I just got done reading Lisa Kansas’s post on prostitution and how it relates to the Edwards case.* I was just going to put a comment, but I realized it was starting to turn into my own manifesto, so i thought a separate post might be more appropriate.
As far as her questions one and two and subsequent answers go, I have no particular complaints. It seems a reasonable to have two separate levels for reality and theoretical levels when it comes to the hurting/ harming question in regards to prostitution, and a lot of sexist things.
But it is the third level that I have a disagreement with, and it’s the third part that relates to the Edward’s case the most.
Lisa KS’s contention is that:
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.
Now, I disagree with this for two reasons: the first is where it assigns blame, and the second is a more general philosphoical question about the nature of promises.
If I’m reading this correctly, (and Lisa, please feel to correct me if I’m misrepresenting something), prostitution would not be bad if we did not have a society that saw women as consumable objects. But since we do have a society where women are seen as consumable objects, prostitutes cash in on this, thus since they are selling themselves as “products” and reinforcing this mindset.
But, as it was already admitted, that prostitution would be fine if we didn’t have this mindset, I can’t see how it can be at all a cause of, or even a reinforcement of, this mindset. The problem is the mindset, not the prostitution.
I also disagree that “statistically much more epidemic in men than women to break this vow [marriage] is because there is a plethora of women’s bodies offered to him for cash”. For one, the differences in infidelity is not that sharp: the rates change from study to study, but according to this http://www.springerlink.com/content/j21080r5q5551u41/ The Hite Report says that about 54% of women and 72% of men have cheated at least once on their long-term relationship. Others say that 25% of women have and 42% of men. Since we’re dealing with self-reporting, I’m going to assume that the female number is problably lower than it really is. So, the whole “cheating” thing seems to be pretty common.
I also feel that to claim that men cheating can’t be blamed on women for the same reason that I don’t think women wearing “slutty” clothes entitles men to treat them poorly, or that men would be ready to “settle down” if it wasn’t for all of those loose women who are willing to have sex without a ring. As an individual, you are expected to be responsible for your OWN actions, regardless of the actions of others. To say that if women were just “better” men would be better is a conservative line, not a feminist one.
And the second disagreement has to do with the nature of promises. If I promise someone something, it is on me to deliver the promise, not the people around me. If I promise to be home at 7, and I’m late because a friend starts talking to me and I lose track of the time, it is not that friend’s fault that I am late, it is mine. My friend has no moral obligation to make sure my promises are enforced.
The same is the true with a marriage. Someone who has made no promise has no moral culpability if the others do break that promise. Marriage is a promise: nothing more, nothing less, and it does not deserve any other special treatment. Like any other promise, the responsibility is between those who make the contract, not the parties outside of it. I, personally, would not sleep with someone who was married, because if he breaks a promise to others, he’ll break it to me. But that is a matter of personal taste, not an admission of moral culpability.
There are enough people in the world that blame women for everything, I think feminism should err on the side of giving women a break. I’m not saying that we should give a “pussy pass” to women, for women, like humans, can do evil things and should be called on it. I’m not even saying that we shouldn’t examine how are everyday actions contribute to the patriarchy (show of hands, who’s wearing makeup, a push-up bra, or high heels right now?). I’m saying that we should leave the criticisms of women and their actions for things they directly do and contribute to, not to promises they didn’t make and systems they didn’t set up.
*I wanted to avoid the whole Edward’s affair entirely because, frankly, I hate how much effort it takes to maintain idealism. Every time a politician can’t get his morals straight, it bothers me.
I agree that the mindset is the problem. However, the mindset will not change as long as there are people who are heavily invested in both sides of maintaining it…not just the provider side but also not just the seeker side.
