PunkAssBlog.com

(Part One is here.)

This entire blog post was actually supposed to be a comment, in response to another commenter’s question on my take on sex work and its inherent feminism or lack thereof. However, once I started writing said comment, it became clear that I had WAY too much to say on the topic to inflict my response in the little comment section of a post! So I asked the commenter how she’d feel about a blog post and she said Sounds fine! (Of course, it’s taken me so long to get around to writing it, she probably isn’t even looking for it anymore.) And then, once I started writing the blog post, I realized that what I really needed to do was write an entire book in response to that query, because it is extremely complicated! and so, apparently, are my feelings on the subject.

(Note: In an attempt to keep this post from turning into the aforementioned book-length commentary, I’m restricting myself to discussing prostitution, not any other kind of sex work.)

When I was younger, up until around my mid-twenties, I hated prostitution. Not prostitutes–what I felt for prostitutes in general was enraged (on their behalf) and horrified (on their behalf too). My reasons for this were twofold–the lesser reason was because I was stuck in the throes of the self-centric worldview that most teens and young adults tend to have–the assumption that everyone if not in possession of the exact same feelings and reactions as oneself, can’t be far off, and I knew how I would feel if I were a prostitute. I was by nature a private person with personal space zone even larger than that of most Americans, who culturally already on average have very large ones. On top of that, I had suffered through some unfortunate childhood incidents that had given me a specific horror of having anyone touch me in a sexual fashion in any situation where I was required to submit for any reason other than my own sexual desire for that person. On top of that, I had left home at age sixteen and discovered very rapidly that there is a decent-sized population of men out there that enthusiastically seize upon any very poor young girl outside the protective circle of a family–they behave very much like someone finding a leprechaun in their backyard and are quite aggressive in pushing her to perform sexual services in exchange for the material help they perceive she is in desperate need of. So I was already not in the best frame of mind in terms of viewing prostitution in any favorable light whatsoever when I first met the greater reason for my hatred of prostitution in general and my agonized contemplation of the horrors that prostitutes must endure in particular.

Let’s call the greater reason “Cyndi;” that isn’t really her name and the chances are slim to none that she’d ever be exposed by this blog even if I used her real name, but I think I’m more comfortable assigning her a nom de plume anyway. She was “retired” from prostitution–that was how she referred to it, though even then it startled me to hear anyone describe herself as “retired” from anything at the tender age of 22. She had been a practicing prostitute for five years, from ages 15 to 20. She was the fiancee of a man I knew and absolutely could not stand, but she was happy with him because, she said, he knew what she’d been before and genuinely didn’t care. (The reason I hated him was because he was in his late thirties and before becoming engaged to Cyndi, had been “dating,” if you want to call it that, a sixteen-year-old with such severe self-esteem issues that she let him tie her up and engage in painful anal sex on a regular basis because afterwards he would tell her how sexy she was.) But anyway, Cyndi at various times related the circumstances of how she became a prostitute and some of her experiences during her professional days as one–without going into the details of her personal life here, suffice it to say that any suspicions I had had of the awfulness that it was to be a prostitute were wildly overconfirmed, setting my resistance to the whole notion in irrevocable stone.

It wasn’t until after I had divorced my first husband and gotten to know many women, and men, from a much broader variety of socioeconomic backgrounds than the one I hailed, that I began to think that my stony convictions about the basic, flat-out evilness period of prostitution might not be an entirely fair and accurate picture. My feelings about Cyndi’s career path in particular and that of all underage girls abused into prostitution in general didn’t change one whit (still haven’t, actually)–however, I started considering the idea of women, fully adult and emotionally healthy women, choosing to sell sex with themselves to others as a completely voluntary choice. Once I had managed to accept that yes, there were such women, I was finally able to start looking at the situation from a more philosophical standpoint. I ended up with the following collection of questions (among others, but I’m restricting myself also to the is-sex-work-as-practiced-by-women-inherently-antifeminist aspect of the situation) to ask myself:

1. Is the selling of the use of one’s body for sex wrong morally in of itself, without the element of coercion or underage or emotionally damaged providers?
2. Is the selling of the use of one’s body for sex for a woman empowering, subjugating or some hazy gray area in-between or even outside the two?
3. Does the practice of prostitution harm women in general and overall, help women in general and overall, or neither?

