The Prostitution of Sexuality. Kathleen Barry
Читать онлайн книгу.
first began my research in the late 1970s, I was shown some photos of prostitution homicides taken by the police. One file puzzled and horrified me. It contained a photo of a huge trash barrel in the basement of an old building. I peered at this photo for a few moments before I realized that a dead girl’s body had been stuffed into the barrel. Only her arm, circled above her head, was showing. In New York City alone in 1975, official police statistics documented 71 prostitution homicides. At least 54 of them were committed by pimps or tricks.33 This figure is undoubtedly conservative.
Maher and Curtis found that in 2 neighborhoods in New York City, at least 4 women in prostitution were killed during the time they were doing research: “One woman was hurled into a parking meter from a van being chased by the police; another was murdered and her decapitated body, minus her breasts, was found over by the railway tracks. Another woman . . . was beaten to death by a date.”34
The fate of prostituted immigrant women rarely surfaces. Mar-iscris Sioson was one of the many of the 80,000 Filipino women who immigrated to Japan for jobs and in the hands of the Yakuza, the Japanese mafia, were turned into bar women. When Sioson’s body was returned to the Philippines for burial, the Japanese medical determination of organ failure as the cause of death did not stand up to the evidence on her body of extreme brutality. The unexplained brutality, evidenced in severe head wounds and slashes on her legs and other parts of her body, would have been left unexplained had Sioson’s parents not taken the medical photographs to the press. However, after President Aquino dispatched an investigator to Japan for a fact-finding mission, reports began to equivocate on the charges of wrongdoing.35
Whether foreign immigrants or local runaways, it is difficult to determine the incidence of murders and suicides of prostitute women. No one counts. Prostitute women’s disengagement from former friends, family, and “straight” society makes them anonymous, then invisible. No one knows. Within the prostitution world, no one cares.
But when a prostitute kills a trick, the John, it is as if the world might come to an end. In 1992, Aileen Carol Wuornos was convicted and sentenced to death in the killing of a trick who may very well have been a serial murderer of prostitutes, as her story, reported by Phyllis Chesler, who has championed her case, suggests:
I said I would not [have sex with him]. He said, yes, you are, bitch. You’re going to do everything I tell you. If you don’t I’m going to kill you and [have sex with you] after you’re dead, just like the other sluts. It doesn’t matter, your body will still be warm. He tied my wrists to the steering wheel, and screwed me in the ass. . . . Eventually he untied me, put a stereo wire around my neck and tried to rape me again. . . . Then I thought, well, this dirty bastard deserves to die because of what he was tryin’ to do to me. We struggled. I reached for my gun. I shot him.36
In all, Wuornos killed 6 violent tricks. A woman serial killer. Chesler points out that “serial killers are mainly white male drifters, obsessed with pornography and woman-hatred, who sexually use their victims, either before or after killing them, and who were themselves paternally abused children.”37 They do not claim self-defense, nor are they threatened with beating, rape, and murder, as was Aileen Carol Wuornos.38 After being convicted in the first trial, she was convinced by her attorneys to plead guilty or no contest to the other charges.
As a woman serial killer of men, the Wuornos case has generated dramatic media attention and her acts have incited the full wrath of Florida justice. She has been sentenced to death 5 times, and given the state’s fury over the death of male tricks, it would seem, as Chesler points out, that “if the state of Florida could, it would electrocute Wuornos once for each man she’s accused of killing.”39 The murder of women is one of the occupational hazards of prostitution, clearly demonstrated in the court trial and treatment of her case, which was dissociated from the context in which she was prostituted and reduced to sex to be used at the will of her customers, which includes his will to kill, apparently.
In Rochester, New York, Arthur Shawcross was on parole from a manslaughter conviction when he killed 11 women between 1988 and 1989. Most of the women were prostitutes. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. During a “cleanup” or sweep of prostitutes that involved arresting more than 12,000 women in 1992, 10 more prostitute murders occurred.40 None of these murders has evoked the wrath that Wuornos’s killing in self-defense provoked.
Serial murders of prostitute women are periodically reported. From late 1977 to early 1978 a Los Angeles strangler brutally raped and murdered several women; most of his victims were prostitutes. During the same period many street walkers in northern England were victims of a “ripper’s” mutilation murders. Serial murders of prostitutes have continued, and in 1992, 9 prostitute women in Detroit, all crack cocaine users, were strangled and left in empty buildings. Their bodies were nude, and they were bound and gagged. Some bodies when found were badly decomposed, having been in the abandoned buildings at least 6 months.41
Meg Baldwin summarized prostitution murders, giving a sense of their scope:
Forty-eight women, mainly prostitutes, were killed by the Green River Killer; up to thirty-one women murdered in Miami over a three-year period, most of them prostitutes; fourteen in Denver; twenty-nine in Los Angeles; seven in Oakland. Forty-three in San Diego; fourteen in Rochester; eight in Arlington, Virginia; nine in New Bedford, Massachusetts, seventeen in Alaska, ten in Tampa. . . . Three prostitutes were reported dead in Spokane, Washington, in 1990, leading some to speculate that the “Green River” murderer of forty-eight women and girls had once again become “active.”42
As Jane Caputi points out, “serial sexual murder is not some inexplicable explosion/epidemic of an extrinsic evil or the domain of the mysterious psychopath. On the contrary such murder is an eminently logical step in the procession of patriarchal roles, values, needs, and rule of force.”43
Murder, bottoming out, rape, and prostitution itself are consequences of dehumanized sexuality, a condition of oppression. When liberal legal constructions of human will are invoked to determine if, when, and where violation occurs, the dehumanized sexuality of patriarchal oppression is dissociated from the individual violations. Cause and consequence are dissociated. Domination prevails.
As I found in Female Sexual Slavery, the agents of that power are men who may function individually or in concert with each other,
considering the numbers of men who are pimps, procurers, members of syndicate and free-lance slavery gangs, operators of brothels and massage parlors, connected with sexual exploitation entertainment, pornography purveyors, wife beaters, child molesters, incest perpetrators, Johns (tricks) and rapists, one cannot help but be momentarily stunned by the enormous male population participating in female sexual slavery. The huge number of men engaged in these practices should be cause for declaration of a national and international emergency, a crisis in sexual violence.
To this list should be added the sexual liberals who promote pornography as free speech and prostitution as consenting sex.
The emergency I identified in Female Sexual Slavery has not yet been recognized. By the end of the twentieth century masculinist society has found the answer in the normalization of prostitution in the prostitution of sexuality. Women’s human rights violations are becoming conditions of normal sex, confirmed in women’s consent and answering the question posed by the Marquis de Sade in the eighteenth century, “But where is one to find free slaves?”
2 Sexual Power