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All oppressive systems utilise mutually exclusive dichotomies.

The plutocracy for instance will often lambaste the poor for not being able to work or think their way out of the badly paid job they work long hours at, the working class’ is that they’re just not showing enough initiative, why when I was their age I was already on my way to earning my first million!* And if the working classes take a look at the system and say “fuck this” and start resorting to crime because that earns more money for less actual work (though with increased risks of course) they’re evil and lazy, why I never had to break the law to make my money.**
Of course every rich person has killed someone, whether directly or as a result of their mad scrabble to be even richer than the Jones’s in the Mansion Ranch next door (across the mile or so of estate that separates the Right people from each other), but that is as of nothing versus those poor folk who ignore concepts like property rights in their mad scramble to survive in system that actively wants to kill them.

Same goes the for the Aryanocracy or Heteronormitivity, Mexicans are, on the one hand, lazy feckless criminals, and on the other hand, evil scheming bastards who are going to take over the world by picking lettuce illegally for 10 cents an hour, and homosexuals are, if they’re not all “I’m queer, I’m here, get used to it”, then they’re obviously ashamed of their lifestyle choice, and obviously agree that it’s just plain wrong, and if they actually are all into pride and outness, then they’re shoving their immoral lifestyle into everyone’s face, and perverting the children† in the process.

Oppressive systems are of course like this naturally, they’re basically ginormous collections of various interlocking and symbiotic memes, and thus subject to selective pressures, those systems of oppression that didn’t set up a series of contradictory concepts which enabled people who didn’t fit into any one predefined stereotypical manner of behavior to be screwed over just as much as those that did, was destroyed or surpassed by better systems of oppression, who could oppress so much better and thus continue to give the oppressor classes their wonderful privileges without fear of the oppressed classes breaking the system from within due to something crazy like consistency and fairness.

Now you may have noticed that certain themes tend to run through the various systems of oppression I mentioned, the plutocracy always states that, no matter what the working class do, they’re still inherently lazy because they’re not rich and no matter what homosexuals do, their sexuality is still inherently icky.

A similar theme runs through the patriarchy in regards to sex, sure, on the one hand women are supposed to be asexual and do not want to have sex under any circumstance, but on the other hand men have a Y-chromosome given right to have sex whenever and however they please.

How does The Patriarchy square that circle? Oh, just a little thing called the Rape Culture.

Now I’ve written before about how the only patriarchally approved form of sex is rape, this is because rape is an act which, by definition, involves a person not wanting to have sex but some guy having sex with them anyway, to the rape culture and patriarchy this is perfect, you have a man having sex but they’re not having sex with an actually sexual person, and in such a traumatic and violent manner that the person who has had sex thrust upon them may even end up giving up consensual sex all together.

This is why the most visible rape culture concept you’ll likely see is the whole rape victim blaming thing, which works by a bunch of guys and patriarchal tools coming along and talking about the many ways in which, obviously, the victim did something wrong, like how they gave their prima facie consent to be raped by doing something crazy like leaving the house, or going to college, or joining the military or drinking alcoholic beverages.
Now such talk is of course insane, you can’t be raped and have been at fault, you can’t go out and get raped, that would imply that it was in some way a consensual act, and rape cannot be a consensual act, ergo you cannot go out and “get” raped, the very idea is nonsensical.

But the point is to conflate consensual sex with rape, so that activities or behavior that occur primarily because a woman is not hiding her sexual nature and may even want to do something as crazy as want to have consensual sex with someone, such as dressing “like a slut” (or just being a stripper, prostitute, porn star etc… a member of the rape class basically) or drinking (a major part of most human mating rituals in the first world), inherently also imply that a woman wants to be raped too, because obviously there is no distinction between consensual sex between two (or more) people who really want to have sex with each other, and a man masturbating using a woman’s body.

Now the distinction between consensual sex and rape is simply that, with consensual sex we have two (or more) people who really want to have sex with each other, while with rape you have one guy who feels it necessary to prove his manliness by fucking someone who either A) actively doesn’t want to have sex or B) doesn’t struggle too hard.
Now note that I mentioned people who want to have sex with each other, as Bitch|Lab pointed out, mutuality is key here (the only really important thing when it comes to sex positive feminist views towards any sort of sex), everyone has to actively want to have sex with everyone else involved or it’s not sex by the sex positive feminist conception of sex, the idea that if a person doesn’t object too loudly then it’s not rape is rejected by sex positive feminism as an entirely patriarchal line of rape enabling bullshit.

