The Continuing Saga of Scarlot Harlot X
Carol Leigh
Roaches and Ruminations
. . . I live in a posh, modern apartment with rustic wood paneling, a push-button fireplace and a panoramic view stretching from San Francisco to San Mateo. The gall to defy taboo, a series of risks and an inclination towards sexual experimentation have provided me with this aesthetic environment where I entertain clients, poke at my typewriter and recline on my queen-size bed, pondering.
The comfort and luxury of my solitary brothel is in sharp contrast to the fear which haunts me. Often I dwell upon my worst fears. Uncontrollable paranoia grips me as I gaze into the starry night. Men who hate prostitutes will rape and kill me. The Moral Majority will conspire with the Mafia against me. I will be arrested for everything. No man will ever really love and accept me. My whole family will find out and confront me with their disapproval. Prostitution is not okay. I am deluding myself and I will go crazy avoiding that revelation.
Food! I need food. I will become obese. I need to eat. I lift my head from velvet pillows, rolling off the queen size blue satin and head for my kitchen. Tomorrow I will go on a diet. I flick on the fluorescents.
There they are. A tiny tribe of enemies, scampering across my private moment. The truth, the truth and a irritating lack of perfection. And I pay so much rent. But I will never be safe.
I confess, I am to blame. I don’t use Raid. I don’t squash them. There are no vacancies in my Roach Motels — in fact, they’ve become symbols. There is no solution.
This whole issue reminds me of something. Birth control. Did you know that there is no good form of birth control? Foams and jellies are poison. I.U.D.s puncture the womb. Birth control pills are a crime against women. All that’s left is rhythm and prophylactics. The rubbers bust and my cycles are obtuse.
Never mind, I’m just making excuses. I should go out and buy some boric acid. That works fine. I confess, I just practice avoidance, telling myself the roaches don’t really multiply that fast. They’ll die of old age, so I’ll never have to fight. But I know the truth. I’ll make a list. I’ll go to the store. I’ll use rubbers and rhythm and Roachproof...
I guess paralysis is a common affliction. I guess most people wrestle with apathy, pessimism, and confusion, not just prostitutes. So why should I be ashamed?
I’m not ashamed. I’m proud. I’m proud that . I’m not ashamed.
I have only one thing left to say. I’m a prostitute and if you don’t like it, you’re stupid. .
PART II: FEMINISM AND THE WHORE STIGMA
Prostitution: Still a Difficult Issue for Feminists
Priscilla Alexander
A decade after the first edition of this book was published, prostitution continues to be a difficult issue for feminists, for reasons that are distinct from those of others who resist a change in its status, but nonetheless reasons easy to exploit by advocates who have more power than feminists. Some feminists reject what they consider to be the exploitation of women’s sexuality by profiteers; they’re uncomfortable with prostitution, which they see as an objectification of women and their sexuality that is somehow related to the pervasive violence against women. These are the two main points that have been exploited by feminist abolitionists (supporters of the abolition of prostitution), and often by right-wing activists, judges, and legislators who have co-opted feminist discourses about subordination of and violence against women in discussions of pornography and traffic in women.
However, another factor continues to be individual women’s understanding of their place on the continuum of whore to madonna. Abolitionists such as Catharine Mackinnon, Andrea Dworkin, and Kathleen Barry seek to eliminate, and thereby disentangle themselves from, the model of the whore, equating the label and the institution with violence, while feminist sex workers’ rights advocates seek to reclaim and destigmatize the name (and the work itself). Because of this stigma, which keeps many women from freely exploring, experiencing, and naming their own sexuality lest they be called whore, many critics isolate prostitution from other situations in which women are objectified or their labor exploited, and assume both that any problems associated with prostitution are unique and that the existence of prostitution is the root cause of patriarchal and capitalist objectification, economic exploitation, and violence against all women (Overall, 1992).
