The Prostitution of Sexuality. Kathleen Barry
sex: prostitution. Again, the power relations of racism and Western hegemony that close down economic alternatives for women of color invoke prostitution as a normative condition for women in poverty.
Power is gain; it produces advantage and superior status by and for the dominating class through the subordination of the “other.” Because sexual exploitation actively harms women, the gain that men derive from it does not merely advance men. Sexual exploitation also forces women backward, regresses women into the harms it conveys, thereby thwarting women’s ability to achieve, to move forward, to grow and to develop.
Feminist Political Consciousness vs. Ideology
Over the last decade, as I have listened to women’s responses to my first book, Female Sexual Slavery, I have heard from some women that they found the book “too painful to read” or “depressing,” while others were “empowered” by it because their experiences had been revealed as exploitation and slavery, or simply because domination had been named and explored.
Yet another reaction has been to classify this work as “victim feminism,” or “male bashing.” In the United States this is more than backlash. This highly vocal, media-hyped assault on feminism as a liberation movement is aligned with conservatives and liberals, who both attack feminism for “political correctness” (p.a). They silence social protest and political consciousness not only of sexism but racism, homophobia, and the environment by denying women’s oppression. Anti-feminism in the form of women’s defense of men is not new to the women’s movement. But the alignment with right-wing anti-“political correctness” forces is new. Katie Roiphe typifies a dangerous women’s movement collusion with both the right and the liberals against what they call the political correctness of feminism. With no data of her own, citing flawed critiques as her sources, Roiphe has challenged the existence of date rape and Mary Koss’s date rape statistics that reveal that 1 in 4 women will be raped in college. Roiphe, raising a women’s movement defense, is concerned that women are being seen only as victims, or “that men are lascivious, women are innocent.”35 Roiphe questions women’s agency when rape takes place after a woman has been drinking or has taken drugs, as if the society is not gendered, is not patriarchal, and has no relationship to individual behavior.
Since the emergence of the U.S. women’s movement in the late 1960s, the political left has consistently tried to delegitimize feminism on the same terms that, today, Wendy Kaminer defended Roiphe in the New York Times: “protesting their sexual victimization enables privileged, heterosexual white women to claim their share of the high moral ground ceded to victims of racism, classism and homophobia.”36 Kaminer’s support for Roiphe suggests the origins of the anti-feminist women’s movement in the left. Right-wing accusations of political correctness build from the left wing’s 25-year campaign to delegitimize independent feminism, denouncing it as privileged or bourgeois. Yet until now, until it became politically incorrect to indicate one has been raped, or that men oppress women, it had been impossible for the left wing to invalidate the women’s movement, precisely because the movements against sexual exploitation raised feminism beyond only issues of economic class.
Roiphe is representative of some women who have come to the movement in a general apolitical climate and who have learned about women’s issues from books, the media, lectures, and through women’s studies. By and large, women’s studies, having dissociated itself from feminist activism, is an increasingly apolitical study of women. Where feminism originated in the 1960s in consciousness raising that raised the personal to the political, many women replace feminist consciousness and political liberation with personal choice (the real p.c). The movement, increasingly emptied of political consciousness, approaches issues in terms of personal choice, an inheritance from the earlier “me” generation that is almost a perfect fit with the ideology of American individualism. It treats issues as if they exist outside of, apart from, and indeed irrelevant to any social conditions and power arrangements in the immediate or distant environment, that is, anything that exists outside of their own conjuring.
In the 1990s we risk repeating history. By the 1890s the women’s movement that had originated in the 1850s was emptied of political consciousness. The movement was rapidly reduced to apolitical reform that blindly supported prevailing national ideologies, ideologies which aside from the narrowed concept of women’s rights then, were exploiting the rest of the world. That generation brought feminism to an end. It invoked the silencing of confrontation against sexism for over 60 years until the 1960s.
By the mid 1990s, it appears that the women’s movement is going in the same directions, which intensifies the isolation of feminists whose commitments to women’s liberation is framed from hard-won, difficultly achieved consciousness. And what is at the root of the reactionary positioning of the women’s movement? Their term “male bashing” is more than accusatory; it is representational. First, it represents collusion between women who identify themselves as feminists and the most reactionary forces of the right wing, particularly Rush Limbaugh, who originated this term. Now, in a reactionary alignment between right-wing agitators and sexual liberals, some women are identifying their feminism as that which will protect men, racists, heterosexists, and polluters from being “bashed.” The strategy is not direct nor is it straightforward. As sexual relations of power have surfaced through consciousness and in activism with other movements, presumably some men, some whites, some heterosexuals, some environmental polluters have become uncomfortable as their groups and some specific members are increasingly identified as perpetrators of injustices and exploitation. Rather than confronting sexual power, these women turn on women who are exposing oppression and confronting injustice and charge that we are reducing women to victims, a concept that could only create attention in the absence of political consciousness as consciousness recognizes victimization as other than passive. As Janice Raymond has put it,
Once upon a time, in the beginnings of this wave of feminism, there was a feminist consensus that women’s choices were constructed, burdened, framed, impaired, constrained, limited, coerced, shaped by patriarchy. No one proposed that this mean women’s choices were determined, or that women were passive or helpless victims of patriarchy. That was because many women believed in the power of feminism to change women’s lives, and obviously, women could not change if they were socially determined in their roles or pliant putty in the hands of patriarchs.37
We are faced with a movement that is not only not remembering that history but is increasingly driven by women who were not there when consciousness ignited, and for the first time in decades of deadening silence, women created new possibilities for themselves which were possibilities for their class. The critiques of power relations that characterized the feminist movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s have been replaced by the apolitical emphasis on the personal choice of hopelessly mired individualism. This is the sexual liberalism that Sheila Jeffreys defined as “a set of political beliefs and practices rooted in the assumption that sexual expression is inherently liberating and must be permitted to flourish unchecked, even when it entails the exploitation or brutalization of others.”38 It is now evident that neither “sexual liberalism” nor “backlash” are adequate terms to identify the nonconscious ideology of personal choice as it is interlinked with the agendas of the right wing as well as liberals.
Under these conditions, the women’s movement is increasingly compelled to prove extreme force in order to charge rape, and to ignore how the sexual relations of power seep into daily life, shaping particularly male-female interaction in the society. Being laden with the burden of proving extreme force is a reversion to where we were in 1970 when we first launched the movement against rape in the United States. This is how the women’s movement against sexual violence is placed on the defensive as it has been since the beginning of the Reagan administration’s threatened cutback of social services and its censorship of social protest. Many rape crisis centers and wife abuse shelters began to limit their services or restrict the kinds of cases they took. Trying to look more like social service agencies, they