The Prostitution of Sexuality. Kathleen Barry
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prostitution, or pornography, whether in their homes, on the streets, or in the migration process, and whether they are children or adults. I welcome this new ebook edition especially for the role it can continue to play in abolishing prostitution around the world.
Kathleen Barry
Santa Rosa, California
September, 2012
Introduction
Sexual exploitation objectifies women by reducing them to sex; sex that incites violence against women and that reduces women to commodities for market exchange. Sexual exploitation is the foundation of women’s oppression socially normalized. This is a difficult and painful subject to study. I tried to back away from this painfulness when I wrote Female Sexual Slavery. I said then:
When a friend first suggested that I write a book on what I was describing to her as female sexual slavery, I resisted the idea. I had gone through the shock and horror of learning about it in the late 1960s when I discovered a few paternalistically written books documenting present-day practices. During that same period I found a biography of Josephine Butler, who single-handedly raised a national and then international movement against forced prostitution in the nineteenth century but who is now virtually unknown. I realized that Josephine Butler’s current obscurity was directly connected to the invisibility of sex slavery today. And so I wrote a few short pieces on the subject and incorporated my limited information into the curriculum of the women’s studies classes that I taught.
But to write a book on the subject—to spend 2 or 3 years researching, studying female slavery—that was out of the question. I instinctively withdrew from the suggestion; I couldn’t face that. But as the idea settled over the next few weeks, I realized that my reaction was typical of women’s response: even with some knowledge of the facts, I was moving from fear to paralysis to hiding. It was then that I realized, both for myself personally and for all the rest of us, that the only way we can come out of hiding, break through our paralyzing defenses, is to know the full extent of sexual violence and domination of women. It is knowledge from which we have pulled back, as well as knowledge that has been withheld from us. In knowing, in facing directly, we can learn how to chart our course out of this oppression, by envisioning and creating a world which will preclude female sexual slavery. In knowing the extent of our oppression we will have to discover some of the ways to begin immediately breaking the deadly cycle of fear, denial-through-hiding, and slavery.
Far from being the project I feared facing, the research, study, and writing of this book [Female Sexual Slavery] have given me knowledge that forces me to think beyond confinement of women’s oppression. Understanding the scope and depth of female sexual slavery makes it intolerable to passively live with it any longer. I had to realistically visualize a world that would preclude this enslavement by projecting some ways out of it. Reading about sexual slavery makes hope and vision necessary.
That was 1979.
Because I found it painful to write about this fact of women’s lives, for the next decade, the 1980s, I tried to shift some of my work into other areas. In 1980, just after my book Female Sexual Slavery was published, I conducted meetings on this issue at the 1980 Mid—Decade of Women Conference in Copenhagen, from which came an international feminist meeting held in Rotterdam in 1983. I am grateful to Barbara Good for her networking that led now Senator Barbara Mikulski to initiate a resolution we drafted on prostitution that was adopted in the 1980 U.N. Conference in Copenhagen, a significant boost to this work. But launching international feminist political action to confront sexual exploitation also brought out the proprostitution lobby—organizations and individuals who actively promote prostitution—who made me and my lectures the focus of their attack and disruption and hate campaigns for several years.
I returned to the United States to find that our own feminist movement against pornography which I was part of launching in the 1970s had escalated with the most important legal approach to have come out of our movement to that point, the feminist civil rights antipornography law, “the Dworkin-MacKinnon Ordinance,” as we have come to call it. Political radical feminism more and more was directing its energies to the struggle against pornography, challenging sexual liberals and just plain liberals for their promotion of sexual abuse and exploitation. This brought out the “sexual outlaws”; lesbian sadomasochists and heterosexual women hiding behind their private pornographic sexual lives joined forces to form the “Feminist” Anti-Censorship Task Force. Radical feminism was under siege as it had been a century earlier. We barely noticed the shift that was occurring in the women’s movement, the shift to a one-issue movement. We had already learned that single-issue movements do not survive because they are disconnected from the totality of women’s oppression.
I found myself in the ironic position of building an international movement only to come home to my own movement to find I was out there alone on the issue of female sexual slavery. I lectured on prostitution as a condition of sexual exploitation. But it was treated by the movement as an “add-on,” an issue tacked on to the work against pornography or sexual violence simply to be sure that all the bases were covered.
After organizing an international meeting in Rotterdam on female sexual slavery in 1983, exhausted and depressed from repeated undermining and personal attack on my radical feminism by the proprostitution lobby and by Western liberals there, I announced to several feminist friends including Robin Morgan, whose support has been more than sustaining, that I had gone as far as I could on this issue. I explained that even after organizing an international meeting, I was still alone and I was withdrawing. But they had other plans. They were excited about how the international network I had been developing could begin a new wave of NGOs, nongovernmental organizations in consultative status with the United Nations. (I actually moaned aloud in the restaurant when Robin proposed this over dinner.) Having worked with many human-rights NGOs internationally, I could see the potential for global feminist consciousness raising. The international networking I had been developing on the issue of traffic in women would qualify our coalition for human rights (Category II) status with the United Nations.
However, I rejected then, as I do now, the idea of a one-woman movement. Although I could no longer be out there alone on this issue, especially among women from the West, I reluctantly initiated the application to the United Nations for NGO status. That work, along with demands for lectures and actions organized on behalf of victims, kept me going despite my personal decisions and even despite the toll it began to take on my health, not to mention the extreme costs to my professional career.
At last, by the mid 1980s something had changed. In the United States Evelina Giobbe announced the organization of WHISPER (Women Hurt in Systems of Prostitution Engaged in Revolt). Then Susan Hunter organized the Council for Prostitution Alternatives.
In the Asian region in particular women have mounted massive campaigns against sex industries and their consumers. I have had the privilege of working with dedicated women like Aurora Javate DeDios and the Philippines Organizing Team, Yayori Matsui in Japan, Jean D’Cunha in India, and Sigma Huda in Bangladesh who have brought deeply felt and powerful analysis to the issue of sexual exploitation of Asian women.
In 1987 I decided it was time, once and for all, to move on to other issues. At the New York Conference on Sexual Liberals and the Attack Against Feminism, I gave the issue back to our movement, challenging the audience of 1,500 feminists not to let this work on prostitution and traffic in women be reduced to a one-woman movement. I asked them to take up the issue, and I added emphatically, “do not call me.” And no one did for almost a year. What I did not know was that during that time Dorchen Leidholdt, who had organized the 1987 conference and had been spearheading radical feminist actions through Women Against Pornography, had indeed taken up the issue. She and a group of women were organizing an international conference on traffic in women in 1988. Calls from Dorchen for information and clarification drew me back from my short hiatus, but this time things were different. From international feminism we launched The Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, organized based on my original work, Female Sexual Slavery, first published in 1979. By then the international work against traffic in women had become a feminist movement.
As we worked together