The Prostitution of Sexuality. Kathleen Barry
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We only do it with condoms, have always done so. We don’t allow kissing, because this is what you can only do at home, of course. Anally—nothing doing. But the young girls who usually get drugs from a pimp and are then sent on the street, they do everything. They cannot care less. They are so broken in spirit and body, they don’t have the strength to take care of themselves. . . . Today they are rather isolated, they completely surrender to their pimp.25
In other words, the construction of prostitution through the stages I have identified above is collapsed; the self is not distinguishable to these prostitute women or girls, because they do not set limits that define their own selves. This younger generation of women and girls in prostitution is not composed of women who stand behind the banners of a proprostitution movement to promote the idea that “all women are whores” and that “sex work” is a viable economic alternative for women. These are the teenage girls and young women who have experienced prior sexual abuse, poverty, and homelessness and have become the prostitutes without limits, selves that are synonymous with prostitution. Therefore the severity of the effect of prostitution on them personally also has no limits. In other words, the prostitution of sexuality through distancing, disengagement, dissociation, and dissembling, which has allowed women in prostitution to sustain some aspect of their selves and to keep a self apart from that which is sold, has collapsed in street prostitution in the 1990s.
Drugs play a different role in the debasement of women in prostitution than they did a decade or two ago. In the 1970s one could find ample evidence of drug use among prostitutes. Pimps often dealt in drugs as well as women. Women often reported needing something “to get through with it” as they turned one trick after another. But generally both pimps and prostitutes knew that a woman strung out on drugs would not generate much income and eventually would be useless on the streets. On a more casual or occasional level of prostitution, some women with drug habits would turn tricks just as they would steal to support their habits. But many never really entered prostitution because the drugs pulled them off in another destructive direction.
Criminologists Lisa Maher and R. Curtis have studied women into crack cocaine and street prostitution in New York City. They have found that “the widespread use of crack in many poor urban minority neighborhoods has increased the number of women participating in street-level sex markets.”26 Their study supports Domenica’s observation in Germany that there is increased isolation of women in prostitution, particularly in the heightened hostility prostitutes have for each other. A Detroit director of a clinic for addicts, Dwight Vaughter, explained crack cocaine in terms that are increasingly synonymous with street prostitution today: “It overwhelms every other human instinct. Crack comes first; something to eat and a safe place to stay means nothing in comparison. The instinct to protect your body, the instinct for life itself, is overwhelmed.”27
Maher and Curtis have shown that “crack-induced increases in the number of women sex workers” has caused a shift in the nature of prostitution “from vaginal intercourse to blow jobs, indoor to outdoor,” which has “deflated the going rates for sexual exchanges.”28 The fall in prices, combined with the virtual “anything goes” access customers have to women, reflects the latest changes in prostitution, the bottoming out of it. This is what Domenica meant by “they do everything,” and doing it for next to nothing ($3 for a blow job, $5 for a fuck) has made street life in prostitution a rougher place to be. It has increased customer violence—beatings and torture have become a taken-for-granted part of the prostitution exchange—along with the violation that is the prostitution of sexuality.
Norwegian sociologists Liv Finstad and Cecilie Hoigard have found that while prices in prostitution vary over time, there has been a minimum to which women have held. “The system of minimum prices is an exact parallel to the internal solidarity employees exhibit when it comes to the question of pay. Personal interests coincide with common interest. If someone sells herself cheap, it affects all the others. Prices fall.”29 And that sets women more intensely against each other.
Hoigard and Finstad found that in Sweden prostitution prices are set by the price of smack. “The women who see themselves as hooked have their daily routines, shifting between shots and tricks.”30 This direct relationship between drug costs on the street and the price of a trick was also found in Oslo, Stockholm, Hamburg, London, and New York. The price of a trick is not only related to the daily expenditure on drugs but is also directly related to the marginalization of women in the labor force and the homelessness forced on women through domestic violence and poverty.
Maher and Curtis’s research exposes the life of homeless, addicted, often pimp-controlled women on the streets, for whom prostitution becomes one of the very few “opportunities for revenue generation that are available in the informal economy.”31This study found that women did prostitution while men in the same neighborhoods stripped cars. “Men still very much control the informal economy in these neighborhoods and the street drug scene in which social and occupational relations are increasingly embedded.”32
Maher and Curtis’s findings reveal a pattern different from what we saw in the 1970s in relation to drug abuse. Crack-cocaine prostitution evokes a deeper desperation and reveals an abandoned self. Drugs become a reason for doing prostitution when there seems to be little reason to exist. Trespassing certain boundaries in which a self can be kept intact means giving up on survival. In homelessness, desperation reaches new extremes. By contrast the effort to survive, to keep oneself together even within prostitution by finding ways to try to protect oneself, reveals human beings who are somehow still engaged with themselves, still fighting for survival. Even if they are despairing of the present moment, they are surviving for a future moment when things might be different.
But, for many immigrant women, for women coming from prior sexual slavery and drugs, all of this—their efforts to survive—seems to have bottomed out. They have given way to deeper levels of deprivation wherein prostitution becomes the means by which they give up having a self. The possibility of being a whole person is thrown away in the despair of it all. Even that fact of desperation is trivialized in the superficial assumption that in bottoming out of prostitution, one does prostitution for the money for drugs. Bottoming out means that human agency is not there. Giving up on one’s survival becomes possible when there are no social conditions to support and promote survival. When the world of prostitution hits a new bottom, women become socially confused within a reality in which their survival is of no significance.
In both the Maher and Curtis research and that of Hoigard and Finstad, early childhood sexual abuse figured largely in the backgrounds of the women crack and smack addicts on the street. They had experienced the prostitution of their sexuality in incest assault, from which they, like every child subjected to it, learned to dissociate. They now do a prostitution from which they are disembodied, taking drugs through which they further dissociate from themselves. The desperation of homelessness and poverty added to the destruction from early childhood sexual abuse leaves young women and girls approaching prostitution without limits—there is nothing of the self left to save for survival. Trespassing those limits, where harm is contained, reduces the self to the sexually exploited thing that one is doing. The price is cheap because fast money is needed for another fix. But the price is also cheap because there is almost nothing of value left. Women are existing in their most severe conditions of dehumanization ever, for unlike the slave master who sold the body of another for a cheap price, these women sell themselves. There is not much of life left for them. Unlike women who distance themselves from prostitution, these women have little or no social space in which to be other than prostituted.
Murder
Systematic sexual exploitation reduces the value of female life to that of “throwaway women” who are like no-deposit,