The Prostitution of Sexuality. Kathleen Barry
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as a violation because an important element of slavery is the acceptance of their condition by many slaves. So deeply is the self-hatred of racism and sexism encoded.
Various theories of labor and analyses of labor markets treat capitalist labor as the exploitation of surplus value, revealing inequalities and dual labor markets. Consider labor in the production of the commodity of human services. In between unremuner-ated, exploited domestic labor that includes emotional labor and private sex exchange exists a range of personal services that are marketed—psychological therapy, counseling, and physical therapies, including massage. Human services begin with distinctions and differentiations—demarcations of what is saleable. Psychological therapy and massage each identifies appropriate treatments for particular conditions that are provided for a price. They may be meant to improve emotional and personal life, and the purchaser may receive emotional and/or personal satisfaction and even pleasure from them. But the therapist is not selling emotions, desires, drives or other aspects of their person. The difference from prostitution is that these services do not invoke sex; in fact, professional ethics in these fields require of the service providers that all protections against sexualizing the services be accorded their clients or customers.
The question of whether paid sexual exchange is exploited as labor does not fully address the question of whether certain experiences and actions should be conditions of labor at all. Dangerously, feminism has not yet asked about sex what marxists and socialists have asked about labor. Marxists ultimately envision labor freed from capitalist exploitation and laborers owning their own labor power. Can feminism, without contradicting its commitment to liberation, envision women as free sexual laborers sometime in the future? As prostitution becomes the model for patriarchal sexual relations of power, the unasked, unexplored, and seemingly hopelessly mired question surfaces: What do we as women want sex to be? How shall we socially construct sexuality as a condition of our liberation?
The recent research on women’s unpaid domestic labor that addresses that part of it that is emotional labor24 has confounded this issue and the answers to these questions, as it tends to adopt the terms “sexual labor” or “sex work.” The terms “sex work” and “sexual labor” imply that sex, if it were not exploited by traffickers, pimps, and industries, should be labor, or a condition of laboring, work that anyone should be able to engage in at a fair wage with full benefits of social services. In the absence of political consciousness of the exploitation of labor by capitalists and by husbands, the term “sex work” becomes imbued with a sense of normalcy.
There is an even larger question beneath this debate: Is emotional labor exploited because it is unremunerated, or is it exploited because emotional and sexual life have been reduced to mere servicing, to a labor that sustains gender power relations? Women’s subordination in general and sexual exploitation in particular raises the question asked earlier: What in the range of human experience should be considered as labor? And how do we achieve a condition of unexploited labor?
And beyond reducing the human experience of sex to labor, the promotion of “sex work” is specifically gendered: services are bought by men, provided for men—services that are not only the privilege of male domination, but the cause. With economic development and advancement, as material conditions improve for communities, families, and individuals, more emphasis is placed on inner life, emotions, and the personal. The self begins to be understood and developed in relation to inner life and emotions.25 Emotions, inner life, and the personal are gendered; they have distinctly different meanings for women and for men. Emotional work and sexual service become part of what men require from women. Men’s emotional disengagement and sexual requirements are not merely a matter of masculinist socialization. Rather, male underdeveloped emotional life and objectified sexual life are produced in power arrangements. In those power arrangements, emotions and sex are reduced to labor that is exploitation of women.
When sex is a requirement in the line of domestic duties, it is made into a form of labor and a dimension of sexual power in marriage. When sex is accepted as another form of labor, human beings cannot be protected from the destruction of that human sexual experience. Given that the human body is the location of ourselves, its fragility and vulnerabilities require protections. The body is extended into realities beyond it through social interaction, from the inner to the outer world, from self to other, and in this location of the body in the human condition, there is fragility. Then what do we constitute as the norms for its (our) protection? Patriarchal domination of women and capitalist markets that are now internationally interdependent have brought us to fundamental questions of human existence: Not can, but should emotions, sex, and reproduction be rendered into saleable commodities?
The principle that guides my work is that in confronting prostitution as an exploitation of women, we are also concerned with freeing women from being reduced to sex and reproduction as acts of labor and of market exchange. Janice Raymond has critiqued the marketing of reproduction in Women as Wombs.26 If feminism is to win women’s liberation, then sex and reproduction must be treated as experiences that protect rather than violate human fragility and vulnerability while supporting women as sexual and reproductive beings of their own choosing. I would suggest that the minimum conditions for sexual consent are in sex that is a human experience of personal dignity and one that is enjoyed with respect and pleasure. Neither marriage nor prostitution, as structures of patriarchal domination, institutionally provide for them. Therefore, although women and men may experience sex that does not violate human dignity and personal respect, their experiences are not because of but external to structured patriarchal power. And those experiences do not obviate the fact of women’s class oppression produced in the prostitution of sexuality.
The logic of the present study, and all of the suppositions of the women’s movements against violence against women and against pornography, assume a new possibility—that sex, when it is a condition of our liberation, will be experienced in the human condition as a human experience, a personal interaction of pleasure, of attachment and affection, of human wholeness, and, for those who choose, for reproduction.
Proprostitution
In the small but highly vocal proprostitution movement, some few women are treating their prostitution affirmatively, as “sex work,” as experiences of unrepressed sex that they control. Theirs is not unlike some heterosexual women’s and lesbians’ defense of sadomasochism as an enactment of sexual desire for women; in the movement to promote pornography this group is led by F.A.C.T. and its views are promoted in works like Carol Vance’s.27 Many women actively promote pornographic sexuality as a chosen dimension of their lives while many other women actively claim and positively assert a “prostitution identity.” Are they dehumanized by these dissociations, or are they only claiming a self-chosen identity? If women actively choose pornographic, prostituted sex, can we consider that sex as harmless because it is chosen? These questions collapse the experience of harm into the act of consent, rendering invisible the harm of the prostitution exchange, dissociating it from the fullness of lived experience, and locating it only in human will. This is a variant of liberal ideology, which drives economic markets by elevating individual choice in order to maximize consumerism. In this way, the sex of prostitution is reduced from being a class condition of women to a personal choice of the individual. Under the decadence that elevates individual choice above the common good, chosen patriarchal violation serves capitalist market exchange.
A feminist analysis of sexual exploitation requires analyzing the class condition of women in relation to actual, lived experience. Developing a feminist human-rights perspective refocuses the question back to the act, to lived experience, to the conditions under which sex takes place, and asks whether or not that constitutes violation. In human rights, the determination of harm must rest on the act, the experience and its representations, not only individually but collectively in women’s class condition. If the act exploits, it is in itself destructive of human life, well-being, integrity, and dignity. That is violation. And when it is gendered, repeated over and over in and on woman