The Prostitution of Sexuality. Kathleen Barry
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as a class through the prostitution of sexuality.
In defense of male domination, sexual liberals, those who have promoted sex as a form of freedom and as a matter only of individual choice without regard to whether that sex enhances or harms human experience, have moved to censor the civil rights approach to pornography. By the 1990s the progression and escalation of pornography has become the masculinist culture of sex in which prostitution is the normative model for sexual behavior. It does not stop there. This Western masculinist construction of sex, this colonization of women’s bodies, is a major dimension of Western hegemony as American, European, and Australian men, in the military, in businesses, and as tourists, impose that sex in the form of market demand on women in Third World countries. The U.S., U.N., or other occupying military forces have not just discovered sex for the first time when they rape and prostitute women of Third World countries, nor is that the end of it when they return home to lovers or wives.
In each historical condition of sexualization—feudalism, industrialization, and post-industrial society—the subordination of women is accomplished through (1) the sexualization that reduces women to biology, locating women in a class condition where they are expropriated bodies to be fetishized, which treats sex and women’s lives as essential rather than social reality; (2) the reduction of human beings to bodily functions, driving women out of history; and (3) atemporality in which women cease to exist in time. In sexual exploitation, women are universalized and therefore not historical, biologized and therefore not social.
By contrast, Catharine MacKinnon summarizes the legal and social reality that would obtain if sex were not the condition of subordination:
If the sexes were equal, women would not be sexually subjugated. Sexual force would be exceptional, consent to sex could be commonly real, and sexually violated women would be believed. If the sexes were equal, women would not be economically subjected, their desperation and marginality cultivated, their enforced dependency exploited sexually or economically.13
Prostitution of Sexuality
When prostitution is normalized it is no longer the exchange of money and the anonymity in the fact that she has known this guy maybe 10 minutes that differentiates how women in prostitution experience the night from how many women, teenagers, and young girls around the world experience it. By the 1990s, sex that is bought in the act of prostitution and promoted in pornography does not look significantly different from the sex that is taken in rape, pressured in teenage dating, and apparently given in many private relationships. This leads to the conclusion that, in the West, normatively the lines between rape, prostitution, and private sex have blurred.
The legacy to women of the sexual liberation movement and the legitimization of pornography of the 1960s has not been women’s liberation but rather the prostitution of sexuality. By the 1990s, the video cassette recorder has done more than bring pornography home into the bedroom and private sexual relations. With the camcorder, it has made the bedroom—or wherever pornography that is prostituted sex is done—the location for making pornography. It has been reported that about one-third of the approximately 75 new adult videos each month are made by amateurs at home.14 And as husbands and lovers see a market value to film their private, intimate moments at home, women are reporting that the sex scenes are becoming more and more torturous. Diana Russell in her study of rape found that 10% of the 930 women she interviewed had experienced pornography being brought into their sex lives:
Ms. C: He was a lover. He’d go to porno movies, then he’d come home and say, “I saw this in a movie. Let’s try it.” I felt really exploited, like I was being put in a mold.
Ms. D: I was staying at this guy’s house. He tried to make me have oral sex with him. He said he’d seen far-out stuff in movies, and that it would be fun to mentally and physically torture a woman.
Ms. F: He’d read something in a pornographic book, and then he wanted to live it out. It was too violent for me to do something like that. It was basically getting dressed up and spanking. Him spanking me. I refused to do it.
Ms. H: This couple who had just read a porno book wanted to try the groupie number with four people. They tried to persuade my boyfriend to persuade me. They were running around naked, and I felt really uncomfortable.
Ms. I: It was S & M stuff. I was asked if I would participate in being beaten up. It was a proposition, it never happened. I didn’t like the idea of it.
Interviewer: Did anything else upset you?
Ms. I: Anal intercourse. I have been asked to do that, but I didn’t enjoy it at all. I have had to do it, very occasionally.
Ms. M: Anal sex. First he attempted gentle persuasion, I guess. He was somebody I’d been dating a while and we’d gone to bed a few times. Once he tried to persuade me to go along with anal sex, first verbally, then by touching me. When I said “No,” he did it anyway—much to my pain. It hurt like hell.15
In their early 1980s study of 12,000 heterosexual and homosexual couples, sociologists Philip Blumstein and Pepper Schwartz found that married people were having more sex and more regularly. While sexual activity was increasing in the home, sexualities have configured around gender rather than sexual preference/orientation. Sexually speaking, “husbands and male cohabitors are more like gay men than they are like wives or female cohabitors. Lesbians are more like heterosexual women than either is like gay or heterosexual men.”16 Their conclusion was based in significant part on preferences for sexual practices in relation to power and control. In the gendering of sexuality, often men consider their genitals the main focus of the sex act. Generally, more sex has led to more sexual objectification that dissociates sex from an interactive experience with another. This is the sexuality that was set in motion by pornography, particularly Deep Throat, made by Linda Lovelace while she was sexually enslaved by the pimp/pornographer Chuck Traynor.
Sex that is not mutually interactive and is dissociated from one’s partner will eventually invoke women in disengagement, dissociation, and disembodiment. It is not surprising then that for women reciprocity was important in their sexual relations. In the couples study, heterosexual women expressed preference for intercourse because it involves mutual participation; it was more central to their sexual satisfaction. But, as Andrea Dworkin points out:
women have wanted intercourse to be, for women, an experience of equality and passion, sensuality and intimacy. Women have a vision of love that includes men as human too; and women want the human in men including in the act of intercourse. Even without the dignity of equal power, women have believed in the redeeming potential of love.17
Women and men have arrived at different places to participate in the sexualization of society and the intensification of sexual exploitation in private life. Continuing with Dworkin, “these visions of a humane sensuality based in equality are in the aspirations of women; and even the nightmare of sexual inferiority does not seem to kill them.”18 By choice and desire, male sexuality configures around disengaged sex, sex for the sake of itself, separate from the human experience and interaction that it actually is, thereby destroying sexual interaction in favor of sex that is objectifying, the origins of the prostitution of sexuality. This is socially constructed sex, the conditions that prevail when sexuality is made an element of power relations of sexism.
If the prostitution of sexuality, the reduction of oneself to sexual object, is increasingly demanded of adult women, it is an even more pressing requirement of teenagers. With the sexualization of society, first sex is occurring at earlier ages, in the teenage years. Sexual norms in high school and college dating are expressed now in the language of prostitution: “hooking up” identifies dating for the purposes of having sex. In 1981, 19% of unmarried girls had had intercourse by the age of 15. By 1988 that figure