The Prostitution of Sexuality. Kathleen Barry
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of what Dee Graham in her important new work, Loving to Survive, refers to as a societal Stockholm Syndrome that likens women’s loving in patriarchy to the captivity of hostages.
It is my hope that with this book I have theoretically advanced the work against sexual exploitation and especially prostitution. I am not treating theory as an abstraction from reality. Feminist theory is theory only if it is rooted in women’s realities and from there reveals and explains women’s class condition.
The other new dimension of this work, which was not possible in my first book because it did not exist in the 1970s, appears in the last chapter, in which I have brought together a sampling of strategies—personal, local, regional, and international—for individual survival and international action—strategies that have been developing throughout the movement and around the world since the early 1980s—strategies that were not yet known when I was stuck in my isolation writing Female Sexual Slavery—strategies that reveal a world of feminist action, global commitments to confront patriarchy. For me these strategies, and the people behind them, represent not only effective actions but an interconnected movement, a struggle, a love of as much as a thirst for our liberation. To them this book is dedicated.
1 Prostitution of Sexuality
“What is a woman? Ans: Support system for a pussy.” That sign, nailed to a post on the street of an outdoor bar, summarized the sex industries, not only there in Angeles in the Philippines, but everywhere. The next sign, “Protect yourself from AIDS, use condoms,” made it appear that under these conditions, aids was the only risk to women. This was only one scene that I thought about in 1993 as I was sitting on a panel in Manila, in a legal forum organized to address the question, “Are women’s rights human rights?” Listening to my colleagues on the panel, I thought of the women trafficked from Bangladesh to Pakistan, of the women trafficked from Latin America to the United States and Europe, of the bar women in Olongapo, Subic, and Angeles I had met and talked to during the previous several days. Most of them still had the naivete of many of the women who migrate from the distant rural countryside, some previously victimized sexually by incest abuse and rape, others without any knowledge or sexual experience, many not even fully comprehending what is happening to them, many still believing that their American “boyfriends” who left when the United States withdrew its bases from the Philippines are still coming back for them, some gagging into towels after each blow job, and others, those in the cheapest bars (as if these hell holes made for and usually run by American and Australian men could be distinguished between cheap and cheapest), who are known as “three holers” because no orifice of the human body is protected from sale and customer intrusion.1
On this typically hot (95o), Philippine summer day, as we sat coolly in an air-conditioned room that was unaffected by the Manila “brownouts,” my mind wandered back to the women from the bars I had met, some of whom I had come to know even during my too-short visits. I found my head swimming and my stomach clenched as my colleagues attempted to answer the question, “Are women’s rights human rights?” Given the realities I had just seen and had seen over and over again for the previous 15 years, I knew again how easy it is to become distanced, a distancing that oftentimes leads either to academic pretense of objectivity or to legal liberalism with its pretense of neutrality.2
The intense concern among the human-rights activists and lawyers gathered in this comfortable room was blurred for me by the reality of the days preceding. I was reminded of my walks through the areas of the maisons d’abattage in Paris 15 years earlier. The utter disregard for women’s humanity, as I saw it then and now, in Paris, in the Philippines, in Thailand, in brothels, on streets, and in storefront windows provokes a more direct but unasked question that must be placed before men, governments, their policies, and their institutions: “Are women human beings?”
When society becomes sexually saturated, sex is equated with the female body—where it is gotten, had, taken. In the sexualization of society, woman is sexed body. Sexualization of society constructs femaleness as an “essence” and as acquisition that is sex. As sexed body, woman is made universal, and women, accessible for sex, are made to be indistinguishable from each other. That is sexual essentialism.
By contrast, men may need sex, they may pursue it, they get it, have it, and frequently misuse it, and sometimes they may even be used for it. But men are not the objects of sexualization; neither as a collectivity nor in their individuality are they sex, sexed body. In fact, men are not reduced to their bodies or their biology or their drives. While male sexuality has been treated as driven by an imperative, however imperative their sexual drives are cultivated to be, men’s identities are formed by what they do in the world, not by functions attributed to their bodies.
While sexual identities are socially ascribed to women, men achieve their identities as acting beings. Sexualization of society genders inequality. Sexual essentialism goes beyond promoting inequality to producing oppression. Patriarchal domination makes women undifferentiated among and from each other and makes them known, in the first instance, as different from men, and therefore lesser.
There are no biological givens about sex that are not social and political constructions. In that sense society precedes biology. Sexual “drives” are built into interactions as needs or necessities. Sex, accessible to men through the female body, is a social product of culture, a political product of gender hierarchy, and these are the conditions of male power. Sexualization is conveyed into society through body images of women in the media, in pornography, and in the “scientific” construction of sex through sexology, which reduces sex to its physicality.3 Further, the construction of sexuality that reduces sex to a thing and woman to an object is a public condition which affects private life but has a public reality of its own. The public construction of sex as a social fact of male power sexualizes women as a public fact. The fullest patriarchal reduction of woman to sexed body is prostitution.
The everyday practice of equating female with sex is typified in the way Melinda entered prostitution. She had been a prostitute in the United States for several years when I met and interviewed her. She told me about her experience as a teenager coming home from the movies with her girlfriend one afternoon. She was waiting for a bus when a man approached her and told her he’d pay her $50 for a date. Being female and on the street was all that was required for her to be taken as a prostitute. But she was a naive 15-year-old who believed that he really wanted to take her out on a date. She talked with him for a few minutes and accepted his offer. With no idea that he had actually solicited her as a prostitute, she went to his hotel room, where she learned that being a “date” meant that he was buying her for sex. By the time she realized she actually had been picked up as a prostitute, she could not leave. Faced with the expectation that she provide sex, she reasoned, “Why not?” She thought, “It will be over quickly. I’ll get out of here.” At 15 she was picked up as a sex thing and “turned out” for prostitution. Once begun, she couldn’t get away. Afterward, prostitution kept coming back to her.
In many cases like Melinda’s, prior sexual abuse, particularly when it has been sustained over time, as in incest assault, has already predisposed women, made them particularly vulnerable to other sexual exploitations and to not fighting back. In exploring Melinda’s story with her, I learned that it was not only the trick who picked her up on the street that had taken her for sex, so had her stepfather. What made her a prostitute to each of these males is that she was a female, and therefore could be taken as a body for them to use for sex.
When the human being is reduced to a body, objectified to sexually service another, whether or not there is consent, violation of the human being has taken place. The human being is the bodied self that human rights is meant to protect and human development is intended to support. However, in the American legal context, consent has become the defining factor in determining whether violation has occurred. In this way, the fullness of human experience and the human self is reduced to will, intent or consent, as if that is all that is involved in violation.