My conclusions:

1. No. Because (a) it’s your body and whatever you do with it of your own free will, as a fully mentally and emotionally capable adult, is absolutely and only your business and nobody else’s and (b) sex between two consenting and fully mentally and emotionally capable adults is not morally wrong, regardless of what some religious types appear to think.

2. This is a harder question, because in a perfect world, the answer would be very different than it is the real one we actually live in. In a perfect world, where women didn’t have a thousands-of-years history as being legal property of men with the provision by them of sexual services to said men being a fully embedded part of that–in a perfect world where there was no economic and social divide between the genders with women usually far to the bottom of the heap, the answer would be “neither.” Is being a nail technician, a pedicurist, for instance, empowering or subjugating? Neither–it’s an intimate physical service being provided by a professional that gives physical and emotional pleasure to the recipient for an exchange of cash. It’s empowering in the sense that any work a person does for cash renumeration empowers her; it isn’t subjugating at all unless you are a person who thinks that providing intimate physical services to someone else that make them feel good is demeaning, in which case you need to also include, say, doctors and nurses in that category.

Unfortunately, we don’t live in a perfect world, and not only have women had the history described above, they are still far behind men as a gender in terms of political and financial power. If you are a man getting a pedicure from a woman working as a nail technician, say, and you decide to try to rape her while you’re at it, you will unquestionably be arrested for it. However, if you’re a man getting a blowjob from a woman working as a prostitute and you decide to try to rape her while you’re at it, you won’t–you can almost do whatever you want to her short of severely physically damaging her or killing her. In our imperfect world, purchasing a woman’s sexual services culturally translates to the actual purchase of her entire physical body–slavery–in the minds of too many men specifically and our culture in general. Some customers and some practitioners like to play at “empowerment,” that he is the slave, the slave of his sexual desire and she is really the one in control of the situation, but the actual fact is that it is only his self-restraint that allows her any real “control” at all. And that means she doesn’t really have any, does she?

So my answer is, in a perfect world, consensual adult prostitution would not be subjugating, and it would be empowering in the sense that any job providing financial independence is empowering. However, in the world we live in, it is subjugating.

3. Back to the perfect world/our world dichotomy–in a perfect world, the answer would be “neither”–it would be JOB. It’d help out the individual in question by being one and therefore providing cash to live off of, but other than that it’d have no impact on that woman in particular or women in general at all. However, unfortunately, we live in this world.

In this world, women’s bodies and the idea of spending money to induce one to have sex with you (you=men) are used to sell everything from coffee to cars. The last five movies I’ve watched, for instance, all have at least one scene where the main female character goes in the bathroom, takes her clothes off on-camera, and showers, and in only one of those movies was there any point to this in terms of plot at all. Women, in short, are presented all the time as a bombardment of something you want to buy and fuck–something you can buy and fuck–all you need is enough money. By validating this outright, female prostitutes help hold up the structure of the patriarchy that assigns women to be objects rather than fully human autonomous people like men.

From an interpersonal relationship standpoint (finally!! she gets around to actually relating it to the original Edwards post–lol) when a man and a woman choose to vow to be monogamous to one another, the woman is really the only one who is actually EXPECTED to do so. A big part of the reason that it is statistically much more epidemic in men than women to break this vow is because there is a plethora of women’s bodies offered to him for cash, quite discreetly–women who make it clear that they are perfectly fine with him treating his vow to another woman like so much bullshit, who have an active interest in encouraging men who have vowed monogamy to break that vow as that is the big majority of their customers. By enthusiastically endorsing that societal double standard, women who practice prostitution are enabling it to a degree that would be impossible without their active cooperation.

So my answer to this last question is, in a perfect world, consensual adult prostitution would neither hurt nor help women in general. However, in the world we live it, it hurts all women, including the ones engaging in prostitution, a lot.

(Note: Now I wanna start passionately discoursing how “well how do we fix this then?!” but seriously, it’ll run into book length. I will throw out there that I think the illegality of prostitution is a stupendously bad idea in terms of fixing the situation–s’matter of fact, that enables it even MORE as a “bad” thing! Well, I take that back–I don’t think that anyone who sells sex should ever fall afoul of any law, but I do enthusiastically support the idea of slapping together a really draconian law package punishing anyone who tries to buy sex from anybody underaged.)