Hey there, big man
If every lap-dancing club in the country were to burn down overnight, what of value would have been lost? We have more than enough commodified servility in our society as it is. Service to others is a useful thing, and paid service can at least approximate fair exchange, but one can serve without performing servility.
The basic reason why sex workers are held in contempt by society at large is not that they are unfairly stigmatised for the moral impurity of their trade (although there is that), but that feigning sexual servility is universally held to be contemptible: the performance of such servility is one of the most efficient ways one mammal can signal its inferiority and submission to another. Sex work is about enabling men to feel superior even though they’re not. Contempt is absolutely intrinsic to the equation: it’s what the punter’s paying for.
The utopia imagined by sex workers’ unions, in which sex work is physically safe, culturally destigmatised and legally protected, is a utopia incapable of sustaining the demand for sex work, which is fundamentally a demand for submission, degradation and vulnerability. Nobody wants a clean, legal, psychologically undamaged whore – neither the punter nor the would-be saviour of the fallen.
The question of what to do about this is multiply vexed, but ultimately I think that the demand for physical safety and an end to legal persecution is one that must be upheld. We should do all that we can to make sex work boring and unattractive to punters, if for no other reason than sheer spite and resentment (there are other, better reasons, but we may as well take the hit – yes, yes, we want to suffocate and diminish others’ pleasure); and the way to do that is to empower sex workers themselves. Eventually even the most adamantly sex positive might get tired of abasing themselves for the amusement of shitbags; the problem that might then arise would be that of preventing the shitbags from making the logical transition to abusing children instead (some will have made a start already).
There’s some truth in the line that prostitution acts as a safety valve, but what it draws off and diverts is not pent-up sexual desire but the frustrations of idiot machismo – those braying twats stuffing wads of cash into a stripper’s G-string are acting out their own pernicious little alpha-male fantasies of wealth and power and female sexual availability, idolators of an image of satisfaction that can never be realised without someone else being diminished, subordinated and instrumentalised. (Whether that other person feels diminished, subordinated and instrumentalised is besides the point: they’re paying her to act like she is – and act like she’s loving it. Maybe it’s possible to put on that act and feel really great about it. Maybe).
With respect to lap-dancing clubs, the obvious solution is for them to be taken into state ownership, run as co-operatives, and for their profits to be used to fund sex education (with a particular emphasis on teaching men not to be imbeciles), rape crisis clinics and the manufacture of small guillotines for the de-goolification of those who make a persistent nuisance of themselves. It remains our conviction that it is not the “moral majority” who are most threatened by the thought of sex workers who are not victimised, dirtied and secretly miserable, but rather their clients. What will you do nights now, Mr. Teece?
March 9th, 2009 at 10:02 pm
Excellent post.
March 10th, 2009 at 3:50 am
First, I’d point out that not all sex workers are female. But second, even if they were, what you’re completely ignoring here is a) most sex workers do not really “want” to be sex workers, and b) the few “sex positive” ones who do are benefitting from an *already existing* heterosexual economy that has devalued any and all displays or acts of female sexuality into those of “abasement”, “servitude”, and “submission.”
You’re forgetting that it’s not wholly within a woman’s own power whether she is “abased” sexually. Any woman who acts sexually in public outside of a heterosexual relationship and without apology is already considered either “damaged”, or even better, “insane.” Male viewers actually believe that the Girls Gone Wild actresses don’t get paid, and that they’re all at home sobbing about how “exploited” they are for being caught at a particularly drunk moment. Damaged? Insane? Or just shrewd? It’s yet another catch-22 for female sexuality: if you do enjoy sex, and exhibitionism, and are employed as a sex worker, you’re a damaged whore. If you don’t enjoy sex or exhibitionism, but you really need the money, you’re still a damaged whore.
This is the actual root of the problem.
In our societies, there is no female sexual subject who isn’t already debased, servile, and submissive–at home, at work, in a marriage, on a pole, wherever–and forced to play this role to some extent every day. The point made by sex positive feminists who defend sex work, I think, since it’s almost exclusively defended by those who have worked in the field themselves, is that it’s hardly any more or less of a con than the “regular” sex women end up having, where sex is still all about the illusion of male domination and privilege. Now more than ever, real sex is just bad amateur porn.
