The Prostitution of Sexuality. Kathleen Barry
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exploitation.
To confront the whole, the female class condition, strategically and politically, I launched action in an international arena of human rights because sex is power over all women. As the female condition is a class condition, sex power must be addressed as a global issue, inclusive of all of its occurrences in the subordination of women. To do that prostitution must be centered in this struggle.
I have chosen to focus my militancy and strategizing against oppression on human rights. While promoting individual civil rights, I believe that human rights can be taken further. Expanded to the human condition, it has been used to recognize that peoples—such as those under apartheid, and those under any form of colonization—have a right to self-determination. The appeal of human rights to me is its ability to protect the class, collective condition—and this is a protection not yet available to women. However, the decolonization of the sexually exploited female class has not yet begun. In 1970 I participated in issuing the Fourth World Manifesto, written in response to socialists who tried to coopt the women’s movement to serve the left as if men were not imperialists of sex. In that manifesto we established the colonization of women as a condition of patriarchy. Where the United Nations will protect the “sovereign [read independent] rights of all peoples and their territorial integrity,”1 in our present human rights work, I intend to see that women, as a territory sexually colonized, are granted that protection. With the struggle of our movement, we will one day see to it that, according to U.N. human-rights standards established for other groups, sexual exploitation is treated as a class condition that is a crime against humanity as much as it is a crime against any individual human being.
Thus, in studying sex as power in Female Sexual Slavery, I found the class condition of all women to be fully revealed in prostitution. That finding led me into almost two decades of work on developing an international human-rights approach to confronting that class condition globally.
But to get to that point in our struggle we must go back to the original premise of radical political feminism: that the personal is political and therefore, the separation of them—the “whores”—and us—the “women”—is utterly false, a patriarchal lie. And that means that we must talk about sex. The sexuality of today. Not only in pornography. Not only when it is explicitly “against our will.”
In this work, I am shifting from my previous work on the sexuality of prostitution to my new work on the prostitution of sexuality. I am taking prostitution as the model, the most extreme and most crystallized form of all sexual exploitation. Sexual exploitation is a political condition, the foundation of women’s subordination and the base from which discrimination against women is constructed and enacted.
The feminist international approach of this study recognizes that there are worldwide commonalities to women’s subordination and that therefore there must be a commonality to power arrangements across races, classes, and state boundaries. The word “gender,” intended by feminists to refer to the social basis of sex ascription and thus to reveal sexual politics, has been neutralized by academics so that it now simply refers to biological differences between the sexes. “Gender” has become an apolitical term, a word that makes it possible to not have to specifically designate “woman.” “Gender” makes patriarchy, the historical and political context of power, disappear. That is the context in which female sexuality is prostituted worldwide today in order to secure the domination of women.
The facts of women’s subordination and patriarchy do not disappear because language is depoliticized and neutralized. In this work I am studying prostitution as institutionalized and industrialized sexual exploitation of women, developed from patriarchal feudalism. Theoretically, I have developed a macro-level analysis of the global condition of women that is lodged in the micro-level analysis of human interaction and personal experience. Sociologically, this work explores sexual exploitation by bridging the “macro-micro” gap, which has been noted as a problem whenever research is confined to one level or the other. From a feminist perspective, this is the bridge from the personal to the political. It recognizes that sexual exploitation is a condition that includes all women in prostitution. As prostitution has become industrialized and a global economy has come to shape international relations, it is more important than ever to feminist research and activism that these different levels of analysis be joined.
For the study of prostitution, traditional measures are not available. Beyond general estimates of prostitution populations, there are no reliable statistics on prostitution because it is by and large illegal. Even where prostitution is legalized, greater percentages of it remain illegal, and it is controlled by organized crime and therefore inaccessible for measurement. And prostitute women are not counted in the development of demographic data and trends in research on women in development.
The most reliable knowledge and documentation of trafficking in women and children come primarily from three sources: (i) human-rights organizations, which are primarily concerned with children and operate from a distinction between “free” and “forced” prostitution in a context of severe poverty, (2) AIDS activists, researchers, and foundations who in the last 5 years have begun to address prostitution, considering it central to the spread of AIDS and being concerned with it from that standpoint, and (3) feminist organizations concerned with women’s rights and human rights, which address the concerns of the other two groups in their particular focus on women. Only feminist/human-rights organizations and activists are addressing the full range of conditions that promote trafficking and sex industrialization because only they are concerned with women (and therefore children and AIDS and poverty). Therefore, research on this subject draws both from first-hand observations and from the documentation and statistics produced primarily by these groups. In the case of prostitution, sex trafficking, and sex industrialization, the reports, statistics, and estimates from state governments are the least reliable. Frequently, local police and border guards are either involved in the trafficking or taking bribes. In fact, some national government officials have made the point that human-rights workers give the government a bad name by exposing cases of trafficking.
A combination of qualitative methods is the best approach to exposing practices that are otherwise inaccessible, especially because they sustain exploitation.2 The approaches I have taken to the study of sexual exploitation are
1. to document the dimensions of prostitution and traffic in women globally and to trace them historically in order to identify macro/global patterns and trends and to determine the impact of the West and its global economic dominance on the developing world;
2. to adopt a symbolic-interaction approach to interpretation in studying the individual experience of sexual exploitation, particularly prostitution;
3. to analyze the interaction of the macro/global condition with micro-individual/interactive experience in terms of international human-rights law, and to identify projects and programs that did not exist when I was writing Female Sexual Slavery but that now are some of the best examples of success in confronting sexual exploitation, particularly in prostitution; and
4. theoretically to consider sexual exploitation as a condition of oppression in terms of sexual relations of power.
Adopting global, theoretical, individual/interpretive, and programmatic-policy and legal approaches, one could argue, is too large an undertaking. Surely such a work risks overgeneralization. However, because sexuality has not been dealt with comprehensively but rather is typically disaggregated in sexological and criminological research, an overall study of the interlocking forces of male domination is required in order to locate women in prostitution within the class conditions of women under patriarchal domination. In order not to reduce women in prostitution and women who are subjected to the prostitution of sexuality to biologically sexed beings or to deviants and criminals, it is necessary to risk some overgeneralization in the process of bringing together the forces that shape sexual exploitation of women today.
My research in this book has developed over two decades. During that time, through my work with women on all the continents, I have had repeated opportunities to present my analysis, confirm my findings, and reassess my assumptions so as to