King Kong Theory
Page 5
It's talking about it that is difficult. What it implies in people's minds, people I will have to face up to afterwards. The condescension, the scorn, the liberties, the uncalled-for conclusions.
When I moved to Paris, working as a hooker became much more complicated. Lots more girls, lots more white girls, from Eastern Europe, very pretty, and lots more dangerous clients. The minitel servers were more heavily policed, and it was hard to be as selective as before. I didn't know the neighborhoods I had to visit. And when I tried to move into massage or stripping, to protect myself, the percentages were pathetic, the rooms tiny, and the supply always greater than the demand, making for a shit atmosphere among the girls. And I was no longer single, so the lies began, and the feeling of bringing my filth back home. Loss of balance.
It's hard to stop. To return to normal work, normal pay, with normal treatment, as an employee. Getting up in the morning, having to spend all your time working. In any case, I tried everywhere but couldn't find a single j ob. It wasn't until I met someone who knew someone at Virgin Music that I managed to become a salesperson there for a few months. Working for the minimum wage was now a luxury-the market was tougher, and I'd become older in the meantime, and there were awkward gaps in my CV. My reintegration wasn't exactly self-evident. The only stable work I could find consisted of reviewing porno films for a soft-core publishing house. It didn't pay Paris rents. I looked after kids, at least I wasn't bored doing that, but it didn't pay enough to get by in a capital city either. There is a valid comparison between hard drugs and being a prostitute. It starts out great: feelings of having easy power (over men, over money), strong emotions, the discovery of a more interesting self, released from doubt. But it's a deceptive high-the side effects are painful, you carry on hoping, just as with junk, that you'll get back the initial rush. The complications when you try to give it up are comparable too. You give in once as a one-off, and then the next week, at the first problem, you go back to it one last time. And when you start to realize that you're losing more peace of mind than you're gaining, you do it again in spite of everything. What had been a brilliant strength, within your control, overflows its frame and becomes threatening. And what becomes appealing is the very idea of pulling the plug.
I stopped and started like that for a while, and then I became Virginie Despentes. The promotional part of my job as a celebrity author has always struck me as very similar to the act of prostitution. Except that when you say "I'm a whore," all the do-gooders flock to your side, whereas when you say "I'm on TV," all those envious turn against you. But the feeling of no longer quite belonging to yourself, of selling something intimate, of displaying that which is private, is exactly the same.
I still don't make a cut-and-dried distinction between prostitution and legal, waged work, between prostitution and female seduction, between paid sex and exchanged sex, between what I lived then and what I saw in the years that followed. What women do with their bodies as long as they're around men with power and money actually seems to me very near to prostitution. I still don't catch the subtle difference between the sort of femininity sold in magazines and that of the whore. And although they may not state their price openly, I'm under the impression of having met a lot of whores since then. Lots of women who aren't interested in sex but know how to draw profit from it. Women who sleep with men who are old, ugly, boring, or depressingly stupid, but socially powerful. Women who marry them and fight to gain as much money as they can when they divorce. Who think it's normal to have their bills paid, to be taken on vacation, to be spoiled. Who even see this as an achievement. I find it sad listening to women talk about love as an implicit financial contract. Expecting men to pay to sleep with them. It seems as sordid for these women, who give up all independence (at least once a whore has satisfied her client, she can do whatever she wants in peace), as for the men, whose sexuality is permitted only when they have the means to pay up. Because I'm middle class, there are some things I find hard to swallow, and I'm always lacking in subtlety. However, if I had to give advice to a kid I'd tell her to do things upfront and to hold on to her independence if she wants to make the most of her attractions, rather than get herself shacked up, married, knocked up, and stuck with some guy she wouldn't put up with if he didn't take her on vacation.
Men are happy to believe that what women love best is to seduce and unsettle them. This is pure homosexual projection-if they were female, what they would really find super- cool would be the power to turn on other men. OK, so it is nice to make them lose their grip with just a bit of cleavage and red lips. You can also enjoy entertaining kids by wearing a Mickey Mouse costume, but you can enjoy other things. For example, you might not want to work for Disney. Seduction is within the reach of most young women, as long as they agree to play the game, because it mostly consists of reassuring men about their virility by playing the femininity game. Making a personal profit from it demands certain skills, rare qualities. We don't all come from the upper classes, we have not all been taught how to get as much money as we can from a man. And there again, some of us prefer money we have directly earned. Contrary to a belief commonly held among men, not all women have the soul of a courtesan. Some, for example, have a taste for overt power, power of the kind that allows you to succeed without having to simper at three old men in the hope that they will take you on as this, or entrust you with that. Power that allows you to be unpleasant, curt, demanding. No more vulgar when practiced by a woman than by a man. Because of our gender, we are supposed to give up this kind of pleasure. Which is a lot to ask. You don't often meet a Sharon Stone in real life, just plenty of coked-up beauties, totally spaced out in their lovely dresses. Men adore pretty women-courting them, and bragging about it when they get one into bed. But what they actually love best is to watch them fall and pretend to pity them, or even openly delight in their humiliation. The proof is in their coarse jubilation as they witness the aging of those they never conquered, or those who made them suffer. What is quicker and more predictable than the fall of a woman who was once beautiful? Men don't need a lot of patience to get their revenge.