The thinking goes: you might as well be making money doing it, if you’re always going to be the bottom-half of some stupid domination/exploitation binary. Are women who don’t work the pole somehow avoiding being debased, and ultimately not denied access to sexual subjectivity in this culture? Hardly. In fact, sex positive sex workers would say that they aren’t be exploited at all, simply exploiting the unfortunate circumstances they have already found themselves in, and exploiting the weakness of men for the illusion of “macho.” (It’s already a second-order simulacra, the “macho” illusion provided by the strip club.) It’s once again men who are imagining that all women must and do think that their bodies are sacred objects meant only for viewing by their One True Love(s). Might it not be time to wake up and realize that this has never been and will never be the case?
Aside from all this, the most cogent point (imo) made by sex positive wokers is on the subject of degrees of exploitation. Would it be better for a stripper’s conscience should she work at Walmart, where she’d be forced to abide sweat shop labor, rampant labor violations, lack of health benefits, and exploitative conditions much the same, only at 1/100th of the pay? At least working the club she can feed her kids and afford to take them to the doctor when they’re ill.
You might even say this impossible situation mirrors that of every kind of subject under capitalism. What I don’t think any feminist thinks, though, is that strippers are empowering other women. They’re just empowering themselves to get the hell out of wage slavery.
March 10th, 2009 at 3:59 am
Just one more thing: I think you’re quite wrong on one count at least– that Johns don’t really “believe” in what’s being sold to them, they’re paying for the illusion of not-reciprocated lust and female self-abasement for cash.
I think most people with experience will tell you that many, many Johns do believe, and believe hard, that this woman is absolutely *enjoying* what she’s doing, and she’s doing it just for him– they have a special bond. This is part of why they need bouncers and pimps, or government protection: to keep the persistent “but you did me, now you’re my girlfriend forever” stalker types away, unless they’re on the clock.
March 10th, 2009 at 7:44 am
The act certainly entails pretending to enjoy it, but the demand is not for the woman to feel miserable – it’s for her to perform her innate inferiority. All the better if she likes being inferior – indeed, there’d be something the matter with her (witch, shrew etc.) if she didn’t.
I do think the comparison with working in Walmart is spurious – low-paid workers get the shaft, for sure, but they’re not generally there to make their customers feel powerful and desirable by abasing themselves. Maybe it feels about the same – I wouldn’t know – but the character of the transaction is different nevertheless.
I like your characterisation of sex work as making the best of a bad job (compulsory heterosexuality), but I also think this is somewhat of a rationalisation: one has to have decided that all men are morons and that male and female sexuality just are, irrevocably, what compulsory sexuality says they are, in order to accept it. I wouldn’t describe this perspective as “sex positive” exactly. In fact, its uncompromising negativity is just about the one thing it has going for it.
March 10th, 2009 at 8:49 am
Women are innately inferior? News to me, but of course, I’m not surprised to hear this from, drum roll, a male.
Why this insistence that simply dancing naked is some sort of vile debasement? If a person doesn’t enjoy dancing naked, is doing it anyway really so different than those tons of things anybody grudgingly does at work? If so, why? Because our society dictates that women are not to act sexual or put on a sexual display in public? Do you think female sexual expression is innately bad, and that females are naturally “inferior” to men sexually in some sense I’m not understanding?
The most glaring error in the thinking of this post is the gaping double standard at the center of the argument: it is the entitlement, nay, the universally accepted *naturalized* (because we’re mammals, you see) position of dominant males that they prioritize casual sexual encounters over love and monogamous commitments, while women (always already subordinates) who dare prioritize financial gain or casual sexual encounters over love and monogamous commitments are damaged and ultimately responsible for the bad behavior of males. And it doesn’t even matter if this isn’t *actually* true, because if teh mens believe it, it is true.
Let’s unpack that. First, the appeal to nature. Mammals and specifically primates (the order humans most tidily fit into) exhibit all sorts of varied and different sexual behaviors. But it is indeed generally accepted that it is the females within a species that are the sexual choosers, not the males. Males of the primate order, and in most mammalian orders, “abase” themselves in all sorts of silly ways in order to gain the attention and sexual acceptance of females, including fights to the death. Likewise, it is usually observed among humans that females are the ones with the sexual power–whose bodies are lusted after, turned into fetish objects, and worshiped imagistically–who are able to withhold sex or give it away as they see fit. Men try to achieve wealth, status, and all sorts of material success in order to make themselves more attractive to females, in the process often making utter fools of themselves in fights, bar brawls, strip clubs–just like other primates.