“I also feel that to claim that men cheating can’t be blamed on women for the same reason that I don’t think women wearing “slutty” clothes entitles men to treat them poorly,”
Unfortunately that analogy doesn’t work–in the first situation, both parties are consensual throughout the entire episode: (1) man wants to buy sex (2) woman wants to sell sex (3) woman chooses to have sex with man and (4) man chooses to pay woman. Every action taken throughout this scenario was the full and free choice of both parties, therefore the responsibility for every action is equally held by both parties. You are trying to compare that to assigning responsibility to a party who is no longer behaving consensually: (1) woman wants to wear low-cut blouse and Daisy Dukes (2) man wants to touch woman wearing low-cut blouse and Daisy Dukes (3) woman does not want to be touched by man (4) man touches woman anyway–clearly the responsibility for the action is held only by consensual party or parties.
A much better analogy would be someone who decides to make a living fencing stolen goods–this person has never stolen anything in his life. He does, however, know that the goods he is receiving have been stolen. However, you seem to want to argue that since he himself never actually did the stealing from the original owner–all he has is the knowledge that it is occurring–he should bear no responsibility for the damage the stealing of that person’s goods is incurring. Is that how you feel?
“And the second disagreement has to do with the nature of promises. If I promise someone something, it is on me to deliver the promise, not the people around me. If I promise to be home at 7, and I’m late because a friend starts talking to me and I lose track of the time, it is not that friend’s fault that I am late, it is mine. My friend has no moral obligation to make sure my promises are enforced.”
Again, you’re not really describing an analogous scenario. I agree that it’s your fault you’re late, but I would think that a friend who knew that they were helping you be late to something that was really important to your husband, not just “late” in general but for some specific reason, like he had a class he couldn’t miss and you had the only car and deliberately set out not only to make you late not just that night, but to hopefully make you late every single night–unfortunately, you’re confusing the moral responsibility of a specific promise one person has made to another with the general moral responsibility to avoid doing harm to others. The friend has none of the first, but nobody on earth is exempted from the second. Well, tragically, there certainly are a lot of folks out there that think there is no such thing as the second…if you’re one of ‘em, too, we really won’t have any more to discuss on this topic. When one person believes something’s wrong and the other person does not and they’ve both considered the situation from all angles and still feel as they feel…well, that’s pretty much that, eh?
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“There are enough people in the world that blame women for everything, I think feminism should err on the side of giving women a break. I’m not saying that we should give a “pussy pass” to women, for women, like humans, can do evil things and should be called on it. I’m not even saying that we shouldn’t examine how are everyday actions contribute to the patriarchy (show of hands, who’s wearing makeup, a push-up bra, or high heels right now?). I’m saying that we should leave the criticisms of women and their actions for things they directly do and contribute to, not to promises they didn’t make and systems they didn’t set up.”
(shrug) as I said, I hold everyone to the moral standard of not enriching themselves on the pain and suffering of others if it is avoidable, and I believe excusing women and nobody else from that standard is the issuance of a pussy pass. I certainly don’t blame them for the existence of prostitution, but I do blame fully consensual, adult and emotionally healthy prostitutes for enthusiastically helping keep the system maximally harmful to women and most beneficial at women’s expense for men.
“fully consensual, adult and emotionally healthy prostitutes”
These people are so rare, if they exist at all (I would argue the latter is true), that they are doing much less to keep the system in place than the porn-sick dudes who pay to rape them.
I certainly don’t blame them for the existence of prostitution, but I do blame fully consensual, adult and emotionally healthy prostitutes for enthusiastically helping keep the system maximally harmful to women and most beneficial at women’s expense for men.
This makes me think of ESSs.
(Wikipedia, I love you: an evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS) is a strategy which, if adopted by a population of players, cannot be invaded by any alternative strategy that is initially rare. An ESS is an equilibrium refinement of the Nash equilibrium — it is a Nash equilibrium which is “evolutionarily” stable meaning that once it is fixed in a population, natural selection alone is sufficient to prevent alternative (mutant) strategies from successfully invading.)
If (and it’s a big if) you want to look at sex as an example of game theory at work, vowed monogamy is not an ESS, because it is a good environment for cheating via prostitution to thrive.
This isn’t a moral point, just a practical one. ‘Enthusiasm’ or no, if prostitution is a viable strategy, how do you stop all of the 3.35 billion women on this planet from ever walking that path? It’s one of many, many places in life where morality does not overrule the desire to be a winner.