Which brings me around to the never ending argument that’s been going on at Pandagon between prostitutes waving the banner of “choice” and “sex positive feminism”, a gay man who needs his blow jobs on demand and the “radfems” who the other two groups think hate prostitution because prostitutes have sex for money, whereas they actually hate prostitution because prostitutes have sex for money.

OMGWTFBBQ, I hear you cry (nice pronunciation btw), people not getting the subtle nuance of an argument? Surely not!? You ask, confused and scared at this strange new world you’ve glimpsed in which nuance appears to be too much for some people to handle.

Next you’ll tell us that people have been whipping out Dworkin as an insult for reasons other than allying with right wingers during the 80s against porn and prostitution, you joke.

Heh.

Which is really the only reason anyone should point to Dworkin and radfems as a bad thing, their thinking and writing, and more importantly their legal work making date rape a crime and all that, are pretty sound and they can shit internal consistency, what with them having such stuff up the wazoo and then some.
That they allied with the right-wingers and have since been demonised by the patriarchy and feminists alike should really stand as a testament to how making deals with the right wing are going to end up with you getting screwed over.

Of course, it’s technically a fight over the legalization of prostitution, but if it was then there’d be questions asked like “does legalization actually help the most vulnerable and abused prostitutes?” and stuff, not “I deserve the right to sell my body for cash and enable the patriarchy because I am able to get other work, and this is feminist and empowering because I say so”, which is nice, because women should feel empowered enough to be so moulitsas± in public, however that doesn’t in anyway make the moulitsas argument any less… moulitsas.

Because prostitution is wrong, and here’s why…

Now KH, the main legalisation pusher in that thread, is convinced that prostitution is not coercive, and htat prostitution is just another form of sexual choice – like blowjobs and engaging in consensual sex. Now her main reason for this is based on a long winded bit of academic masturbation, which starts off with this little gem:

Nonetheless, the following discussion will focus on a narrower sense of the term more in line with its use by major historical philosophical writers and contemporary theorists alike. This usage will rule out, by stipulation, such things as mere disapproval, emotional manipulation, or wheedling.

So basically she holds her position by playing semantics with some wording using the wanky academic concept of “coercion”. Uhuh, that’s philisophically sound, that everyone else uses the term in the normal way to mean methods of manipulation that include emotional manipulation, as well as socio-economic manipulation, is beside the point, she has redefined “is” to justify her profession and that’s the end of that (I am of course using a magical term that her academics had to actively point out they weren’t using, which I made up entirely, of course).

We know that prostitution is coercive in the normal, as opposed to the “Could I make it any more clear that I’m really reaching for justifcations here?”, sense of the word coercion from the most basic economic concept of supply and demand.

Now everyone knows supply and demand, hell it’s all most libertarians and right wingers know about economics, but due to supply and demand, a suppler with a monopoly in something can jack their prices sky high because they don’t have to worry about competition undercutting them, they’re the only supplier in town and so if anyone wants to buy their produce, they need to pay those prices and thus have no real bargaining power, unless demand is almost non-existent.

If the dynamic then becomes a matter of needs versus wants, the power imbalance becomes even more pronounced, because the person who needs something is in a position where, unless there’s a serious bounty of supply for that needed stuff, they have no choice but to pay what ever they have to obtain it, and if the supplier merely wants their money, because for instance they’re rich already and are now just amassing a huge money filled swimming pool for their own personal amusement, then they can turn the person who needs down, refuse to sell them anything, if the person who needs tries to haggle or pay less than is being asked, and so the person with needs gets screwed over more often than not because it is dangerous to even risk trying to haggle or negotiate a better price.

Now obviously a person who relies on prostitution to pay their bills and to just generally live is not in the superior bargaining position compared to the john who use them, who neither need them nor are particularly pressured to use any particular prostitute – not only can johns haggle but they have the ability to dictate terms to the prostitute who has a huge force (hunger, the luxury of having a place to sleep).

Prostitution is clearly a buyer’s market, and prostitutes are sellers, inherently degraded by their lack of power even when their profession is something they’ve entered into by “choice”.

The prostitute needs the money for their survival, and the john merely wants to have sex with a woman, and so a pressure is put on the prostitute to perform when they do not want to and/or how they don’t want to.

Now despite the fact that when a woman is having sex when/how she doesn’t want to, it’s not sex, it’s rape, which is coerced sex, KH still sits stubbornly by the concept that there’s nothing coercive about having sex for money.

