The Prostitution of Sexuality. Kathleen Barry
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Mamac, born in a rural farming village in the Philippines, tried to escape the inevitability of marrying there and raising her own family in the poverty in which she grew up. Like many women moving from rural to urban areas as their country is industrializing, Lisa left her village for a large city with plans to go to school. Rural to urban migration socially dislocates women and girls as patriarchal power in traditional societies provides almost no possibilities for women outside of marriage or their family. Under these conditions women are made particularly vulnerable to sexual exploitation. Away from home and on her own, Lisa fell in love and then became pregnant, only to learn that the man she was involved with was already married. He left her and she struggled alone with her infant, who died at 8 months. She tried to go back to school but did not have the money. Finally she became involved with a man who said he would put her through school. But he didn’t. In October 1981, Lisa met a man who was a chief prosecutor in the court of justice of the region in which she lived. He told her of a high-paying position as a receptionist in a 5-star hotel in the Netherlands. He arranged for her to have the job. As women are marginalized from the developing economies of their industrializing countries, emigration often appears to be the only way to survive.
Most women trafficked into prostitution are from rural areas and have been in brief marriages or liaisons with men who abandon them.1 When Lisa arrived in the Netherlands, she was put into a brothel. Like many women trafficked into prostitution, Lisa’s only chance for help was to appeal to customers to help her escape. In 1983, one customer listened to Lisa’s story and agreed to help her. But it was 2 years before police investigations led to a police raid on the brothel. Once she was free, with the support of Philippine groups in the Netherlands, women’s organizations there, and women’s groups in the Philippines, in 1985 Lisa Mamac began the struggle to win justice in her case. In 1988 Jan Schoemann was expelled from the Philippines and was convicted in Dutch courts of trafficking and sentenced to serve two and a half years in prison. His Philippine counterpart, Nestoria Placer, a former government official, was freed by the Philippine court in 1991. The judge in the case turned the blame back on Lisa Mamac and “her glaring immoral conduct manifested by her unusual inclination for illicit sex” in contrast to Placer, whose “character is beyond reproach and whose public life remains unblemished.”2 In 1993, the case was on appeal.
Lisa Mamac, caught in the vulnerability of women migrating from rural poverty, was trafficked into prostitution. At the same time, prostitution was being industrialized in her own country. Sex industrialization had been set in motion to service the military, particularly of the U.S. Subic Naval Base and Clark Air Force Base. Furthermore, Lisa was trafficked from the Philippines to the Netherlands, one of the Western countries that has taken the lead among post-industrial nations in legalizing and normalizing prostitution. Lisa Mamac’s exploitation in prostitution encapsulated all of the stages of sexual exploitation that I have identified in this work: (1) trafficking in women, (2) military prostitution, (3) sex industrialization, and (4) normalization of prostitution.
Historical Stages in the Deployment of Sexual Exploitation
Patriarchal power is singular in its reduction of women to sex, but varied in its political and economic strategies for deploying sexual subordination. Sexual exploitation is differentially shaped according to the economic development of each region, which determines how sex is constructed and deployed to subordinate women. Therefore, there is no one strategy of patriarchal power and sexual politics.3 While each of these 4 stages of sexual exploitation are found in any historical period or in any stage of a country’s economic development, they also constitute progression, one leading to another with economic development and prosperity.
1. Trafficking in women prevails especially in pre-industrial and feudal societies that are primarily agricultural, where women are excluded from the public sphere. Women’s reduction to sex is a fact of their status as the property of their husbands. Under such conditions women are governed by marital relations of power through the exploitation of their unpaid labor in the home, their reproduction, and their sexuality. They are privatized by marriage, and their labor outside of the home is confined within the informal economic sector, not counted in the public economy. Sexual subordination and economic dependency resulting from women’s status as the property of their husbands is marital feudalism. In feudalism men may sexually exploit their wives, take concubines, and buy prostitutes with impunity as the privilege of male domination that services their promiscuity. By contrast, as women are sexual property of men, any sexual act outside of their marriage, including rape and forced prostitution, is usually considered infidelity and the victims are severely punished. There is little or no social space for women outside of the private patriarchal sector. However, prostitution prevails for men. In the private patriarchal sector, women and girls are supplied to brothels primarily through brutal trafficking and forced prostitution.
2. Military prostitution in war and in many areas where there is a massive military presence provides for soldiers’ rest and recreation, R & R. Increasingly wars are being fought primarily in Third World countries, or in somewhat more developed areas such as Eastern Europe was when much of it was reverted to underdevelopment by war. Likewise, military prostitution proliferates in the areas where women’s vulnerabilities from war, because of rape in war, in economic underdevelopment from war, and in the patriarchal traditionalism of the society where the war is waged, makes them accessible to be prostituted as sex commodities for soldiers who are usually foreign men—either aggressors or occupiers.
3. Sex industrialization accompanies economic development. With industrialization and the development of a public economic sector, larger numbers of women leave the privatized household in search of jobs in the public economy, usually in urban areas. As industrializing economies shift from domestic to export-oriented production, Western-originated sex industries work with local and regional traffickers to build sex industries. Women migrating from rural to urban areas constitute a ready pool for procurers. Their labor, having been unpaid and exploited at home, is devalued in the public economy, and they are marginalized from it. Exploitation in the family leads to exploitation of labor in the public economy. As industrialization accelerates, sex industries buy women’s sexual exchange at a higher rate than most women can earn in export processing labor. Sex industries prostitute significant proportions of the female population, which can no longer be spoken of only as forced prostitution in terms of trafficking in women. In this phase, the primary emphasis of sexual exploitation shifts from trafficking in women to sex industrialization that is usually not characterized by physical coercion or slavery. Rather, economic destitution in the displacement of women from rural to urban areas and the absence of work opportunities close down the world of possibilities for women. As sex industrialization develops, for some women it has the appeal of fast money in an increasingly commercialized world of commodities that are available primarily to men.
4. Normalization of prostitution takes place with higher levels of economic development in post-industrial societies. In post-industrial, developed societies, when women achieve the potential for economic independence, men are threatened with loss of control over women as their legal and economic property in marriage. To regain control, patriarchal domination reconfigures around sex by producing a social and public condition of sexual subordination that follows women into the public world. Sexual exploitation is individualized to fit the domination of economically independent women. Sexual saturation of society through pornography promoted by sexology sustains individualized sexual exploitation in the public domain. By contrast, public images of the sexual subordination of women are not necessary under feudal conditions, wherein sex is a fact of privatized property arrangements of marriage and there is no economic or social alternative to marriage for women. Nor is the issue of women’s consent important or even relevant when they are legal property of their husbands. But in the sexual saturation of society through pornography, when women are reduced publicly to sex, women’s sexual consent becomes paramount in importance to sustain their subordination. Pursuing work in industrialized sectors, women are removed from men’s control of them in the family. The social control of women is reinforced in the public world by invoking