Loose Women, Lecherous Men (38 page)

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Authors: Linda Lemoncheck

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about the degradation of women in sex can sound exactly like moral prudery. By asking "What is it like to be myself in this sex worker's eyes?," feminists can sensitize ourselves to such misunderstandings in order to better establish lines of connectedness with sex workers. Inviting nonintrusive and safe conversations with sex workers in bars, clubs, and on the street; visiting them during a studio session; buying them dinner; helping them pay the bills; finding them affordable housing; meeting their child-care needs for a dayin other words, meeting sex workers on their turf without intruding on their turf: these are the practical strategies that Amber Cooke believes will show sex workers that feminists are committed to addressing their specific, daily needs as well as the longer-term needs of women within the industry as a whole.
137
Just as feminists are required to "world"-travel epistemologically and practically to an individual sex worker's social location in order to find common ground, so, too, a sex worker must adopt an ethic of care respect from the "view from somewhere different" if she is to understand a feminist's emphasis on the historical and social context in which she works. In this respect, developing the autonomy characterized in chapter 3 as autonomous relating to others and taking responsibility for her sexuality under conditions of patriarchy will be vital for any sex worker, both to ''world"-travel successfully to a feminist's critical perspective and to make better sense of her own. For example, when a sex worker stigmatized by some for her association with the sex industry chooses to make an economically better life for herself in sex work rather than in social work, she exercises an autonomous
being oneself
in which she chooses to act for herself alone and not in virtue of how others might want her to act; but a woman who exercises an autonomous
relating to others
recognizes both her own individual needs
and
the needs of others. Such an autonomy requires that she see her actions within the context of a larger community of women whose own needs and interests may conflict with her own. In this way a sex worker may locate her work within a feminist community that will ask her to question some of her presuppositions about the benefits of sex work.
Therefore, a sex worker who adopts a sexual ethic of care respect will be required to take responsibility for her sexuality. She does so by reflecting on the extent to which her sexuality originates with her, and also the extent to which her sexuality is a function of male-identified, institutionalized sexual values that she has adopted for the sake of survival, approval, or profit. This is not to suggest that such reflections are easily parsed out or that her awareness of her gendered context will necessarily alter her pursuit of sex work. Her responsibility for her sexuality will recommend locating the common feminist complaint that sex work is degrading to women in a political context, not a context of moral and sexual conservatism. ("What is it like to be them?") Also, by asking herself "What is it like to be myself in their eyes?," a sex worker can better understand why some feminists might regard sex work as collaborating with the enemy or as work so infused by patriarchal approval that sex workers assume the pleasure from their work to be self-determining. Such "world"-traveling can be motivated by the conviction, based on the "view from somewhere different," that sex workers' happiness and well-being will be improved when they see their lives as part of a larger community of women whose combined efforts at securing women's liberation are stronger than any single effort alone. Such a perspective will also
 
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allow a sex worker to see the variety within feminism, so that she need not think that feminists are unilaterally against sex work or against one form of sex work. Furthermore, taking responsibility for her sexuality will allow her to see the diversity among sex workers, especially those whose work may be much less lucrative or satisfying than her own. In this way her considered judgments about her own work and sex work generally will be better informed and more sensitive to feminist politics than before.
From this perspective, the relevant question for both sex workers and feminists is not "What kind of sex do women like?" but "What kind of sex (if any) does
this woman
like?" If both women's and men's contemporary sexuality is a complex social construction under conditions in which patriarchal institutions define the norms of the sexual, then it makes no sense to ask, paraphrasing Freud, ''What do women
really
want?" Enmeshed as we are within the social framework that circumscribes our sexuality, we cannot know which aspects of our sexual lives are defined by conditions of women's sexual subordination by men and which are the "natural" conditions of women. Alan Soble critiques a Reichian sexual philosophy on the basis that we cannot know what kind of sexuality will emerge from repressive capitalist conditions, when all we know about that sexuality is circumscribed by those conditions. On this basis, however, I do not think that Soble can argue for his thesis that there will be pornography under communism with any more epistemological certainty than Reich has at his disposal.
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The question of whether or not there will be sex work in the ideal society assumes that there is one ideal to which individual women and men universally subscribe and to which we all have the same epistemological access, a perspective firmly ensconced in the "view from nowhere," which I have argued greatly misrepresents the variety and complexity of women's sexuality. What we can say is that our individual attitudes toward our own and others' sexualities is quixotic and complex enough to warrant skepticism about making generalizations concerning what women (and men) may derive politically or personally from sex work. As with Andrea Dworkins's
Mercy
, the subject/object dialectic in sex work makes distinctions between pornography, erotica, and feminist moral realism tenuous even when their contexts are carefully noted. Robert Stoller has pointed out, "In both art and erotics,
each episode feels different and is done differently from every other episode
, even in the same person" (Stoller's italics).
139
Feelings of power and powerlessness, fear and rage, tenderness and intimacy often paradoxically combine to form a single human sexual relationship. Sex work, like sex, is simply too complexly motivated to lend itself to easy analysis or simple categories.
To affirm this ambiguous, contradictory, and uncertain space is typically unpopular with philosophers and feminists who require analytically and morally determinable foundations from which to argue their positions. My thesis throughout this book has been that while both feminism and philosophy are essential to clarify the issues that divide people over sex, it is a mistake to treat sex itself as capable of conceptual and moral clarity. What we do need is more women talking
and listening
to each other, so that we will feel united, not divided, by our diversity; and we need more women talking to men who perform sex work, more women listening to men who are embarrassed, confused, or themselves enraged by sex work, and more women willing to "world"-travel to the social location of men who simply cannot get
 