At some point, in human culture, the traditions of what Haraway calls Teddy Bear patriarchy somehow got this all confused, and the roles of males and females in the mating game suddenly switched. Somehow the idea that men are naturally promiscuous while women are monogamy robots pre-programmed for seeking nothing but lasting “pair bonds” became the justification for all sorts of restraints, judgments and limitations on female sexuality and behavior (that were, surprise, surprise, already firmly in place). There is actually little to no hard evidence for the assumption that women have less of a biological incentive to sleep around or act sexually than men do–in fact, there are several reasons to believe just the opposite, including the fact that women are more likely to conceive with a man with whom she’s having an illicit affair than she is with her husband or primary partner, the fact that female humans are one of the creatures that practice sex throughout their fertility cycle with multiple partners (rather than just during estrus as most primates do), and that just like for men, having many partners increases the chances that a female has of conceiving and bringing more offspring into the world. The extra load of sexual and parental responsibility usually heaped on women in our society make women much choosier, regardless of biological factors.
Beyond this, the idea that a man who is so pathetic that he will actually pay for sex, or the illusion of sexual power, is *not abasing* himself, while a female dancing naked is doing exactly this, makes absolutely no sense to me. Why exactly must a female who is dancing naked be necessarily abasing herself? Are female bodies dirty and bad? Should women hide themselves away and refuse to perform any act that might signal sexual health? Is a woman who does this really making herself “servile”, for that matter? If men are so much more powerful, and so naturally dominant in sexual matters, why would they have to pay for sex or attention from women in the first place? Wouldn’t women be throwing themselves at men for free? In fact, the men with the most status and wealth, most of them, do not need to pay for sex in general (even though they often do)–but some of them do need to pay for sex with a beautiful woman half their age, who doesn’t have wants and needs like their wife and kids at home, who is a pure fantasy of their ego-ideal, and who has no biological incentive to want have sex with them unless some sort of reimbursement is involved.
Really, the idea of a “naturalized” dominance in sexual matters breaks down immediately when we acknowledge that different roles, or sexual difference in general, does not always or necessarily entail a dominant/submissive binary oppositional relationship.
Even more importantly, where do class or race fit into all of this? If a woman would rather strip in a Miami club than live with a “regular” job in Oaxaca, who can blame her? Is she really “abasing” herself or giving herself and her offspring a chance at a reasonably secure future? What about the black woman who was taken from an abusive home as a child and shuffled from foster home to foster home, whose education suffers and who suffers developmental delays typical to abused children, lacking the opportunities and white privilege to carry her into a lucrative career. Is she really wrong wanting to make $300 an hour rather than $6? To want to be able to afford taking her children to the doctor? In my mind, the chauvinist who really believes this woman is “abasing” herself by dancing rather than working at McDonald’s is a complete pig. A much bigger loser than someone who is getting paid premiums to do what anyone could.
The bare fact of the matter is that sometimes, in some situations, women would much prefer to dance naked or have casual sex with someone for the chance at the relative financial independence and stability–both of which are still routinely denied women but considered a male entitlement. Anyone who is ready to judge a woman who makes this choice, as if the male gaze always already owns female sexuality, and every last act a woman might perform for sexual purposes subordinates her to her male counterparts, probably could never even begin to imagine what her situation is like. But, as they say, privilege blinds.
March 10th, 2009 at 8:56 am
Strippers aren’t there to make anyone feel powerful. They’re there to get paid.
March 10th, 2009 at 9:38 am
That’s a little like saying that undertakers aren’t there to bury anyone, they’re there to get paid. Why would anyone pay them, if not for the particular service they perform?
March 10th, 2009 at 10:40 am
Women are innately inferior?
In point of fact, no. Performing one’s innate inferiority is colluding in the telling of a particular sort of lie about oneself.
