The Prostitution of Sexuality. Kathleen Barry
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contract,” the implicit agreement with the customer, requires that they do.
Because the sexual relations of power involve women’s bodies and their actions through their bodies with men who assume the right to buy that, disengagement gives a woman the emotional distance to be able to distinguish her real self from that of her self that is being used for sex as a commodity.
Prostitute women construct barriers. Through disengagement, prostitute women establish limits for customers in terms of what of their bodies and their selves can and cannot be used. These are limits that they enforce. Parts of the self cannot be accessed for use, which means that certain acts cannot be employed, certain parts of the body are off limits; often prostitutes refuse kissing or require the use of condoms as barriers demarcating the self. Certain things are kept for one’s real self; as one French prostitute reported, “Never, never will he lie on my bed. He’ll lie on a special sheet, on a blanket, but not on the bed that’s my own bed.”15 In making these kinds of distinctions, women mark off parts of themselves that are real, personal—parts that they can, if they choose, engage for lovemaking that is not prostitution. Most frequently, however, prostitute women report being turned off to sex in their own intimate lives.
Differentiating parts of the self for sexual commodity is both vital to women’s mere survival of prostitution, and destructive of women’s humanity. It segments the self. But in fact, the self cannot be segmented. There are not separate parts of a self that can be taken as separate from the self. Some body parts, some physical acts cannot be relegated for sale while others are protected. Yet that is what is done and is why and how violation to the self occurs. When the self is segmented, which it cannot be, it is separated and its parts are used as separated fragments. Segmentation of the self is distortion and produces dehumaniza-tion. Sex is an integral dimension of the human being, of the self. When it is treated as a thing to be taken, the human being is rendered into a thing, an objectification that not only violates human rights but also destroys human dignity, which is a fundamental precondition to human rights.
Can women choose to do prostitution? As much as they can choose any other context of sexual objectification and dehuman-ization of the self. Following from distancing, disengagement invokes harm, harm that takes the form of forcing distinctions between what are essentially nonchoices. This is how women actually do not consent to prostitution or any other condition of sexual exploitation—in rape, in marriage, in the office, in the factory, and so on.
At the same time, appearing to choose is an element of survival. Agreeing to go with a customer, taking his money, and agreeing to and performing specific acts appear to be choices. The appearance of choice is especially necessary for prostitute women for without it they could, in this stage of prostitution, lose their selves entirely. In this sense, to choose simply means to act, a fundamental aspect of being alive. And so women become engaged in establishing the terms of their own commodification. This is the prostitution contract, which “protects” women by involving them, invoking their self-acceptance in what is essentially the terms of their objectification, thus intensifying the harm and abuse of prostitution.16 In the disengagement that follows from distancing, sex is made available in the prostitution exchange. Doing prostitution involves women in the dissociation of their own selves from their prostitution, over and over and over again. In the market exchange, if a woman stays in prostitution an average of 9 years and takes an average of 5 customers a day, 6 days a week, she will have sold sex in, on, and through her body 9,540 times to different men in anonymous contacts. This is a conservative estimate.
3. Dissociation. From her research and study of Swedish prostitution Hanna Olsson has described the male sexuality in prostitution as “male masturbation in a female body,”17 wherein the customer may demand, and in some cases may have to negotiate, where that takes place, either in the vagina, the anus, the mouth or all three. As Ulla points out, “They do it to empty themselves. That’s all.”18 But that is not all; although sex is reduced to this act of male masturbation that has nothing to do with the woman as a human being, customers generally require that prostitutes act as if they are engaged with the customer emotionally, psychically, and affectively by entering into a fantasy or by feigning the role of a lover. Either the prostitute is to act like a whore or she is to act like an affectionate lover. On one hand, themes of perversion abound, particularly acting out “piss and shit” fantasies by which customers associate sex with filth, dirt, excrement. On the other hand, prostitutes are expected to act out submissive, subservient, docile, and fawning sexual behaviors. As numerous studies report, the customers, like the by now well-known profile of the average rapist, are “average men who want average sexual satisfaction.”19
Men buy not a self but a body that performs as a self, and it is a self that conforms to the most harmful, damaging, racist and sexist concepts of women. Western men, particularly more “liberal” ones, often require from Western women an enactment that is sexually active and responsive as well as emotionally engaged. By contrast, traditional Western and Asian men may require of Asian prostitutes sexual behavior that is enacted with passivity, submissiveness, and slavishness.
In prostitution, customer demand includes specification of color and cultural characteristics, which are advertised and sold. Racism, which like sexual exploitation is an objectification that dehumanizes, is a foundation of the prostitution industry. A woman of color in prostitution is expected to sell not only a sexed body but a “colored” one also—from which she must also dissociate as that, too, is part of herself that she exchanges. Race is that which is bought with sex. And so it goes through different cultures; whatever the cultural context, prostitution in the sex exchange itself invokes and plays out the most reactionary racist and sexist stereotypes while segmenting women into buyable parts.
4. Disembodiment and Dissembling. In prostitution, what men expect from women is the semblance of emotional, sexual involvement, the appearance of pleasure and consent, a semblance that they can treat as if it is real in the moment of the commodity exchange. In this sense, they want prostitutes to behave like non-prostitutes—wives, lovers, and girlfriends. In other words, in the disembodiment of the self, which the prostitute constructs to protect herself from dissociation, we find the beginnings of the reconstruction of the subordinated, dehumanized self, which must act as if it is embodied by acting affectionate, by acting interested in the customer (for whom the women often have contempt), by acting sexual, by acting as if one is feeling sexual and wants to feel sexual, by trying to distinguish between acting as if one is feeling sexual and sometimes actually feeling sexual because one has inadvertently sexually responded, and then, by acting as if the racism and sexism in the act are a woman’s self-chosen definition—all in all, by acting as if one is not the icicle that one already has become internally in order to protect one’s self.
Distancing one’s self in order to become disembodied and then acting as if the experience is embodied produces sex in prostitution. In this sense women become interchangeable with the life-size plastic dolls complete with orifices for penetration and ejaculation sold in pornography shops, but those dolls do not affect or dissemble a “response.” Response is the differentiating factor because consistent with legalistic values of liberalism with the compulsive focus on will, response is considered an indicator of choice. That women respond in the sexual acts that dehumanize them is testimony to patriarchal construction of normal sexuality.
In women’s experience, this is what prostitution is, including all of the acting and all of the physical and sexual behaviors in an anonymous commodity exchange. It is the sex of all sexual exploitations, institutionalized, systematized, and increasingly validated.
What Then Is Rape?
Beating, rape, and even murder are generally considered merely “occupational hazards” of prostitution. The Council for Prostitution Alternatives in Portland, Oregon, reported that of