Now I think I get what she’s sort of going on about, I do, one you get past the whole fucked up semantics BS, there is the whole “If someone offers you a million dollars to eat shit, you can refuse” thing, no one’s actively forcing the prostitutes to have sex when/how they don’t want to.

Well, except the socio-economic conditions inherent to prostitution of course.

Now the more eagle eyed among you may have noticed that an argument that basically says “Well if she had sex with him and chose to be a prostitute, then she wasn’t raped, she consented” and automatically erases the fact that the prostitute did not want to have sex then/like that, which is always rape, duh.

And yes B|L, this was put forth by a person claiming to be a sex-positive feminist. Sans any of the various contexts that I needed to be informed about after the Bussel flamewar, Bussel sounded like the sort of anti-fem I hear much too often, lording the right to be victimised while slamming feminists with some really randomised citations (that’s the anti-fems btw, after you add in a shit load of context to Bussel you find out that she’s wasn’t actually lording the right to be victimised, she’s just moulitsas). Yes it’s fucked up that I’m more familiar with common anti-fem arguments than Moulitsas feminist ones (I’m looking at you Levy).

But as I was telling my crack dealer this morning, I’m a fucked up kinda gal.

Anyhoo… If a woman isn’t able to consent it’s rape, If she was willing at one point but changes her mind later on, it’s rape if you don’t stop guys, even if she’s a prostitute/pr0nstar/stripper, it’s still rape if she doesn’t want to have sex with you.

DUH!

Now you may have noticed I used a word which usually gets the prostitution legalisers aggravated; “degrade”.

This is not me saying “oh, they have sex for money, they’re being degraded”, I’m saying that someone has to play pretend that they’re enjoying themselves while having sex with a person to whom they are not physically attracted to is being dehumanized.

One of the words used to support various sex-negative concepts under the cover of sex-positive feminism is “empowering”, stripping is “empowering”, being just (as in no life outside of being a stay at home mother, not as in being any kind of mother is something less in and of itself) a stay at home mother who caters to your “manly” guy’s every whim while ignoring your personal wants and needs is “empowering”, being a prostitute is “empowering”.
Now the funny thing is that out of those three, stripping is probably the only one that even approaches being “empowering”, because the thing is that, no one tells her how she does her routines, that’s her choice and her choice alone (I think, I could be wrong), the woman who’s trapped in that abusive marriage (and what else would you call a marriage in which a woman unilaterally takes on the stresses of a family while the husband complains about how she isn’t satisfying his every sexual whim often enough?) and the prostitute don’t’ even have that level of freedom in their “empowering” profession.

Yes yes, I suppose a prostitute can turn down clients, but again there’s that matter of really needing the money that means that’ll happen in extremis only.

And while she’s on the clock she is not herself, not sexually, not personality wise either, a john doesn’t just hire a prostitute’s body for an hour or an evening, he hires her personality as well, she hires someone who’ll laugh at his lame ass jokes and smile and go “oh it’s so big and hard” at appropriate moments.
It’s a trope borne entirely of the abrahamic faiths’ belief in a mind/body duality that creates this idea that sex is a purely physical thing that is somehow separate from the mental/spiritual aspect of a person, it isn’t, it can’t be.

Which is why the term “empowering” is such a classic case of doublethink when used in relation to prostitution, A prostitute is not doing what they want to do sexually, they’re doing what the john wants to do sexually irregardless of what the prostitute feels about that particular act.

It may not be rape if a woman does an act that bores them to tears and through which they have to pretend to be enjoying themselves, but it’s certainly not “empowering”, the precise opposite in fact, it’s dehumanizing.

And the amount of time, work and money that has to go into a prostitute’s body during her career is also another aspect that robs the whole thing of it’s empowering aspect, the closest equivalent to the dehumanizing nature of prostitution is shitty things in the service industry, those bullshit jobs where not smiling at all times when customers are present is a good way to get fired, those jobs are also dehumanizing, no question about it, but at least in most of those jobs I can get off work, and then eat and drink myself fat, or not get a face left because I’m getting old, and the next morning I can go into work, fat or wrinkly or ugly as sin, and as long as I remember to smile between 7 and 6 everyday, I still get paid.

But a prostitute has to go to the gym and stay trim, has to get the cosmetic surgery if possible, otherwise they’ll suffer a drop in customers, and the only empowering thing about either of the service industry jobs, the money you get from them, starts to dry up.

