The Prostitution of Sexuality. Kathleen Barry
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Képés’s medical approach to the body physically reiterates the foundation of human rights, which recognizes each human being as a distinct person whose personhood has the inalienable claim to human dignity and rights. Violation occurring on the body, oppression absorbing the self, violates human rights because it segments human beings, separating them from their bodies.
When one loses contact with one’s body, one dissociates from “’the only thing in the world which we can feel both inside and out,’ and which is therefore the channel through which we are able to get inside of everything.”11 The human need for “somatic anchoring” is disrupted. “If you are out of your body . . . you need a substitute for the feeling of being grounded.”12 Sexual exploitation, an objectification, is a disruption to the continuity of human experience, the undermining of sexual development for the subordination of women.
Human beings are incredibly resilient in the security of their bodied location just as they are fragile in the development of a self. In constructing the self, they are constantly negotiating their relationship to that which is not in their body. In the tension between inner and outer, the interaction between self and other, human beings negotiate their world and construct their identities. Violation is bodied—whether it is psychological and emotional, sexual, or physical. Violation occurs in exploiting those tensions between what is the self and what is outside of it. Distorting them destroys human experience. Following R. D. Laing’s formulation, “If our experience is destroyed, our behavior will be destructive. If our experience is destroyed, we have lost our own selves.”13
The Social Construction of Sexuality: Stages of Dehumanization
Under male domination today, when sex is not explicitly treated as/a genuine human interaction, it dehumanizes experience and thereby dominates women. The meaning that is the product of interaction can reveal how sex is experienced as an enhancement of human development or how sexual interaction destroys human experience. This study joins feminism with human rights to explore how meaning is produced in the experience of sex. Feminist theory exposes power and domination, but it goes further. It posits a reality above and beyond the present exploited condition from the conviction and commitment that power can be deconstructed and socially reconstructed into human and egalitarian relations.
Were it not for the groundbreaking feminist research over the last two decades that has revealed the personal harm and human cost of sexual exploitation, especially the work of Evelina Giobbe and WHISPER, of the Council for Prostitution Alternatives, and of Hanna Olsson in Sweden, of Liv Finstad and Cecilie Hoigard in Norway, and the work on incest abuse of Judith Herman, Florence Rush, Louise Armstrong, and Sandra Butler in the United States, were it not for the courage of women who have dared to speak their experiences of sexual exploitation, were it not for the unfailing feminist confrontation against the sex industries, particularly by Asian women’s organizations and feminist activists against pornography worldwide—were it not for all of these women, their efforts and more, my understanding of how sex, a human activity, is turned into harm, a dehumanization, a human-rights violation, would not be possible.
On the other hand, were it not for the exploitation of women in prostitution, were it not for the transformation of the sexuality of prostitution into the prostitution of sexuality, were it not for the normalization of prostitution, accompanied by the silence of women who cannot or will not give voice and visibility to their private sexual exploitation, this study would not be necessary.
From all the above research and activism, from my own 20 years of work on this issue, from the women I interviewed when I wrote Female Sexual Slavery and since then, I have identified four stages in which prostitution socially constructs the sexual exploitation of women: (1) distancing, (2) disengagement, (3) dissociation, and (4) disembodiment. Prostitution is sexual exploitation sustained over time. Commodification is one of the most severe forms of objectification; in prostitution it separates sex from the human being through marketing. Sexual objectification dissociates women from their bodies and therefore their selves. By examining the social interaction of prostitution sex, we see more closely the harms of prostitution and of prostitution normalized.
1. Distancing. Prostitution sex, the act of prostitution, begins for women with distancing strategies in which they separate their sense of themselves—that is, their own, human, personal identity, how they know who they are—from the act of prostitution. Separation in prostitution begins with geographic relocation and extends to psychological dissociation. Once a woman has “turned a trick,” she knows herself as an outcast (or in some few cases, namely, those women who promote prostitution, outcast takes the form of outlaw). Distancing begins with separation of self from family, home, and worlds of social legitimacy. When women are “turned out” for prostitution, they usually take a new name and get forged identity papers, which is frequently necessary in order to falsify one’s age. As extreme and as violating as this appears, it is not unlike the separations women make from their family of origin, their own friends, and their own name when they marry. Even when women are not evidently coerced into prostitution, they begin by changing their name (“Lolita,” etc.), an act that is central to their dissociation from their old or previous identity. These are acts of distancing from one’s real identity and real self; they intensify the dissociation produced in the act of prostitution itself.
At the same time, distancing is a survival strategy for women in prostitution, who are able to stand away from themselves in the world and in the exchange of prostitution. They do not associate who they are in prostitution with who they are apart from being a prostitute. Distancing is an interrelated part of a complex web of other damaging, harmful effects of prostitution on women and girls. It causes women to become estranged from themselves in order to save themselves.
At a simplistic level, proprostitution groups argue that if prostitution were accepted as normal work for women, prostitute women would no longer be marginalized. But the reality of prostitution as a sex commodification is not that simple. Normalizing the sexual exploitation of women will not make it less sexually exploitative, it will only make it more available. In fact, if women are encouraged to incorporate within themselves, into their identities, the knowledge of themselves as socially acceptable sex objects, the damage of prostitution, of any sexual objectification, is intensified. However, distancing is only the first step toward the construction of woman as prostitute. Alone, it is not sufficient to ensure that women will survive prostitution or any other form of sexual exploitation. Distancing sets the stage for disengagement.
2. Disengagement. Disengagement is the up-front strategy of women in prostitution. Women engaged in the sex acts of prostitution report establishing emotional distance by dissociating themselves from the commodity exchange in which their bodies and sexuality are involved. Again, this is not different from what female teenagers, lovers, and wives report in the experience of objectified sex. As with rape victims, repeatedly they report that they are “not there.” They are disengaged.
Disengagement is conscious and intentional action. It is central to the sex act of prostitution. Because sex is interactive, for it to be mechanically reproduced as commodity, sex requires that the women be there and “perform.” For the women’s part, they are “not there” when it is done in, on, with, or through them. Not being there is how they are engaged in the prostitution power relations invoked by customers.
In a recent Norwegian study of prostitution by Cecilie Hoigard and Liv Finstad, prostitutes report their dissociation from the sexual exchange men buy from them. Pia says, “I have to be a little stoned before I go through with it. I have to shove my emotions completely to the side. I get talkative and don’t give a shit.” Elisabeth reports, “You switch off your feelings, you have to do it.” And Jane reports, “I’ve taught myself to switch off, to shove my feelings away. I don’t give a damn, as long as there’s money. It doesn’t have anything to do with feelings.”14 In many accounts from different countries women report becoming icicles. And they view their customers