The Prostitution of Sexuality. Kathleen Barry
60% of unmarried males between the ages of 15 and 19 have had sexual intercourse. Not surprisingly, 1 in 5 girls age 15 to 19 who are sexually active become pregnant.19
The fear of AIDS and the crisis in teenage pregnancy has led to new programs in the mid 1990s that promote sexual abstinence among teenagers. Their approach teaches girls how to resist pressure for sex and “hooking up.” It is similar to drug prevention programs that teach young people how to resist pressure to take drugs. They are taught to turn away from pressures to have sex by asserting their own goals. These initiatives are being promoted especially by the African-American communities and by organizations such as the Urban League. These programs may lead teenagers to increased sexual autonomy and sexual self-determination. But they do not directly confront the harm of early sex to human development. Abstinence or virginity projects are frequently dismissed as moralistic, representative of repressive “family values” promoted under the Bush-Quayle administration. And indeed some of them use the fear of AIDS and the crisis in teenage pregnancy to reinvoke sexual repression. However, programs focused on sexual and personal autonomy through controlling sexual activity until developmentally mature hold the potential of challenging sexual power relations that frequently undermine teenage female development.
While there have been racial differences in frequency of early sexual intercourse, according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, “most of the increase in female sexual activity in the 1980s was among white teenagers and those in higher income families.”20This trend reflects the normalization of early sexual behavior by the bourgeois and upper classes in their exploitation of women and girls, which sets the standards that eventually produce that exploitation among the working classes and the poor. In a 1993 survey of high school seniors in a private girls preparatory school on the East Coast, (with a total of 67 from 108 responding) 40.3% had had sexual intercourse, 92.5% of them having had first intercourse between ages 15 and 17. The pattern of sexual behavior in 1993 for high- and middle-income, mostly white teenage girls in this school follows the pattern that Blumstein and Schwartz found in 1983 among adults. The study found that 63.2% had stimulated a boy to orgasm while 50.7% had been stimulated to orgasm by a boy; 45.6% had performed fellatio on boys while 36.8% had experienced cunnilingus.
Research is beginning to make the connections that feminists established a long time ago. “A substantial proportion of young adolescents who are sexually active are active only because they have been coerced,” according to Bruce Ambuel and Julian Rap-paport who cite research that reports that “although 7% of White and 9% of African-American 14-year-old girls have experienced intercourse, only 2% of White and 6% of African-American 14-year-olds participated voluntarily.”21 This is the sexual socialization into the prostitution of sexuality where coercion becomes a normalized dimension of sexual life. These are the conditions under which coerced sex becomes chosen sex. As a recent study conducted by the American Association of University Women establishes, these are the conditions for producing educational, economic, and political subordination because these are the conditions that diminish achievement far beyond the experience of sex. In the AAUW study, 81% of all students in grades 8-11 say they have experienced unwelcome sexual behavior at school. Seventy-six percent of the girls and 56% of the boys in the study reported receiving sexual comments or looks while 65% of the girls and 42% of the boys were touched, grabbed, or pinched in a sexual way. These figures indicate how sexual development of teenagers initiates female sexual subordination in the early years and cuts off female potential for development. The negative effects of present normative teenage sexual behaviors overwhelmingly impact on girls’ experience of and success in school. Thirty-three percent of girls and 12% of boys subjected to sexualization do not want to go to school, and 32% of girls and 13% of boys do not want to talk in class because of their experiences. Other effects disproportionately impacting girls are that after being sexually harassed many find it hard to pay attention in school and difficult to study. Twenty percent of the girls’ grades have dropped and 17% are thinking about changing schools.22
Every year, Ed Donnellan, a high school teacher, conducts a survey with female students who range in age from 14 to 17.23Donnellan uses this survey for consciousness raising about sexual exploitation. In 1992, of 70 students surveyed, 17% reported that they had been subjected to intercourse against their will. And 57% reported being kissed against their will while 25% indicated that their genitals had been touched against their will. In 1993, 9% had intercourse against their will while 78% had been touched in their thigh or crotch against their will.
Donnellan’s survey produced other responses from students. One 14-year-old told him privately that she had sex with 13 boys in the previous 9 months and “I don’t even like it.” The widespread sexualization of women through pornography and the media has intensified teenage male expectations of sex and female teenagers’ experience of social pressure to be sexually active, believing that they can’t say no.
When I spoke to Donnellan’s class, some students asked what they should do if they find pornography when they are babysitting. I suggested that they call a friend or trusted family member to come over, stay with them and accompany them home, but not to remain alone in the company of a potential sexual exploiter. Some of the girls feared that such protection would appear to be too extreme a response, making them appear weak or uptight, a fear that extends to pressures for sexual relations.
There is little evidence of the effect of early sex on identity development in adolescence. But as coercion is increasingly normalized, the roots of female dependency can be found here. Rather than in some natural or essential design of femaleness, here is where the foundations are for girls’ and women’s difficulty in marking separate identities of their own, the basis for autonomy, independence, and, of course, equality. Here are the contemporary foundations of sexual subordination and gender inequality.
On one hand, those who promote sexual exploitation emphasize women’s choice to prostitute and to engage in pornography. On the other hand, campaigns against sexual violence make women’s consent the primary issue. Both approaches separate the sexual power of male domination from the system of patriarchal oppression by which men as a class subordinate women and thus reduce them to a sex class. Consent—either its willed assurance or its denial—does not determine, identify, or cause oppression. When violence is separated from oppression, violation of consent must be established in order to establish a woman’s victimization. Such legalistic construction of victimization, which fails to recognize patriarchal political oppression, incessantly places women and girls in the position of claiming sexual violation from an increasingly passive, non-interactive role—as beings acted upon by brute force and therefore violated. Yet subjection to that kind of force is part of a continuum of sexual exploition and oppression, and it is not necessarily the most frequently occurring element. Consent to violation is a fact of oppression. Any oppression. All oppression.
Sex as Labor?
The prostitution exchange is the most systematic institutionalized reduction of woman to sex. It is the foundation of all sexual exploitation of women. It is the prototype, the model from which all other sexual exploitation can be understood. Put another way, if this practice is not recognized as sexual exploitation and as a model for the sexual subordination of women, then all other forms of sexual exploitation will be ineffectively addressed, many going fully unrecognized as sexual exploitation.
In the normalization of the prostitution of sexuality, it is not surprising to find that prostitution is increasingly considered to be merely another form of labor. Considering prostitution as merely another form of labor raises the question, what kind of labor? Slave labor or exploited labor of feudalism or class exploitation of capitalism?
Slave labor is condemned universally because it deprives human beings of freedom and of the gains from their labor, and child labor is considered to be work that not only denies freedom but is developmentally premature. If, for example, consent was the criterion for determining whether or not slavery is a violation