The Prostitution of Sexuality. Kathleen Barry
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women in prostitution promote their own sexual exploitation and treat it as a condition of women’s freedom or self-determination. Erich Goode points out, “For most of us to find the behavior attractive, something we would want to participate in, we must ‘neutralize’ the negative status of the behavior or nullify our feeling about participating in it”28 because “most of us find despising ourselves as too painful.”29 Therefore, to neutralize not only the deviant status of prostitution but also the actual harm it produces, to treat that harm as sexy, fun, and a kick, is to valorize it and to promote it. In prostitution that means actively incorporating dehumanization into one’s identity—to live it, embrace it, and ultimately to promote it. What is dehumanized sex, if it is not sex in which one has become disembodied? To actively accept this, to live dehumanization as if it were an original human condition, the act of an intact self, is to live one’s fragmentation, that which kills the human self, as an actively chosen option, as wholeness, as fun, as pleasure.
Ultimately, the only way to promote such dehumanization for oneself is to promote it for others, assuming that doing so will neutralize its social stigma. Hence a proprostitution movement. Hence the validation of pornographic sex in marriage and intimate coupling. Hence the promotion of lesbian sadomasochism. But promotion of prostitution is not only about trying to change social stigma. Proprostitution lobbying has become increasingly validated in a general climate of dehumanization of sexual relations, what I now consider to be the prostitution of sexuality.
Promoting prostitution publicly is not the way prostitution will be neutralized and destigmatized. The sexual relations of power constitute the political context for proprostitution movements that publicly affirm the use of sex to exploit women. To “embrace” prostitution sex as one’s self-chosen identity is to be actively engaged in promoting women’s oppression in behalf of oneself. It means that the sex that customers buy, which is an objectified sex that dehumanizes, is what a woman in prostitution promotes when she chooses it as her own identity.
For women who promote prostitution, neutralization of it requires internalization of all that women who simply survive prostitution have distanced themselves from, have dissociated from themselves, going through each of the steps—from distancing to disembodiment—and then internalizing their opposite, treating the sex as their own spontaneous experience of it. It is the embodiment of prostitution sex even as prostitute women are disembodied while doing it. Women who experience everything from distancing to disembodiment are not rejecting that which for some few women in prostitution is accepted. As prostitution is sexual exploitation, it harms the human self and destroys through sex, dehumanizing women. In other words, to promote the sexual servicing of others through the use of oneself, one must re-embody that which has been disembodied of the original developing self.
It does not work the other way around. There is not an original, essential, embodied prostitution. To treat prostitution as if it is not sexual exploitation is to assume that sexual dehumanization is the original human condition.
Typically the proprostitution lobby, fronting for the international sex industry, has been credited with neutralizing the negative status of prostitution by promoting legal and social acceptance of it. If, then, accepting one’s prostitution and incorporating it into one’s identity requires only “deviance neutralization,” it is because prostitution is identified as “deviant” instead of as the human-rights violation and dehumanization that it is. Prostitute organizations are absolutely right in wanting that deviant label removed: as long as prostitute women are the deviants, all of the women who accept sexually objectified sex and incorporate it into their identities are protected from having to incorporate into their identities the recognition of themselves as prostitutes.
In the sexual objectification of women, the problem is more complex than the theory of “deviance neutralization” suggests, for this theory requires that what one does be understood as deviant in the society. Prostitution has been considered deviant, but through the prostitution of sexuality it is losing its deviant label because it is increasingly the normalized experience of sex. Therefore, when women in prostitution defend and promote their activity as work, it is not that they are merely trying to neutralize a deviant category that has been assigned to them. They are requiring that their sex exchange for money be treated merely as sex. When they achieve their goal, then equal acceptance of every form of sexual objectification and dehumanization that goes under the overall designation of “sex” will achieve the prostitution of sexuality. This is how the sex of prostitution is normalized.
In the normalization of pornography, and the prostitution of sexuality, the experience of sex is no longer relevant in determining whether sexual enhancement or sexual degradation has taken place. Normalized prostitution is a product of liberal individualism where free will or consent prevail.
In the prostitution of sexuality we can find the basis for the developing support for the proprostitution movement from many women who are not prostitutes. Nonprostitute women’s promotion of prostitution is about something other than destigmatizing prostitution. The wider support for prostitution from nonprostitute women has to do with reinforcing the distinction between prostitute and nonprostitute women, especially as it becomes indistinguishable in the sexual acts through the prostitution of sexuality. In other words, as prostitution sex becomes recognized as the prostitution of “normal” sexuality, the only way nonprostitute women know that they indeed are not whores is by insuring that some women are sustained in a separate category, whether they call it prostitute, or they call it “sex work.” Through non-prostitute women’s promotion of prostitution, the separation of prostitute and nonprostitute is maintained. Knowing those women who do “sex between consenting adults” as “sex workers” protects other women from being seen as whores when they are doing that same sex in their marriages, in dating, or in anonymous, unpaid liaisons.
Sexual Relations of Power
To locate all of sexual exploitation within the real, lived experience of patriarchal oppression is to speak about power. In his search for a theory of sexual power, Foucault came close in his History of Sexuality. Establishing that the term “sexuality” originated in the nineteenth century, he located sexual power in history rather than ahistorical biology. He rejected the marxist tendency to identify power only as an overarching power of the state or as a general class condition, in other words, to identify power only as public and social. He theorized on sexual power at a level of analysis that invokes the personal, private, social domains that have been ignored by earlier theorists of sexuality.
Sex as power, Foucault told us, is ubiquitous—it is everywhere at once “not because it has the privilege of consolidating everything under its invincible unity, but because it is produced from one moment to the next, at every point, or rather in every relation from one point to another.”30 Foucault gave us a middle ground of theory in which the sex relations of power can be recognized as “a multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organization.”31Consequently, he found that the domain of sex and power is not driven but rather constitutes
an especially dense transfer point for relations of power: between men and women, young people and old people, parents and offspring, teachers and students, priests and laity, an administration and a population. Sexuality is not the most intractable element in power relations, but rather one of those endowed with the greatest instrumentality; useful for the greatest number of maneuvers and capable of serving as a point of support, as a linchpin, for the most varied strategies.32
Yet, in order to understand how sex is constructed into power, we need to get at it where it operates without becoming lost in its individualized components. The problem with Foucault’s theory is that in seeking to elucidate sexual power at the micro level, he abandons attention to the collectivized conditions that produce classes of power.33