The Prostitution of Sexuality. Kathleen Barry
new avenues for addressing women’s human rights. In 1986 I had been a rapporteur in a UNESCO meeting of experts on prostitution held in Madrid. In that meeting it was clear to me that present U.N. conventions could no longer address the problems of sexual exploitation. I remember telling Wassyla Tamzali in the Division of Human Rights and Peace Rights at UNESCO that that five-day meeting was the first time since I wrote Female Sexual Slavery that I had been challenged into new analysis of this issue. Seven years was a long time to wait. Those new ideas led to a collaboration with UNESCO in a meeting I held at Penn State in the spring of 1991, which has led to the development of a new model for an international human rights law, the Convention Against Sexual Exploitation. Such momentum internationally and with feminists in the United States in 1992 formed the basis of a Plan of Action for networking on the part of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women and UNESCO. The plan as Wassyla Tamzali and I developed it called for joint action to create an international network to confront sexual exploitation, especially in prostitution as a violation of women’s human rights. The work and support of Twiss Butler and Marie Jose Regab, of the National Organization for Women has provided encouragement and networking.
Despite the overwhelming prostitution of women’s sexuality, the unbridled trafficking in women worldwide, and the sex-industry-supported proprostitution lobby, I have seen many important changes since the mid 1970s when I was researching and writing Female Sexual Slavery. Back then, prostitution and traffic in women were as disconnected from the women’s movement as they were silenced. In Europe Denise Pouillon Falco, Renée Bridel, Suzanne Képés, and Anima Basak sustained long-standing movements and actions on this issue when it was silenced elsewhere. They provided hope, support, and friendship. But in research, prostitution, treated as a form of female deviance and an area of criminology, was considered inevitable but controllable. Traffic in women had been made invisible after the campaigns of Josephine Butler in the nineteenth century. But in 1986 sitting in a conference organized by Cookie Teer in North Carolina when Evelina Giobbe described her new organization WHISPER, with tears in my eyes, I realized that it had all been worth it.
In the beginning of our women’s movement, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, in thirst of our history and in search of our theories, we voraciously read of our feminist past. We were struck by the most glaring political mistake of our foremothers—an error not at all evident to them during the first wave of feminism. After more than 20 years of radical feminist struggle against the widest and deepest range of exploitations and violations against women, that first wave of the U.S. women’s movement made the tactical error of focusing primarily on one issue above all others—suffrage. The reasoning was sound, the practicality clear: that without political power women would not be able to gain for themselves their other demands.
But that strategic shift, from radical feminist confrontation against oppression to single-issue movements emphasizing legalistic reform, was the beginning of the end. By the time women achieved their goal of suffrage, the women’s movement had died. It would take at least another 70 years for women to use their vote for women.
Twenty-five years ago, launching this second wave of the movement, we radical feminists promised ourselves that we would never, ever concede our radical movement by reducing it to a single strategy, that we would never retreat from the interconnections among all issues confronting women. To do so would be to concede our revolution and reduce our struggle to individual personalities and to legal reform. But it has happened.
Not only have issues of sexual exploitation been reduced to a single-issue movement; they have been configured only (or at least primarily) in terms of legal change. But patriarchy will never make itself illegal. Long before new laws are enacted or ever actually protect women, the struggle for them is where and when feminists set new standards. Our struggle must go beyond law and reform to their roots in the experience of female oppression. I consider legal change to be an important aspect of our movement and struggle. That is why since the beginning I have supported and promoted the civil rights antipornography legal proposals, and I have promoted the development of new international law. But law, attractive as it is to a captivated American audience, is only one part of radical change. What ultimately matters is that male behavior change.
In the 1990s we have found that in the United States women’s issues have become so dissociated from each other that there are separate movements for abortion rights under the euphemism of “choice” while at the same time the euphemism “choice” is turned into the rallying call for the promotion of sexual exploitation through pornography and prostitution as fostered by sexual liberals and the proprostitution lobby, who ask, don’t women “choose” prostitution? pornography? (as if this question made an ounce of difference to the customer-, i.e., male-driven market). Meanwhile our movement has become so deconstructed that issues like teenage pregnancy and prochoice, which means girls’ right to abortion, are dissociated from the very conditions that have produced a crisis in teenage pregnancy: sexual exploitation—the wholesale sexualization of society and promotion of early sex through pornography and the legitimization of prostitution.
Feminist programs have suffered with the fragmentation of issues. There has been the reduction of some feminist programs we launched, such as rape-crisis programs initiated in the early 1970s to social-work programs of the 1980s. This has further deconstructed the political commitment of feminism to revolutionary change. And consequent to this, we radical feminists have been isolated, made into targets of the sexual liberals and proprostitution lobby because we insist on confronting sexual exploitation as a condition of oppression.
How did pornography come to be taken up as a feminist action dissociated from other issues—especially prostitution, especially rape, especially sexual harassment? As feminist political action against pornography escalated, it separated into a particular movement of its own. The separation was forced, in large part, by the attacks from sexual liberals. In this near-deadly struggle, radical feminism began to turn more and more exclusively to anti-pornography because we were embattled and fighting to survive, as was true with Susan B. Anthony when she desperately turned to focus on a single issue, suffrage, in the nineteenth century.
The civil rights, anti-pornography ordinance developed by Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon defined pornography as “sexually explicit subordination of women.” This definition was a key to inclusiveness, to widening the girth of the movement, for it refers to a collective female class condition. Oppression. Domination. And so revolutionary struggle has been inherent in this anti-pornography work, even if the movement has lost focus on the fullest, widest range of issues and, most importantly, their interconnections—for it is in their interconnections that we find revealed the complex web of patriarchal domination of women as a class. The history of feminism is a warning to us against turning from one single issue to the next. When we open up a “new” issue, last year’s issue goes to therapy or social work—possibly important but apolitically individualized.
When in the second half of the 1970s I was writing Female Sexual Slavery, I did not consider that I was writing a book on prostitution. Nor, as I’ve already established, was I trying to break open the next “new” feminist issue. My effort then and since has been to integrate the violation of women by prostitution into the feminist struggle and to move it, as one of several connected issues, into the forefront of the feminist agenda. I have approached this struggle by understanding prostitute women not as a group set apart, which is a misogynist construction, but as women whose experience of sexual exploitation is consonant with that of all women’s experience of sexual exploitation.
What I was doing in Female Sexual Slavery was writing about the use of sex/sexuality as power—to dominate—as a condition of oppression. I am concerned with a class condition. My study of sex as power then and now inevitably, continually, unrelentingly returns me to prostitution. I knew then that one cannot mobilize against a class condition of oppression unless one knows its fullest dimensions. Thus my work has been to study and expose sexual power in its most severe, global, institutionalized, and crystallized forms. I reasoned that we could know the parts because we would know the whole. From 1970 I had been involved in initiating radical feminist action against rape, but until I learned of the traffic in women and explored the pimping strategies in prostitution, I did not fully grasp how utterly without value female life is under male domination. Women as expendables.