Not sure game theory is the best approach though, because irl people do not all play each other constantly, but often seek to live in harmony instead.
LK, there are certainly very few emotionally stable adult female prostitutes in the entire world. In fact, I often doubt that there are any at all. I think that your eagerness to get mad at these women for actions which are coerced and/or the result of trauma is getting in the way of your seeing that prostitution is almost never a free choice for anybody. Let’s go look at your scenario again.
“(1) man wants to buy sex (2) woman wants to sell sex (3) woman chooses to have sex with man and (4) man chooses to pay woman”
This only works if you don’t examine the factors involved in why women would want to sell sex or choose to have sex with a man, or why/how a man would want to buy sex.
First off, most of the women engaged in prostitution worldwide are enslaved, addicted to drugs, working for pimps, or starving. Most of these women are poorer and browner than the very very privileged few whose situation is bearable enough that they can even pretend to like it. I tend to find any discussion of prostitution that tries to re-frame the question of prostitution so as to discuss it in terms of the experience of rich white educated western women racist and classist in that it attempts to erase the majority experience in favor of universalizing that of rich white people. Most women in prostitution, as I’m sure you are well aware, do not want to sell sex and cannot be said by any stretch of the imagination to be choosing to have sex with their clients.
Second, I know that I personally, when I was a prostitute, was working with some really fucked up values, societal messages, and traumatic history. If the women who you are claiming are emotionally healthy are raised in a society where all women are taught to be nothing more than their sexual function to men, if most of them were sexually abused as children, how free is their choice? If they have friends and acquaintances who try to explain to them all the time that sex work is “empowering,” as many people do in subcultures which like to consider themselves edgy or alternative, how free is their choice? It would seem to me, having actually been one, that the majority of even higher-end prostitutes are heavily coerced at best.
Third, the men who buy prostitutes do not ask them if they are happy in prostitution. They do not ask them if it’s consensual. I never ever had a man ask me these things. What these men do is hire a woman with no concern for who she is or what her motivations are, have sex with her which is often painful and usually involves some element of humiliation taken out of mainstream pornography, and maybe make small talk with her before or afterwards. Occasionally, they are even kind enough to seek out “reputable” agencies or high-priced prostitutes because they have decided that they will make a conscious effort not to rape anybody that day. But it takes a certain amount of deliberate self-deception to tell oneself that the woman you just had sex with must have wanted it because you gave her a lot of money and her handler is clean-cut. The very very best thing you could call these men is reluctant or possibly self-deluding rapists. The worst you could call them is sociopathic misogynistic monstrous rapists.
In the context of a transaction in which a man pays specifically to have sex with a woman who wouldn’t have sex with him without the money and specifically pays to have sex with a woman whose consent cannot be meaningfully confirmed by asking beforehand in a non-coercive situation, I am shocked that you would type “man wants to buy sex.” Here is a more honest appraisal of what’s going on, even in the case of the most privileged prostitute’s “harmless” transaction.
(1) man wants to pay to rape somebody (2) woman who is almost certainly emotionally unstable and suffering from PTSD is available for sex (3) man decides which one he will rape based upon relative pornulated hawtness of individual model and (4) man rapes woman
I feel inclined to question whether every man out there has an “original owner”. Is every woman who first shares an ample meal with a man and afterwards has sex with him (let’s stipulate that he’s the one paying for dinner) an accessory to larceny? Is every woman who first climbs into a hot tub with a man and who afterwards has sex with him without knowing every detail of his past committing a misdemeanor? Is every woman who goes out with a man (whether with a view to eventually having sex with him or not) somehow inherently obligated to be au courant with the whole of his personal history? How is this different from “blaming the woman”?
And what if a woman does feel such an obligation and fails in it, either because she lacks the skills of a natural sleuth or because she gets lied to? Is her behavior still demi-criminal, or does “gee he fibbed to me” work as a get-out-of-jail-free card?
Just want to know.