From a sex workers’ rights point of view, it is the laws against prostitution and the stigma imposed on sex work that provoke and permit violence against prostitutes, and ensure poor working conditions and the inability of many sex workers to move on to other kinds of work without lying about their experience. Few women reach puberty without being aware of prostitution. Many have at some point thought about turning a trick to pay bills or to get out of serious debt, although for most it is only a fleeting thought. Some have prostitution fantasies in which they equate sexual pleasure with depravity and “badness,” on the one hand, or with power on the other. Some equate prostitution in general with negative feelings about their own sexual encounters with men— particularly if they experience heterosexuality as a context in which men are interested in quick, rather anonymous, casual sexual encounters, while women are interested in more long-term, caring, sexual relationships. Of course, like all generalizations, this one is too simple to be accurate. It is more accurate to say that the message beamed at young girls by parents, advice columnists, teachers, clergy, and others continues to be that they should protect their virginity, and save their sexuality for marriage, or at least for a significant relationship. Although the percentage of adolescent girls who are sexually active increases every year, so that being sexual has become the norm rather than the exception, the behavior is still condemned, often with a mask of pious concern that so many teenagers are having babies. Although adolescent girls who become pregnant are no longer automatically expelled from high school, many schools now channel them into special, inferior programs, outside of the regular curriculum, focusing on parenting rather than academic skills. As a result, many of them still drop out, which effectively ends their education and sentences them to a lifetime of low-level, low-paying jobs, or dependence on the increasingly ephemeral welfare and/or dead-end workfare paid at below the minimum wage. At the same time, many communities continue to resist providing comprehensive sex education in the schools, out of the misperception that sex education increases promiscuity, despite many studies done by the Alan Guttmacher Institute that confirm the opposite. In fact, both abortion and live births among adolescent girls have been declining sharply since 1991, probably due more to discussions of condoms in relation to AIDS than to abstinence classes, since the rates are highest in the southern states where fundamentalism has the tightest grip (Lewin, 1998).
Another factor that interferes with a dispassionate view of sex work is that twenty-five to thirty percent of women report that they were sexually abused by an adult male before they reached the age of eighteen, and as adults women face a one in four risk of being raped (or even one in three, according to some studies) by acquaintances or strangers, not including marital rape which is rarely counted. Compounding this abuse is a persistent blaming of the victim, such as a judge describing a five year old who had been molested by her stepfather as “sexually precocious”; and another describing the rapist of a high school girl who had been wearing dungarees, a turtleneck, and a loose shirt when she was raped, as responding “normally” to provocation. A standard defense to a charge of rape is that the woman was a prostitute, and in 1986 a judge in Pasadena, California dismissed a case because the victim was a prostitute, saying “a whore is a whore is a whore,” and that he was not going to “enforce an illegal contract.” In the same year, a Fresno, California prosecutor dropped twenty-nine of thirty-two charges of forcible sex crimes against a man accused of raping six women, because at least four of them were prostitutes. Indeed, it is extremely difficult for prostitutes to successfully file complaints with police when they are raped. In 1995, when
I did a presentation for the police beginning a workshift in a New York City precinct, I spent a fair amount of time explaining the difference between being raped by a client, and being robbed by a client refusing to pay or demanding his money back. I also explained that while rape might be an occupational risk, that did not lessen its impact or criminal status. At the end of the session, one officer said that when a prostitute said she had been raped, it was only that a client refused to pay, and another said that if she was raped, it was her own fault for being out there (not to mention, again, that she was breaking the law). In a survey of thirty-two street-based prostitutes I conducted in 1996, fourteen said they had reported a crime against them to police. In six cases, the police refused to take a complaint, made fun of the woman, looked up her prior arrest history, and/or arrested her. When I looked at the crimes the women reported, I noticed that in the eight cases where the police were helpful, the women had been beaten, but not sexually assaulted. In almost all of the cases where the police refused to help, the crime was rape, harassment, or robbery. In addition, fourteen women reported having been physically harmed by a police officer during an arrest, including seven who said police had fondled or raped them (Wallace, Alexander, Horn, 1997).
Although laws against adultery and fornication have been repealed in most states, the stigma still remains. Women who are sexually active outside of traditional marriage remain vulnerable to custody fights, and judges were still, as of 1998, granting custody to fathers on those grounds. This is particularly true for lesbians and prostitutes, who judges perceive as being far outside of the norm, but it is also a problem for women who are in long-term, heterosexual, monogamous relationships outside of marriage.