"What is transgressive for women is neither providing services to men nor is it receiving money or goods for sexual service; women's transgression is in explicitly asking for and taking money for sexual services," writes Pheterson.
Like housework and bringing up children, women's sexual services must be done for free. Money is independence. What upsets morality about paid-for sex is not the lack of female pleasure, but that the woman is out of the home and earning her own money. The whore is the "streetwalker," the one who takes over the streets. She works far from the domestic and maternal spheres, far from the family unit. Men have no need to lie to her, nor she to cheat on them, and so she runs the risk of becoming their accomplice. Traditionally men and women are not intended to understand each other, get on well or tell one another the truth. That this is possible is evidently frightening.
Media, documentary articles, and radio reports about prostitution always focus on the most sordid kind: street prostitution exploiting illegal immigrant girls. It has obvious spectacular impact: a spot of medieval barbarism on the fringes of the city certainly makes for arresting images. And it's good to peddle stories of abused women that make all the others feel lucky to have escaped. The women and men who work the streets cannot lie about their work in the same way as those who use the internet do. Reporters will look for the most sordid, and they find it without much difficulty because it is just that kind of prostitution that lacks the resources to remove itself from the public eye. Girls without work permits, without free consent, churning out clients, broken in by rape, numb on crack: portraits of lost girls. The more wretched it is, the stronger the man feels in comparison. The more sordid the images, the more emancipated the public feels itself to be. And then, moving on from these unacceptable images of prostitution worked in slavery conditions, they draw conclusions on paid sex in general. This is about as relevant as exploring work
conditions in the textile industry purely through images of children working in black-market sweatshops. But it doesn't matter, because the important thing is to put across the idea that no woman may profit from her sexual services outside marriage. In no case is she adult enough to decide to make a business of her charms. She necessarily prefers an honest profession. Which is judged honest by the moral authorities. And not degrading. Because for women, sex without love is always degrading.
This particular image of the prostitute that we so love to display-stripped of all her rights, deprived of her independence and her capacity to decide-has several functions. Above all, to show heterosexual men who quite fancy a whore how low they will have to stoop. They too are thus brought back toward marriage, toward the family unit: everyone back home. It's also a way of reminding men that their sexuality is necessarily monstrous, that it creates victims and destroys lives. Because masculine sexuality must remain criminalized, dangerous, antisocial, and threatening. This is not an inherent truth, it's a cultural construction. When whores are prevented from working in decent conditions, women are not the only ones being targeted, men's sexuality is also being controlled. Having a relaxed heterosexual fuck when they feel like it mustn't be too easy or pleasant. Their sexuality must remain a problem. Another double bind: in our cities all images arouse desire, but its consummation must remain problematic, guilt-inducing.
The political strategy of victimizing prostitutes also serves this purpose of branding male desire and confining it in its own squalor. He can pay to come if he wants, but he'll have to rub shoulders with filth, shame, and poverty. The prostitution transaction-"I pay you, you satisfy me"-is the basis of the heterosexual contract. It is hypocritical to pretend, as we do, that this transaction is foreign to our culture. On the contrary, the relationship between the heterosexual male client and the whore is a healthy and explicit contract. Which is why it must be artificially complicated. When the Sarkozy laws banish street prostitutes from within the city walls, forcing them to work in the woods outside city centers (sexuality being literally pushed out of the domain of the visible, the conscious, the lit up), vulnerable to the whims of both cops and clients, it is not a political decision, based on morality. The intention is not merely to conceal this poor section of the population from city-center residents, the richest among us. The government is deciding to use the female body an absolutely essential tool in the political creation of the masculine mystique-to remove from the city raw male desire. If until that time, whores have often chosen to settle in upmarket neighborhoods, it's because that's where the clients are, stopping by for a quick blow job on the way back home.
In her book, Pheterson quotes Freud: "In only very few people of culture are the two strains of tenderness and sensuality duly fused into one; the man almost always feels his sexual activity hampered by his respect for the woman and only develops a full sexual potency when he finds himself in the presence of a lower type of sexual object; and this gain is partly conditioned by the circumstance that his sexual aims include those of perverse sexual components, which he does not like to gratify with a woman he respects."
The mother-whore dichotomy is mapped out in detail on women's bodies like the mapping of Africa through colonial borders-taking absolutely no notice of the actual terrain, only of the interests of the colonizers. It does not follow from a "natural" process but from political will. Women are condemned to be torn between two incompatible options. And men are trapped in a different dichotomy, that which gives them a hard-on must remain a problem. Above all, no reconciliation. Because a peculiar thing about men is that they tend to despise that which they desire, as well as despising themselves for the physical manifestation of that desire. In fundamental discord with themselves, they are ashamed of whatever gives them a hard-on. By banishing street prostitutes, who offer the fastest form of release, society makes problematic male sexual relief.