Anarcha, if you read the post I wrote that Antigone is responding to in this blog post, you’ll see that I’ve already considered the situation of prostitutes who aren’t emotionally healthy–indeed, it took me years to believe myself that there were any who weren’t in some kind of coercive situation. However, I assure you there are–they blog, for one–and the post I wrote was in answer to someone else’s comment originally based on the morality of the situation specifically for women who are fully and freely consensual and emotionally healthy sex workers. (I know, a tangled path here of comment-post-comment-post.) But seriously, if you do read it, you’ll see that I have absolutely no interest whatsoever in blaming women who are sex workers who were in any way coerced or damaged into being in that situation for anything whatsoever–qute the opposite.
Beckabot–the analogy is not a comparison of a man to an object that is owned; the analogy is a comparison of the morality of someone doing something that is wrong vs. the morality of someone enabling someone else to profit from something that the someone else has done wrong. If you’d prefer, we can use this analogy instead: Someone you work with is badmouthing someone else because she wants that other person’s job, and it’s working pretty well–people are starting to act very cold towards that other person and that other’s person’s boss can be heard complaining about the other person’s work. Now, the person that you know has also started taking a group of folks out to lunch every Friday on her own dime to a really great, chic place that you love, and the outings are amazingly fun. You are in that lunch group. Now, although you yourself have never said anything bad about the other person and have no intention of ever doing so, since you are profiting from your association with the person who is, you choose to keep your mouth shut and mind your own business. Is this moral?
Lisa KS-
I would say the situation is a-moral. In order for an action to be immoral or moral, there actually HAS to be an action. No action means that there’s no morality.
I guess we have to agree to disagree–I can easily think of lots of situations where I would consider someone’s inaction immoral. But if you can’t, okay.
Bush re: Katrina comes to mind. The English government re: the Irish during the potato famine too. Millions of Germans re: the Holocaust. I’m not sure how you can argue morality requires an action Antigone.
Bush was responsible for the United States; he implicitly agreed to the action. As did the English government (considering they were a major contributor). Again, the Germans supported the Holocaust THROUGH THEIR ACTIONS (electing Hitler, allowing him to control power, et cetera). This really isn’t disproving my point.
Now, if you wanted to say that I’M responsible for Katrina, because I didn’t do anything besides donate 20 bucks, that would be a more apt comparison. But, I’m going to say that I’m not because I was not the one who broke my promise re Bush.
Morality does require an action, and requires responsibility. I don’t have a responsibility to honor someone else’s promises. If I knew someone who promised god to convert everyone to Christianity, am I required to honor that promise? If I know someone who promised to get home early from work, am I required to cover that person’s excess work so that s/he can honor that promise? No, I am not- and it is neither immoral nor moral.
Let’s see: you’re saying that when your choice is to either behave immorally or do nothing, you’re not required to behave immorally. Very true. However, the question is, can your inaction in a situation ever be construed as immoral? How bout this one:
Your next-door neighbor is beating his wife. You do not choose to call the police or otherwise attempt to intervene; you are a paragon of inaction. So you have no responsibility and therefore no immorality, you claim?
Lisa KS- Yes. I am not required by law to intervene. However, if I wished to be MORAL, I would actually have to intervene. It would be amoral to do nothing, it would be immoral to help beat the wife, but it would be moral to intervene.
So, you don’t believe it is immoral to allow someone to be hurt when you could prevent or stop it, merely amoral, and you think that whether or not you are required by law to do something has anything to do with morality or lack thereof. Well, okay. We’re just entirely different people, you and I.
That’s about the thrust of it, I guess. And to add to that: you said “when you could prevent or stop it”- in the case of a wife beater, there may be very real reasons not to intervene: my life, the life of my family, the life or my roommates may be in danger, and if I call the cops, they may make it worse.
When we get to “immorality” we start having to have the conversation on what the appropriate punishments for “immorality” are- from critisms, to actual jail time. If you think that it is immoral for a person to not intervene in a situation, what exactly do you think the pentalty should be?
On the original topic, whoever the women Edwards cheated on with is being loudly harangued without actually having done an action one way or another. Edwards is the one who deserves the critisism: not Mrs. Edwards for “not providing enough support in the marriage” or whatever the argument de jur boils down to, and not “the other women” for breaking a promise SHE DID NOT MAKE.