the contextual specificity of each person. An ethic of care respect also requires that we try to understand an individual in her own terms and not through our favored ways of seeing her and that we try to promote, where possible and desirable, the interests of individuals consistent with that ethic. Thus, a sexual ethic of care respect is not confined merely to personal sexual relations but extends outward to individuals and institutions that are a part of one's larger community.
This perspective reiterates the recommendation from the "view from somewhere different," introduced in chapter 1, that each one of us "world"-travel in order to understand and more effectively promote the particular worldview of others. Such traveling reminds us to ask the questions "What is it like to be them?" and "What is it like to be myself in their eyes?" It is a point of view that requires me to recognize that my "world'' is not the only one worth knowing, and that my perspective will always be partial to
my
needs and
my
interests in a way that will often make it difficult to understand the partiality of others.
Therefore, treating sex workers with care respect will mean trying to see the world from their point of view and, even more important, to respect each worker as a unique individual whose social location specifies her needs and interests in ways that may be quite different from other sex workers' or my own. Such a relationship requires establishing open lines of communication and trust between feminists and sex workers through which we can exchange points of view. Former stripper Amber Cooke cautions, however, that politics is a luxury that most sex workers cannot practically or legally afford.
136
Thus, care respect for sex workers means realizing that only those sex workers (and feminists) who know about seminars, attend conferences, or will risk speaking in a public forum will be heard. Such women show that they already have the freedom of choice that many sex workers do not. This means that sex workers who do politicize their profession must recognize that they are not representative of sex workers as a whole and must work, in deference to the "view from somewhere different," to find ways to include otherwise silenced agendas on the table.
As I mentioned earlier in the chapter, sex workers who politicize their work must also face an often humiliating and skeptical public eye when they voice their concerns about the terms and conditions of their work. They also risk losing their means of financial support and custody of their children for coming out as illegal workers. For this reason it is all the more important that feminists wishing to align ourselves with sex workers in pursuit of women's economic and sexual self-determination be willing to listen to, and speak on behalf of, sex workers with the time and money to be political as well as sex workers with no such opportunities. Feminists must also remember that many sex workers will mistrust our political agenda, since concerns

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