I remember a sentence from the time I was a hooker. It was repeated several times, by different men, after different kinds of sessions. They said to me, in soft, slightly sad or at least resigned voices, "It's because of guys like me that girls like you do what they do." It was a way of putting me back in my role of the lost girl, probably because I didn't seem to be suffering enough from the job. It's a phrase that also expresses the extent to which the private experience of masculine desire is painful: what I like doing with you necessarily produces unhappiness. Face to face with their guilt. The necessity of feeling shame about one's own pleasure, even if it is satisfied in a noninjurious setting that fulfills both parties equally. Male desire must hurt women, wither them. And as a result render men guilty. This is once again not an inherent construction, but a political one. At present, men do not seem intent on liberating themselves from these chains. Quite the opposite.
I am not trying to argue that in any conditions, and for any woman, this kind of work is innocuous. But with the modern-day economic world being what it is-cold and pitiless warfare-banning the practice of prostitution within an appropriate legal framework is actively preventing the female class from making a decent living and turning a profit from its very stigmatization.
I don't think I would have such positive memories of my years of occasional hustling if I hadn't read the prosex American feminists such as Norma Jane Almodovar, Carole Queen, Scarlot Harlot, or Michelle Tea. It is no accident that none of their books have been translated into French, that Pheterson's The Prostitution Prism is not widely available despite being a major work, or that Claire Carthonnet's J'ai des choses a vous dire is hardly read. The theoretical desert to which France has banished itself is strategic-prostitution must be kept in shame and darkness, in an effort to protect the traditional family unit.
I start working as a hooker in late 9 i, and write BaiseMoi in April 92. I don't think this is a coincidence. There is a real connection between writing and prostitution: freeing oneself, doing what isn't done, delivering up one's intimacy, exposing oneself to widespread judgement, accepting one's exclusion from the group. And, more particularly as a woman, becoming public. Being read by anyone, discussing what is supposed to remain secret, being exposed in the newspapers ... All obviously in contrast to the roles we are conventionally assigned: woman is private, property, half, shadow of man. Becoming a novelist, earning money easily, provoking as much repulsion as fascination: the public shame is comparable to that of the whore. Providing comfort and company to the unwanted, sharing the private lives of strangers, accepting without judgment different kinds of desire. We meet a lot of prostitutes in novels: Boule de suif, Nana, Sofa Semyonovna, Marguerite, Famine ... they are popular characters, antimothers in the religious sense of the word, women without judgement, inclusive, accepting male desire, damned, and liberated. When men dream of being women, they more easily imagine themselves as whores, marginalized and free to move around, than as mothers concerned with household cleanliness. Often, things are exactly the opposite of what we have been told, which is why we are told them so repeatedly and ferociously. The character of the whore is a good example: when you hear that prostitution is an "act of violence against women," we are supposed to forget that it is marriage and other things we put up with that are "acts of violence against women." We cannot ignore the fact that far more women die from domestic violence than from engaging in sex work. Women who are fucked for free must continue to be told that they have made the only possible choice, otherwise how can they be kept under control? Masculine sexuality is not in itself an act of violence against women, as long as they are consenting and well paid. It is the control exercised upon us that is violent-the power to decide on our behalf what is dignified and what is not.
Pornography is like a mirror through which we can take a look at ourselves. And sometimes what we see doesn't look pretty, and it can make us feel very uncomfortable. But how beautiful to take that look, to see (truth), and to learn. The answer to bad porn is not no porn, but to make better porn!
Annie Sprinkle, Hardcore from the Heart, 20
01
ONE CANNOT HELP BUT WONDER WHAT EXACTLY THE PROBlem is with pornography, what it is that gives the world of X-rated films such blasphemous power. Show any number of people a waxed pussy being pounded by a fat cock, and they'll be squeezing their hands under their buttocks to stop themselves from doing the sign of the cross. Some claim wearily that porn's not interesting, but you only need to walk a hundred yards or so in any town center with a porn actress to be persuaded otherwise. Or read the antiporn literature on the internet. Those who take umbrage at the banning of a religious cartoon"How absurd, this isn't the middle ages"-aren't quite so forward-thinking when it comes to a clitoris or a pair of balls. The amazing paradoxes of porn.
Strange claims are circulated, all the more arrogant since unprovable. Pornography is responsible for everything from gang rape to domestic violence to rape in Rwanda and Bosnia. It is even compared to the gas chambers! The only certainty we can deduce from all this is that the filming of sex is not a trivial matter. There is a remarkable volume of articles and books dedicated to the subject. Serious research is less common. We rarely take the trouble to enquire into the reactions of men who use porn. We prefer to guess at what's going on in their heads rather than actually ask.
In his study Watching Sex: How Men Really Respond to Pornography, David Loftus does in fact interview a hundred men about their relationship to porn. They all report having discovered it before the legal age. None of the men in this sample say they found the experience shaming. On the contrary, the discovery of pornographic material was for them associated with pleasant memories, masculinity-forming in many ways; it was either playful or arousing. Two men are exceptions. Both are homosexual, and say that the experience was difficult at the time because they already vaguely knew that they were attracted to other men, but had not yet clearly grasped this. In both cases the sight of the pornographic material forced them to clarify what attracted them.