March 10th, 2009 at 10:51 am
The rest of your response, while interesting in its own right, doesn’t really connect with what I’m saying, since I’m not saying (in the first instance) that male dominance is a natural phenomenon (although I am saying that one of the ways mammals signal submission to other mammals is by performing sexual servility – male apes to other male apes, for example). My basic premise is that sex work, irrespective of the gender of the performer, redresses in fantasy the failure of the purchaser to live up in reality to a certain masculine ideal. It shores up and validates that ideal, even if the reality of the work also provides a vantage point for debunking it.
March 10th, 2009 at 11:07 am
My animus, in other words, is not against women and the choices they make (although I question some of the rationalisations people employ), but against the ideology of male dominance and the choices it generates.
March 10th, 2009 at 11:46 am
I do assume that the ideology of male dominance is real (not true) and pervasive (not ubiquitous), and that it produces or co-ordinates real practical consequences. In particular, I regard it as the prime mover in the generation of sex work as a form of employment: without the demands that it issues, there would be no supply, no economic motive, and no reason for anyone to make a sexual exhibition of themselves except for the hell of it (which I acknowledge as a possible alternative motive).
March 10th, 2009 at 3:17 pm
You still haven’t explained what makes any sexual performance on the part of a female for money a debasement of that woman but not that man. I don’t see how this isn’t just the same old double standard with a contemporary twist.
Apes “submit” to one another sexually, but the “servility” part is your own invention, not a scientific term, and it has nothing to do with ape sexuality as far as anybody knows, as apes do not conceptualize “servility” just “submission” to sex or none…
The problem of females doing sex work was around long before there were any “sex positive” feminists. It is the oldest profession, after all, and based on the most basic unit of capitalism, a body commodity. Men give their bodies to contracting jobs that ruin their joints and vertebrae and send them into permanent disability all of the time. I doubt they like filling potholes in 90 degree weather in the summer with their bodies, but they do it, because it’s the best possible choice for them financially at a given moment.
But you say “Performing one’s innate inferiority is colluding in the telling of a particular sort of lie about oneself.”
By this logic, a slave who continued working on a cotton field was colluding in the telling of a particular sort of lie about himself, i.e., that he was innately inferior to whites.
The fact that women find themselves already stuck in a sexual economy that has devalued their very sexual subjectivity to the point where it doesn’t even exist except as a subordinate to male sexual empowerment does NOT make women complicit in this terrible and unfortunate situation. It just makes them a slave to it, like we all are.
March 10th, 2009 at 3:20 pm
“That’s a little like saying that undertakers aren’t there to bury anyone, they’re there to get paid. Why would anyone pay them, if not for the particular service they perform?”
If some total loser really thinks that paying for sex in some sleazy back alley makes him “powerful”, that’s his stupidity’s fault, not the stripper’s.
March 10th, 2009 at 3:27 pm
It would be a double standard, surely, if I thought that taking one’s clothes off for cash was infra dig for bourgeois males but somehow not so for poor women.
But the point in any case is not that sexual exhibition is an intrinsically demeaning procedure, but that part of the point of that particular transaction between those two particular actors – buyer and seller – is that the seller should be demeaned by it in the eyes of the buyer. That’s what he’s buying.
Performing inferiority is more than just being in a subservient position. It’s acting out subservience: acting dumb, acting available, acting helpless. In the very worst circumstances, this act is necessary for survival, because any behaviour that visibly contradicts the notion that one is inferior is taken as a challenge. You see it in all-male hierarchies too, from public schools to prisons. Collusion is part of how domination operates.
March 10th, 2009 at 3:28 pm
Personally I would not wish to appear to anyone as the buyer must appear in the eyes of the seller, but that’s a different story.
March 10th, 2009 at 3:31 pm
If some total loser really thinks that paying for sex in some sleazy back alley makes him “powerful”, that’s his stupidity’s fault, not the stripper’s.
His stupidity is nevertheless the reason why both he and the stripper are there.
March 10th, 2009 at 4:13 pm
It doesn’t matter what x person thinks, if a woman is actually in full ownership of her own body and able to have sexual feelings of her own that are not merely a function of her relationship to x other person. This is the problem. People afford men this full privilege, the capacity for non-relational sexual feelings that are valid, but not women.
I’m also going to go out on a limb here and guess that you’ve never actually been at the receiving end of sexual services.
