The Prostitution of Sexuality. Kathleen Barry
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of the survivors were the victims of rape, a class A felony. Almost half (48%) were raped by pimps an average of 16 times per year and more than three-quarters (79%) were raped by Johns an average of 33 times per year.20
In the prostitution world, the payment of money is the distinguishing factor that differentiates rape sex from prostitution sex. In women’s lives and experiences there is little distinction. In her WHISPER oral history project, Evelina Giobbe found that the prostitute woman “defined rape as a situation in which a customer had sex with her and then refused to pay or took back their money after the act.”21 Likewise in their study of 200 women and girls in prostitution in San Francisco, of the 73% who reported being raped while being prostitutes, Silbert and Pines found that in 19% of the cases the women tried to stop the rapist by telling him that she was a prostitute. By trying to return sex to economic exchange, the prostitute woman, rather than causing the rapist to withdraw, found that he escalated his attack. “They became furious at hearing the woman say she was a prostitute. Most started demanding she take back what she had said, insisting on taking her by force. In order to reassert their control, assailants then became extremely violent.”22
Silbert and Pines pointed out that “when the victim told the assailant she was a prostitute and offered him sexual gratification, she was trying to assert some contrql over the situation.” In comparison to those who did not tell, these women (12%) were subjected to more violent abuse. The rapists indicated in their behavior and words that they were directly involved with pornography.
In an effort to reduce accompanying beatings, the prostitute women offered sex that could be treated as if it were consensual, meaning sex to which they would not resist. The women distinguished rape sex from prostitution sex, not by the act, but by the payment of money. In the act of making the offer for prostitution exchange, the women behaved like bodied human beings who would willingly subordinate themselves to exploitation. This is the same condition that rape victims are in when they fight back and are told by their attacker to accept it or they will be hurt more or killed. As Silbert and Pines noted, the prostitute women were trying to assert control. But prostitution is sex bought on men’s terms. Rape is sex taken on men’s terms. The sex men buy in prostitution is the same sex that they take in rape—sex that is disembodied, enacted on the bodies of women who, for the men, do not exist as human beings. Men decide whether it is sex they pay for, or sex they take by force or with consent.
Rape of prostitute women has been a social enigma—not because prostitute women are not raped, for indeed they are, but because the experience of disembodied sex (in both rape and prostitution) has been reduced to issues of consent or of force. The prostitute women who offered consensual sex assumed that because they were sex, the commodity, by virtue of being prostitutes, offering sex would reduce the force. But both prostitution sex and rape sex are constructions of sex power. The prostitution of sexuality is the continuous reconfiguring of sex “on men’s terms” to sustain women’s subordination. In actuality, when a prostitute woman tries to assert sex divorced from rape, she defies one instance of sexual power—rape—to be subordinated in another instance—prostitution. That is why experientially rape and prostitution sex are undifferentiated for the women who are its vehicles. As one woman reported to Evelina Giobbe in her oral history project on women in prostitution,
Prostitution is like rape. It’s like when I was 15 years old and I was raped. I used to experience leaving my body. I mean that’s what I did when that man raped me. I looked up at the ceiling and I went to the ceiling and I numbed myself . . . because I didn’t want to feel what I was feeling. I was very frightened. And while I was a prostitute I used to do that all the time. I would numb my feelings. I wouldn’t even feel like I was in my body. I would actually leave my body and go somewhere else with my thoughts and with my feelings until he got off as it was over with. I don’t know how else to explain it except that it felt like rape. It was rape to me.23
The Sexual Secret
Although often represented as sexually liberating, prostitution, fitted to male customer expectations, is a reactionary, regressive, and repressive sexual act. The market is driven by secrecy. Customers require anonymity and secrecy, and therefore prostitutes’ protection from exposing their identities. Secret sex is what they buy. The origins of sexual repression can be found in the secreted buying of women’s bodies. Marginalization of women in prostitution stems from this protection of the customer’s secret sex, his requirement of anonymity and secrecy. He requires that she be the “other,” the outsider, marginalized to sustain his secret. Secrecy is a foundation to sexual power in prostitution as sex industries display women on printed pages, in cages, on billboards, in storefront windows, but men, the customers, carry out their sex purchases in secret. The clandestine character of prostitution is part of the sexual experience and excitement customers buy. When we reach a time, as we surely will if feminism does not vigorously intervene, when prostitution is so normalized that men do not invoke secrecy to sustain their purchase of sex, we will have reached the dystopia of Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale where prostituting women is the only sex.
In the first instance and the final analysis, prostitution is not about women at all. The fact is that whether women claim prostitution as a right or condemn it as an exploitation of them is irrelevant to the promotion and continuation of prostitution. Prostitution and traffic in women are not perpetuated based on whether or not women want to do prostitution or are forced into it. Women are in prostitution because men buy them for sex; men buy children for sex, and men buy other men for sex. Sometimes society is concerned about buying of children. Sometimes society is preoccupied with men being bought for prostitution. Rarely does anyone question men buying women for sex, despite the fact that in some countries women in prostitution are no longer counted in the thousands but in the millions.
Prostitution is a male consumer market. The intense public focus on women’s will, her choice or her “right to prostitute,” deflects attention from the primary fact that prostitution exists first because of male customer demand. Sex industries are in place—from trafficking to brothels—to provide female bodies to satisfy that market demand. What matters in terms of the prostitution market and male demand is that there are female bodies provided for sex exchange. How or why they get there is irrelevant to the market.
Beyond Limits
Distancing one’s self in order to become disembodied to do prostitution is an effort to set limits and establish barriers with customers, to mark off oneself from the commodity constructed from oneself. Although setting limits creates a false sense of control, it is at least an effort to sustain some control in order to sustain one’s self. When limits are quantifiably dropped, the self is abandoned. As rape denies women the opportunity to set limits on or establish the terms of exploitation, prostitution without barriers or limits is the merging of rape sex with prostitution sex.
Domenica, an older German prostitute woman and a leader in the movement for prostitute rights in Germany, worries about the younger generation of women in prostitution. In an interview with Alice Schwarzer, editor of Emma magazine, Domenica reflected on the changes she sees in prostitution today, describing it as like a “market fair” where the streets are flooded with women from all classes who do prostitution with no limits:24 there is no bottom line to what customers are allowed to do, there is no bottom price, there is no separation of women from their lived experience as sexual objects—and they therefore must become them.
There are hierarchies that have structured the world of prostitution, stratifying women from high-class call girls to the lowest class of street walkers. In the last decade this structure has bottomed out and given way to prostitution without limits. In contrast to her generation of women, who learned to set rules and establish limits that enabled their survival of (and in her case survival in) prostitution, Domenica points out,
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