And the higher paid the hooker, the more crap they need to do to stay a high paid hooker, until their bodies are 80% silicon/collagen, 19% water and 1% themselves, at all times.
And as I’ve written previously, another trick oppressive system use is to turn a person from an individual, into a role, a job, a duty.

The Lovage song Sex (I’m a) notes this fact actually, where the chorus has a man going “I’m a man” over and over again, while a woman replies with all the roles she can be, “I’m a bitch”, “I’m a hooker”, I’m a little girl”, “I’m your mother”, “I’m a blue movie” the female half of the dialogue goes, never matching the man’s definitive statement that he’s just “a man.”

The core principle of feminism is that women are people, not roles, not jobs, people, and while people can take on roles when they want to, they can only take on roles as an expression of their personhood, and jobs that gradually subsume more and more of a woman’s personhood beneath their need to earn money, going so far as to disfigure her appearance so that men can better masturbate with her, are not feminist.

Now are y’all ready for the Big, Bad, horse molesting “But” to this whole tawdry affair?

But…

None of that matters a damn in the prostitution legalisation debate.

Whether prostitution is legalised has to be all about whether legalisation or decriminalisation helps stem and stop abuses in the industry, nothing more and nothing less, that some women decide to have sex for money is irrelevant to the legalisation debate, yes they should be called on their patriarchal bullshit when they call prostitution feminist or sex-positive, but the moral debate that broke out on pandagon has nothing to do with whether prostitution should be legalised, the debate should always be “can this or that legal change help those women who are being abused in an industry that is already illegal but exists anyway?”

And my personal stance is that the answer to that question is highly situational, which is were I feel Dworkin and most prostitution fighters, whether for or against legalisation, err heavily.

Universal attitudes to legalisation/decriminalisation are foolish, I could see it possible that in some locales, prostitution could be legalised and give prostitutes and shit load of much needed legal rights and protections that will be used to their benefit, and legalisation doesn’t forego attacking the root cause of prostitution – patriarchy – not by a long shot.

But then again legalising prostitution anywhere within a few hundred miles of Yale, Harvard or Duke will do nothing more or less than essentially legalise rape, the police simply won’t arrest, the juries won’t convict, the worst possible thing in the world you could do for prostitutes in that particular socio-political environment is legalise prostitution, even decriminalisation would rely too much on the local police not being out and out misogynists who joined the police force because they really like beating poor people with their batons (which they fiddle with constantly).

So it depends, if there is a good reason to think that legalisation in some form will be helpful within a particular social context, then by all means, I’ll have your back.

Just don’t tell me that prostitution is empowering, or feminist, or about you being sexually free, just don’t, I hate people who can’t even be bothered to lie to me well, cheap lies won’t do anything but piss me off.

It’s about the money, so say it’s about the money, there’s no shame in admitting that.

* Because they already had the massive amount of starting capital that is absolutely needed, due to that being how economics works, to make even more money (money being entirely unlike tribbles and all) in our great “meritocracy”, and their bags of inherited cash also allowed them to survive the first couple of false starts, like those times they ran several businesses into the ground through raw incompetence for instance, which strangely enough never get mentioned in those great tirades against the incompetence of poor people that asswaste failure right-wingers are so fond of.

** Of course this is largely true, when you can throw money at the politicians to change the laws so that all those handy cost saving schemes (like incredibly lax health and safety regulations) are perfectly legal, not to mention hire the lawyers and accountants who know all the little legal loopholes that enable them to never pay taxes and to avoid breaking the letter of the law while bending the law’s (and the workers’) spirit into crazy pretzel shapes that inexplicably never quite break it (though onlookers are always amazed that it doesn’t, “how can anyone or thing contort themselves like that?” they often ask, as though the answer is ever going to be anything other than “because they’re paid to hyuk hyuk hyuk…”) and thus the rich, strangely enough, never quite break the law.

† Who seem to go to way too many pride parades and gay bars than would seem credible if the constant paedophilic obsession of homophobes is to be believed. One can only assume that wingers raise their children in gay leather bars. Actually, now that I think about it, that would explain rather a lot really.

‡ I’m thinking of using Kos’ name as a term to replace the morally questionable terms “moron”, “idiot”, “retard”, “mong” and “dumb”, as in “my god, that was really moulitsas” or “Stop being moulitsas and get a move on”. To put it into a relative context, the bush administration is really really, incredibly moulitsa.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 10th, 2006 at 6:51 am and is filed under Feminism, Lick My Jackboots of Love, Sex, What Patriarchy?. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.