The Prostitution of Sexuality. Kathleen Barry
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for women’s economic equality produce a new public, social exploitation, which is built from the prior, privatized sexual exploitation of women in marriage. When single, economically independent, emotionally autonomous women evade sexual reductionism and become historical reality, publicly institutionalized sexual exploitation reverts them back to sex.
That was the experience of Anita Hill, a prominent African-American lawyer, when she reported her experience of Clarence Thomas’s sexual harassment of her to the congressional committee that would confirm Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1991. When Hill testified before the congressional committee, the committee saw in this African-American woman her refusal to be sexed body, reduced to sex. Her refusal to be sex deeply challenged the sexual power of racism and the historical reduction of African-American women in slavery to sexual property, that is, to the sexual ownership of their white masters.4
The committee’s interrogation of Anita Hill, especially the threats from Pennsylvania Senator Specter, were more than a reaction against one woman. The all-male congressional committee made of Anita Hill a nationally televised lesson to all women—and their message to U.S. women was to withdraw, to retreat. As she bravely and unswervingly stood up to that day of grilling, of intensive cross-examination, of unrelenting efforts to find a modicum of motivation, other than justice, for her allegations, women throughout the United States became aware, as many had never been aware before, of the reality that if a woman of Anita Hill’s character cannot be believed, none of us will be believed. That was the message from the congressional male bonding, racist as it was, that enveloped Clarence Thomas within its protective cover. Hill’s case acquired such prominence because she became paradigmatic of the woman who refuses to be reduced to body, sexist body, racist body, and the fact that she is African-American made her refusal to be sexed body an ultimate act of defiance.
Culture of Sex and Construction of Sexuality
Sexual power is a political condition of women’s lives that is either privatized and feudalistic or public and industrial, or both. In each historical period, under each set of economic conditions from marital feudalism to sex industrialization and normalized prostitution, sexuality is socially constructed, shaped in the society by social norms and values to fit to the particular conditions of patriarchy. Society (not biology, not drives, not needs, and not desires) precedes sexuality, giving structure and context to the individual experience of it.
As society socially constructs sexuality, acts of sexual exchange are where domination is produced and, in turn, they give shape and form to physiological sexual impulses, drives, or needs. It does not work the other way around, as sexologists would have it. That is, the sex drive does not manifest itself as some innate reality that then determines sexual behaviors. Christine Delphy has pointed out that “it is oppression which creates gender” and that “gender in its turn created anatomical sex, in the sense that the hierarchal division of homogeneity into two transforms an anatomical difference (which is itself devoid of social implication) into a relevant distinction for social practice.”5
In the industrialized world, the social, cultural production of “sexuality,” the sexuality of normalized prostitution, has developed and been deployed through the science of sex, sexology, and its counterpart, pornography, the graphic representation of prostitution sex. Foucault poses the question “whether, since the nineteenth century, the scientia sexualis . . . has not functioned, at least to a certain extent, as an ars erotica.”6 The public and social deployment of sex as sexuality, “proliferating, innovating, annexing, creating, and penetrating bodies in an increasingly detailed way, and . . . controlling populations in an increasingly comprehensive way,”7 created “discourses” through which sex, which has no pre-social definition or meaning, became sexuality, a condition of sexist power.
A century of development of public, social sexual preoccupation in the West in liberal areas has shifted the social expectation of coupling away from marriage and its privatization of women under one male authority, the husband, toward sex and the public colonization of women for male sexual servicing. Conservative areas of post-industrial society demonstrate the effort to reconfine women within the family, under reproductive and sexual control.
A sexual imperative looms over coupling. It signifies for the late twentieth century what marriage had meant for previous centuries in terms of control of women. As women are no longer necessarily identified as wives, they are expected to be known through their sexual connection to another. Coupling has become a social signification that women are sexually connected to another—therefore under control, a control of women that marriage no longer assures. The imperative that women be/are sexual is a historically recent social force constituted to sustain male domination when women cannot be controlled by marriage or in economic dependency.
The 1960s sexual revolution took as its bibles the works of sexologists and pornographers, both of which groups, as Sheila Jeffries pointed out, were hostile to women’s liberation in the 1960s and 1970s.8 Finally, by the 1980s, they had reduced the meaning and significance of women’s “liberation” to pornography where “liberation” means trespassing traditional masculinist sexual norms to replace them with modern, public masculinist norms that reduce woman to sex. The culture of sexual liberation, developed in the twin discourses of sexology and pornography, produces sex as an objectified “thing” to be gotten, taken, had. That “thing” has been reified in the orgasm. As Stephen Heath points out, orgasm is “the key manoeuvre in the sexual fix”:
As long as orgasm holds the centre of the stage, we will never get out of the sexual norm, a redirection of the sexual, the realization of sex as a commodity with men and women placed and held essentially, as their “nature,” male and female, the difference, as the agents of that exchange.9
In a century-long development of a masculinist culture of sex in the West, sexuality has been made compulsive, and it is compulsively treated as if compulsive sex is “normal” sex. The deployment of sexuality generally follows the progression of pornography, which emerged for massive distribution in the early 1960s. As legal control of pornography was lifted, its subject matter escalated from pictures of nude women to more provocative poses. By 1967 more sexual explicitness was expected by consumers,10 which finally led to hard-core, violent, humiliating, degrading sex and the snuff films in which women were murdered in the sexual fix.
Today male domination is sustained in large part by the failure of society to distinguish between sex that is exploitation and sex that is positive human experience, enhancing rather than destroying human lives. Feminism has intervened in the patriarchal construction of sex. In their civil rights approach to pornography, Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon redefined pornography to be “a systematic practice of exploitation and subordination based on sex which differentially harms women.”11 Dworkin and MacKinnon defined pornography as harm not only because it is violent—because it presents women being penetrated by objects or animals, because it presents women injured, bleeding, bruised in pornographic sex—but at its core pornography is violating because “women are presented as dehumanized sexual objects, things or commodities.”12
Legally, Dworkin and MacKinnon have identified the subject matter of pornography as “graphic, sexually explicit presentation that produces a subordination of women through pictures and/or words” (emphasis added). Prostitution is the enacted version of pornography, where the graphic representation of the subordination of women comes to life. The normalization of prostitution is the pornographic deployment of that subordination into private lives and personal relationships. Now, not only is it the daily, subjective experience of a class of women, identified by their commercial