Prostitution itself is shrouded in layer upon layer of mystique. The traditional male-dominated media discourse, which includes classic literature as well as modern television, movies, novels, and magazines, largely created unreal images of the prostitute. On the one hand, outsiders have depicted the “whore with the heart of gold” and the “sex goddess”; on the other hand, they depicted the depraved, degraded prisoner, the sexual slave. Only recently have prostitutes themselves begun to write about their experiences, or to tell their experiences to other writers, in a literature that is much more multidimensional (Millett, 1973; Jaget, 1980; Perkins, 1985; Roberts, 1986; McClintock, 1993; Chapkis, 1997; Nagle, 1997). In addition, some feminists, particularly historians, have begun to write about prostitution in the context of the patriarchal structures that surrounded it while recognizing the agency of the women who worked within those structures (Perry, 1978; Walkowitz, 1980; Goldman, 1981; Rosen, 1982; Wells, 1982; Otis, 1985; Hobson, 1987; Harsin, 1985; Barnhardt, 1986; Hill, 1993; Bernstein, 1995). And since the early 1980s, women have been challenging many old assumptions, and declaring a sexual territory defined by women’s initiative and agency (Snitow, et al., 1983; Vance, 1984; Bright, 1992; Califia, 1994; Tisdale, 1994; McElroy, 1995; Queen, 1997). Nonetheless, active support for sex workers’ rights continues to be difficult for many women and men who define themselves as feminists.
Prevalence of Prostitution
For a long period in history, women had only a small number of options for economic survival, including getting married, becoming a nun (earlier a priestess), or becoming a prostitute. The invention of the spinning wheel, around the thirteenth century, enabled a woman working alone to produce enough thread to support herself as a spinster, but even when there have been economic options, something akin to prostitution has existed in every society for which there are written records (Bullough, 1987; Tannahill, 1980; Murphy, 1983; Otis, 1985; Lerner, 1986; Roberts, 1992).
The prevalence of prostitution has tended to increase in times of social and economic change, including changes in women’s roles. In medieval France, for example, small towns grew into cities as farmers became merchants in the transition from feudalism to capitalism, and the number of prostitutes increased and the forms of prostitution changed. Thus in thirteenth century France, prostitution was usually a cottage industry in small towns, with a few women working independently or in small groups. In the fourteenth century, as the towns grew larger, authorities confined prostitutes to certain streets, sometimes inside the city wall, sometimes outside its protections. In the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, prostitutes were required to work in brothels, and then the brothels were “municipalized,” with the city “farming” out their management. With each step, the control of prostitution passed increasingly into men’s hands. Although prostitution was usually a stigmatized profession, it was rarely prohibited outright. During the Protestant Reformation, however, increasing pressure was put on the women to repent, and some cities did outlaw prostitution (Otis, 1985).
The Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth century was accompanied by another marked increase in prostitution. This was due again to the substantial migration of women from rural, agricultural communities to urban, industrializing cities. When they could not obtain factory jobs, or subsist on low factory wages, some turned to prostitution. The women who left home to work in factories were considered intrinsically immoral and were subject to intense sexual harassment on the job. Once they were stigmatized for leaving home, barriers to involvement in prostitution declined (Madeleine, 1919/1986; Longstreet, 1970; Rosen and Davidson, 1977). A similar pattern can be seen in today’s industrializing nations in Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia, as impoverished young women migrate to cities to earn money to sustain their families’ farms. Indeed, in some rural towns in Thailand, the primary source of income is the monthly postal money orders the daughters send back home. The largest amounts are sent by women who have migrated to work in the sex industry (Phongpaichit, 1982; Truong, 1990; Bond, et al., 1996; Bishop & Robinson, 1998).
The status of female prostitutes has often been inversely related to women’s general status: the more that women, as a class, have been confined and treated as chattel, the freer prostitutes have been to work without official harassment. As other women have achieved increasing independence, however, prostitutes have been more restricted and condemned, often confined to segregated districts, denied freedom to walk on the street, even when not working, or required to wear special clothing (Otis, 1985; Richards, 1990). In a similar vein, when there were few women in a community, as on the American frontiers and in mining towns, prostitutes had high status and could move freely in the community (Barnhardt, 1986; Brown, 1958; Jeffrey, 1979). The same was true during the colonial years in many countries, where governments saw the need to permit prostitutes to congregate near local male work sites, such as railroad construction sites, or other places accessible to lonely, male representatives of the far distant colonial power, who had been discouraged from bringing their wives or marrying locally. For example, in Nairobi, women migrating from rural areas were able to establish stable households, and accumulate real estate, by providing reproductive labor (i.e., food, a place to sleep, and sexual services) to migrant male laborers, and British colonial authorities in India established and/or tolerated brothels to serve British men (White, 1986, 1990; Levine, 1994).
