The Prostitution of Sexuality. Kathleen Barry
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and political reactionary stance and these women who promote personal choice to treat rape as normal sex, to promote pornography, to treat racial hatred as a personal preference for a racially “pure” environment, to treat homophobia as the personal choice to live with and work outside of association with lesbians and gay men. Hyper-individualism and elevation of personal choice as the only and therefore ultimate condition of freedom, if it prevails over the feminist movement, will be its final deconstruction.
The harm of personal choice politics and campaigns against political correctness is intensified for oppressed groups as it is another manifestation of capitalist market liberal ideology that emphasizes individualism to serve market competition and promote consumerism. But more than that, it creates an ideological environment that elevates personal choice above any concept of a common good or collective well-being. The idea is that freedom is defined as personal choice in a context of structured, politically imposed inequality that ranges from male-female relations to the relationship between Western nations and the Third World. Ultimately the reduction of political consciousness to personal choice reverts all issues to the liberal construction of consent. At base this is how market economy ideology promotes patriarchal domination in post-industrial society.
While the slogan of the movement against sexual violence, “No Means No,” firmly asserts that individual women refuse to be cajoled into sexual experiences they do not want with men they reject, it also suggests that sexual victimization of women takes place only when consent is not given, when women explicitly say no. It suggests that when women do not say no, when women actively consent, they are not violated. Defining rape in terms of violation of consent shifts the emphasis of political consciousness from the act of victimization, the use of sex to exploit, to individual will; it shifts oppression from a class condition of sexual exploitation to individual experiences of it. That is how women in prostitution are excluded from being recognized as sexually victimized. Prostitute women are made to be the “other”—the women for whom the act of abusive, violating, dehumanizing sex is meant—because their consent is established in the market exchange, where they take money for sex.
The patriarchal power of sexual liberalism has deployed ideologies that narrowly construe consent in context of social normalcy of impaired judgment. Patriarchal law can address individual conditions of coercion but it will not help women confront conditions of collective oppression. It is not a crime to oppress women through sexual exploitation where those lines blur. The law will not resolve women’s subjection to sexual power. Nor will it correct its own liberal ideology that individualizes every case so that there is no recognizable collective condition. Only a collective liberation movement’s struggle with analysis of oppression can do that.
The facts of women’s subordination often lie in realities that are obscured in silence or normalized in acceptance but that nevertheless dehumanize and brutalize us as women even when we do not directly experience their most extreme manifestations—unless we bring to them consciousness of women’s condition as a political reality.
Breaking silence and facing the brutal realities of sexual exploitation require feminist political consciousness. Consciousness transforms brutal facts and painful realities into new knowledge that exposes power and ignites action. Confronted with sexual exploitation, to move from not knowing to awareness without political consciousness of power relations leaves one confronted either with prevailing liberal ideology or raw pain, and therefore unable to know that because sexual exploitation is not inevitable and has been politically constructed, it can also be deconstructed—by women.
The common denominator in all sexual exploitation is the disruption of and violation of a woman’s identity, that sense of “who I am” and “who I can be.” Prostitution and incest abuse are twin acts—they are the terrorist models of female subordination in that they invoke girls’ and women’s splitting from their selves, segmentation of the unsegmentable, partitioning of human realities that can only be whole. Consciousness of sexual politics in confronting oppression restores the whole from its segmentation. It is the foundation for healing and action.
Feminist political consciousness moves feminism back and forth in a dialectical interaction between the personal and the political, the particular and the general, inevitably taking us from our own cultural and national specificity to the international community and global feminism, and back again. Political consciousness extends our awareness of our social location from our homes to our communities, from nation-states to the international economy and the global political order. International feminist activism leads us logically to analysis of patriarchal power.
Consciousness requires being able to see the conditions by which sex is exploited, and that requires considering what occurs in the sex exchange. Consciousness is not only an intellectual awareness; rather, political consciousness allows us to know women’s experiences of individual exploitations and of oppression, not only as painful subordinations but also as potentialities for their transcendence. I am not speaking of transcendence in only spiritual or ephemeral terms. Feminist consciousness is knowledge of material, concrete conditions that, because it knows them in terms of domination that produces brutal realities, also knows of the possibility of revolutionizing those material conditions in confronting domination. Feminist consciousness recognizes the fuller terrain of male domination—oppression. Consciousness of oppression makes strategies clearer, vision fuller, and action deeper.
Popular criticism of feminism alleges that it reduces women to victims. But women’s knowledge of themselves as victims, as “empowered,” as oppressed, and/or as liberated is knowledge that is realistically accessible to women only through political consciousness. Due to fear of the potential of consciousness to produce change, this dynamic, powerful knowing has been reduced to “political correctness.” But, in fact, the power of political consciousness is that it is personally liberating because it enables vision of the world of patriarchal domination as it is. Without consciousness, in the suppression of consciousness, prior to consciousness, knowledge is isolated to individuals and in that isolation it goes unnamed, unspoken. As knowledge is produced in interaction with others, isolation relativizes it and relegates it to intra-individual psychological conditions. While feminism is charged with reducing women to victims, women’s isolated, suppressed anger and pain from domination is reduced to clinical conditions, material sources of the pain. Objective knowledge is located outside of, as well as within, the self. It can either function as an exterior determination of the self as it does in oppression or as the basis for collective action as it does in consciousness.
Personal empowerment that treats overcoming objective domination as an act of will, a psychological state, is an idealistic approach that traps knowledge of oppression within individualized, personal feelings and preferences.
Consciousness reframes personalized, isolated knowledge of objective conditions, recognizing them as political conditions. Reformulating knowledge redefines victimization, which is no longer recognized as an intra-individual experience and therefore is not a matter of consent or will of individuals.
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