Because there’s no “acting dumb” or helpless. There’s very little interpersonal interaction between staff and customer. You get on the pole, you dance, you get money as “tips” thrown at you. As a hooker, you have sex with the guy only after he gives your pimp the money. The less talking the better, unless there’s some sort of fantasy role play involved. Nobody knows the performer’s name or anything about him/her. This is what men are paying for: anonymous, consequence-free sex with a totally blank or “empty” psychological canvas. Hookers will usually pretend to like the sex, and this might entail talking, but strippers certainly don’t talk. If they did, that would most likely kill the fantasy.
It’s more austere an arrangement than I think the fantasy-or the media- suggests.
March 10th, 2009 at 4:57 pm
if a woman is actually in full ownership of her own body and able to have sexual feelings of her own that are not merely a function of her relationship to x other person.
You seem to think that this isn’t acknowledged, and that it changes something. I do acknowledge it, and I don’t see what it changes. At most, it affects what it feels like to be her. It doesn’t change what she is doing, or why someone is paying her to do it.
March 10th, 2009 at 4:59 pm
Also, of course, I’d rather hack my nuts off with a plastic ruler than purchase sex. Fuck that shit to hell and back.
March 10th, 2009 at 5:10 pm
How many lap-dancing clubs and brothels do women’s ownership of their own bodies and enjoyment of autonomous sexual feelings cause to be built? How much money do they make for the owners of those establishments? How many soft-porn magazines for men are published because of them? How do the images in the magazines reflect or express the autonomous sexual feelings and self-ownership of the women they are images of?
March 11th, 2009 at 12:34 am
No, you don’t acknowledge that women are autonomous, because you do not leave any room for women who engage in sex-for-profit because they prefer sexual performance over other types of labor. In your analysis, female sex workers are ialways already bad, wrong, abased, damaged, etc.
March 11th, 2009 at 12:39 am
“How many lap-dancing clubs and brothels do women’s ownership of their own bodies and enjoyment of autonomous sexual feelings cause to be built?”
I would say that porn has helped many women (and men) get past repression and shame about their sexuality. I don’t personally like it, but hey, that doesn’t mean it’s morally wrong.
“How many soft-porn magazines for men are published because of them? How do the images in the magazines reflect or express the autonomous sexual feelings and self-ownership of the women they are images of?”
I don’t think there’s a direct relationship between real-life sex work and availability of print porn, although I’m sure some companies have their hands in the industry all over the place. Believe it or not, some women do not feel debased, or used, or upset at all by the thought of other people seeing their naked bodies and enjoying this.
Some people think it’s the most natural thing in the world for people to enjoy looking at each other’s naked bodies. (Other species do it, all the time.) Why wouldn’t this be something commodifiable? Why shouldn’t it be? I’m assuming you think this is morally wrong outright, because I can’t think of any other reason why consenting adults shouldn’t be able to practice their sexuality how ever they please, as long as they’re not violating/hurting anybody.
March 11th, 2009 at 7:49 am
No, you don’t acknowledge that women are autonomous, because you do not leave any room for women who engage in sex-for-profit because they prefer sexual performance over other types of labor
I’m not interested in their motives and preferences. I don’t claim to know what their motives and preferences are. I don’t think their motives and preferences have any bearing on what is being sold, to whom, or for what purpose.
The very notion that sex work as “consenting adults practicing their sexuality however they please” is just total ideological mystification. One person is paying to get what they want. The other is being paid to supply it; what they want is structurally irrelevant.
March 11th, 2009 at 8:42 am
Also, of course, I’d rather hack my nuts off with a plastic ruler than purchase sex.
You lucky bitch you always get to me with that gentle upper class top act !
March 12th, 2009 at 8:36 pm
So what women feel, experience, want, need, and do is irrelevant to reality and our social relations?
Yup, that’s exactly what I thought you were saying. It makes no sense. You are privileging the male perspective over the female one, as if it is the only inroads to human experience and psychosexual power dynamics. Absurdity to the max.
Please, do, tell me what’s right for me. I assume it entails sitting around waiting for prince charming to save me. But then, how could he, he’s my oppressor?
I guess I should really just be at home “honing” my “sexual intelligence” by not sleeping with anyone, ever, or having any sexual encounters. That’s the only path toward True Love ™.