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enough of what the sex industry has to offer.
140
Exploring the tensions in women's and men's attitudes toward sex work without the superiority of the "view from somewhere better" or the univocal perspective of the "view from nowhere" means negotiating the tensionsaccommodating, even embracing them, not disregarding or ignoring them after attempts at resolution have failed. Indeed, I contend that such attempts at resolution arbitrarily and artificially close important conceptual, moral, and political questions, thus dividing women against each other when openness to such questions would unite sex workers and feminists.
Efforts at eradicating specific sex work practices commonly ignore those women whose only sense of identity and autonomy derives from sex work. On the other hand, celebrating the subversiveness of the self-identified "bad girl" can minimize the ways in which sex work is used to justify and reinforce men's sexual subordination of women. Both run the risks of polarizing the dialogue and alienating women from our common goal of sexual subjectivity and self-definition for all women. Both sex workers and feminists must recognize that a debilitating sexual double standard that turns "good" girls into ''bad" ones, combined with economic discrimination that drives many women to a profession stigmatized by that standard, are the real enemies, not sex workers or feminists. Without such recognition, women may unwittingly fall prey to the socially ubiquitous "blame the woman" syndrome that both sex workers and feminists contest. The extent to which sex work will be liberating for women will be the extent to which individual women of diverse perspectives can define their sexuality in their own terms and, as members of a caring community of women, live differently together in ways that help secure for all women the educational and economic opportunities necessary for informed vocational choice.
Conclusion
Driving the sex industry underground with accusations of political incorrectness will not constructively address those aspects of the trade that promote or reinforce the degradation and abuse of women; nor will successfully eliminating abuses within the sex industry change the content of billboards and soap operas that also capitalize on the equation of a woman's identity with her sexual availability to men. The sex industry is a conducive environment for the exploitation of women, since the industry exists within a culture in which heterosexual sex has been, and continues to be, a primary means of intimidation of women through rape, sexual harassment, wife battering, incest, and the forced traffic in women.
141
However, this is not equivalent to saying that every female sex worker is a victim nor that sex workers must work for feminist producers, procurers, or club managers in order not to be collaborators in patriarchy. Moreover, pinning harm to women on the sex industry, its workers, or its images absolves rapists and batterers of their responsibility for their violence against women.
142
Indeed, sex workers are often assigned the impossible role of being both the brainwashed victims of an oppressive patriarchy and the willful causal agents of men's violence against women.
The goal of feminists working to separate pornography from erotica is to give women sex work and sexually explicit material that is nonsexist and nondegrading to women. Yet many such feminists err in assuming that we can easily distinguish the
 
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pornographic from the erotic or that women who perceive themselves as feminists would not want to be turned on by bondage, discipline, anonymous sex, group sex, telephone sex, computer sex, and other alternative sexual styles depicted or otherwise offered for sale by the sex industry. This is not to suggest that sexual pleasure is its own justification. It is simply to remind feminists that women must be given the freedom to explore sexual difference if we are to transcend the restrictive standards of women's sexuality under patriarchy. It is also to remind sex workers that such standards are easily reinforced by behavior that can be reframed by the status quo and mistaken by feminists as women desiring our sexual subordination by men. Characterizing sex work as a dialectic between subject and object allows feminists and sex workers to talk to each other about the meaning and morality of sex work without devolving into the polarization and alienation that has characterized so much of the dialogue in recent years. By adopting a sexual ethic of care respect derived from the "view from somewhere different," feminists and sex workers can better understand how a woman's sale of her sexuality can be both a vehicle for her subordination and her liberation.
143
How this perspective can help us understand the pervasiveness of women's sexual intimidation at home and at work is the subject of the final chapter.
 
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5
Appropriating Women's Bodies:
The Form and Function of Men's Sexual Intimidation of Women
Overview
The woman who says, "He talked me into it" after having consensual se
is still seen as a good girl. The young woman who says, "I invited him up
to my place; we got naked and had a blast" is often still deemed a slut.
Rene Denfeld,
The New Victorians: A Young Woman's Challenge to the Old Feminist Order
As the previous chapters suggest, one of the ways that individual women are punished for defying patriarchal models of feminine sexuality is by being denigrated to the status of "loose woman." When a woman chooses to be promiscuous, or when she questions the desirability of a compulsory and traditional heterosexuality, or when she turns a profit from selling sex, she becomes tantalizing proof of a potential for sexual agency and self-definition that must be discouraged if she is to continue in the sexual service of male desire. Moreover, as Rene Denfeld implies, so-called good girls acquire and maintain their good-girl status by acquiescing to the sexual intimidation of menif not by appearing to submit to men's sexual persistence, then by actually relenting to ultimately coercive sexual advances. Still other women acquiesce to sexual intimidation by remaining silent in the face of sexual violence or psychological abuse. From this perspective, men's sexual harassment, rape, battery, and abuse of women and girls are the visible exemplars of men's attempts to insure that women stay well within the boundaries of male-identified conceptions of women's "proper place."

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