A few countries, including Cuba, the old Soviet Union, and China, have undertaken large-scale projects to “rehabilitate” prostitutes, hoping to thereby eliminate prostitution, but some women in those countries continued to work as prostitutes after the revolution, especially in the large urban centers, and following increases in tourism from other countries. Indeed, many countries rely on prostitution to provide foreign currency necessary for trade with the technological west. A particular case in point was Thailand, which deliberately encouraged sex tourism as an integral part of the economic development that led to westerners describing Thailand as an “economic miracle.” In the early nineties, while I was living in Geneva, Switzerland, the International Herald Tribune carried a four-page color advertisement from the Thai Ministry of Tourism. On the front cover was a full-page, color photograph of two young children, a boy and a girl, dressed in white clothes
that could easily be read by Westerners as night clothes, standing in a doorway with a split door, the top of which was open. Inside were several references to areas in Thailand famous for prostitution (e.g., Phuket), and pictures of Western men accompanied by Thai women. Perhaps in response to the pressure from anti-sex tourism groups, the following year’s advertisement had only vague references to “nightlife,” etc., and the picture of the children had shrunk to fit in a single column, in black and white. The next year, there were no references, even veiled, to prostitution. It was approximately two years after that that the first rumors of economic trouble in Thailand began to surface, blowing up into full-scale collapse by 1997.
Why Prostitution?
Prostitution exists, at least in part, because of the power and status differentials between men and women in most societies. This imbalance is reflected in the double standards of sexual behavior and economic power for men and women, with men institutionally having more access to and control of money than women. In virtually all countries, men earn more for the same or equivalent work than do women (with the notable exception of prostitutes), and while women now earn more than the sixty-seven cents on the male dollar they were earning in the United States eleven years ago, a significant discrepancy continues. In times of economic crisis, such as recessions and depressions, unemployment is generally higher among women—who are often the last to be hired and the first to be fired—than men.
The specific reasons that prostitutes have given for deciding to engage in sex work have included money, excitement, independence, and flexibility, in roughly that order. Indeed, first person accounts by women in the sex industry often mention economics, and sometimes rebellion against the restricted roles and tedious jobs available to them (Jaget, 1980; Leigh, this book; Perkins, 1985; Roberts, 1986). The mainstream literature about prostitution often cites a history of childhood sexual abuse as the deciding factor in women’s prostitution (James 1977; Silbert, 1979; Rush, 1980; Sanford, 1980). However, in one recent review of literature concerning prostitutes in Western countries, a Dutch researcher found the prevalence of childhood physical and/or sexual abuse in the life histories of prostitutes to range from twenty-nine percent, which is consistent with studies of women generally, to seventy-three percent (Vanwesenbeeck, 1994). The prevalence of childhood abuse appears to vary according to the age of the prostitutes interviewed and/or the sites where they work. That is, adolescent prostitutes, many of whom ran away from abusive families or foster care, and adult prostitutes who began working a adolescents, are much more likely to report a history of physical or sexual abuse than women who began to work as adults. In terms of worksite, the abuse history is more common among street-based workers than among brothel, parlor, escort, and independent out-call workers. This is largely a marker for age, however, as most adolescent prostitutes work on the street, and many street prostitutes began working before the age of eighteen. A traditional psychoanalytic interpretation of the relationship between childhood sexual abuse and later involvement in prostitution has been that the child came to view sex as a commodity through the abuse, which often included some sort of economic reward for compliance, and became masochistic. The connection many sex workers report, however, is that involvement in prostitution was a way of taking back control of a situation in which, as children, they had none. Indeed, a number of women have told me that the first time they ever felt powerful was the first time they turned a trick (Millett, 1973; Jaget, 1980; Perkins, 1985; Maccowan, 1997). As painful as these statistics are, it is important to remember that many women with no history of sexual assault become prostitutes (and many survivors of childhood sexual abuse never work as prostitutes), so the relationship between prostitution and early sexual trauma is far from clear.
Sex Work Page 20