The Prostitution of Sexuality. Kathleen Barry
in the Western concept of rights. In this way, liberal legal theory does not consider oppression, the condition of class domination which is so pervasive that it actually invokes consent, collusion or some form of cooperation from the oppressed. Prostitution is structured to invoke women’s consent, as is marriage, as is socially constructed sexuality.
In this work I am shifting from the nearly singular standard of consent or force in the determination of violation to its full human, interactive bodied experience, to span the range of oppression from individualized coercion to class domination. In the fullness of human experience, when women are reduced to their bodies, and in the case of sexual exploitation to sexed bodies, they are treated as lesser, as other, and thereby subordinated. This is sexual exploitation and it violates women’s human rights to dignity and equality. Therefore, while pornographic media are the means of sexually saturating society, while rape is paradigmatic of sexual exploitation, prostitution, with or without a woman’s consent, is the institutional, economic, and sexual model for women’s oppression.
To the oppressor, sexual differences and racial differences are visible evidence that all women and people of color, being unlike whites and men, are the “other,” the lesser. That is the significance of reducing woman to sexed body in the sexual saturation of society. It is how she is known, no matter what else she does, or who she is. In “otherness” time is made to stand still for the oppressed. By representing the oppressed as biologically or culturally different, by reducing them by means of their difference to “others,” patriarchal power dismembers women from their history. That is how human beings are deprived of their humanity. The making/doing of history is the way in which human social action takes place over time. In violating contrast, oppression is a historical condition in which, for the oppressed, time is shrunk to the moment; for that is what it means to be ahistorical, outside of time, immanent and therefore not transcendent. This is the most ancient and contemporary form of subjugation in the world. These are the ideological justifications that underpin relations of power in racism, apartheid, and colonialism.
Sexual oppression, through its biological determinisms, halts women’s forward movement and thereby attempts to annihilate the possibilities of their progress, change, growth, and development. Sexually subjugated women cease to be treated as if they exist in time, and to varying degrees they internalize atemporality contained by immanence. These are the conditions by which the subordinated are effectively deprived of the fullness and potential of their humanity. Men make themselves historical at the cost of those whom they have physically differentiated from themselves by race and by gender, those whom they have reduced to “other.” To them, women are not just a different body, but sexed body. It is therefore not coincidental that when women begin to claim their own history—indeed, to enter into history because they are making it—men reinvoke woman as sexed body with a vengeance. That vengeance saturates the society with pornography and enters women’s bodies through sexual exploitation.
Domination by sex, race, and culture is encoded in human beings.4 The body is our connection as human beings to both our personal inner world and the social outer world, our self and society, and the body is the material location of differentiation, the connection to the world outside of oneself through which one knows oneself as a separate and distinct human being. The body both encases human experience and transcends itself as hu-manness is achieved and sustained in interaction with others and with and in the world. “Body image extends beyond the borders of the body,”5 as Morris Berman points out. He quotes Paul Schilder: “In the construction of the body-image there is a continual testing to discover what could be incorporated into the body. . . . The body is a social phenomenon.” Therefore to influence a person in terms of image “is to have an impact on that person somatically.”6 The body cannot be taken as a discrete object, separate from its interactive moorings, for as Berman and others have pointed out, “I am” also means “I am not.” Interaction in the world and with others is simultaneously the source of one’s differentiation as an individual self and the means by which the world and our interpretations of it are brought into the body. The self “has no other root than a visceral one.”7 Yet it has humanity because it is social.
Simultaneously and artificially, racism and sexism etch inferiority or superiority onto, and socially construct human life through, social interaction. Interaction is the most specifically personal means for encoding domination in human beings, onto human life, in the human condition. When domination is encoded through social interaction, it dehumanizes in each instance. Racism invokes the body, with the use of physically differentiated racial characteristics to claim the superiority of one group through the domination of another. In different historical moments those physical differences are attributed to biology or to culture. The effect is the same—the reification of difference to dominate. Likewise, sexism invokes the body in power relations of domination in that physically differentiated sex/gender characteristics are used by men to sustain their subordination of women. Sexual saturation of society is a political accomplishment of male domination. With sexism, domination is brought into the female body through sexual interaction. When sex is objectified and human beings are reduced to vehicles for acquiring it, sexual domination enters into and is anchored in the body. This is the foundation of prostitution and its normalization in the prostitution of sexuality.
Sex, an embodied dimension of the self, is not a preexisting physical or physiological fact, not an already-shaped fact of human experience that merely realizes itself when it is stimulated. “Drives” or impulses that are engaged in initiating sexual desire dictate neither the nature nor the quality of the sexual experience. Rather, sex is socially constructed. In patriarchy, it is a political fact of subordination.
If in human experience, sexual interaction is dehumanized and exploited, then violation of the self occurs. Indeed, we do not know the self as separate from social interaction in which it is being produced. But that is not all. Oppression essentializes human life and determines those it subordinates. Biological and cultural determinisms theorize the essentialisms, such as that woman is sexed body, that produce subordination by constructing domination as intellectual truth.
French physician Suzanne Képés has carefully considered the body in relation to human rights and particularly in terms of the violation of prostitution. She identifies “human” as “the condition of existing in the world with a body which is a source of energy and a mind, a psyche, closely linked to that body, depending on and reflecting everything that happens in that body.” Understanding the body as a source of energy, “of different energies serving the motor, affective, intellectual, instinctive and sexual functions,” Dr. Képés points out that health requires that these multiple, human energies be balanced through self-awareness and self-acceptance. For the body/self to negotiate in a world that supports its existence and also threatens it, self-awareness and self-acceptance are necessary to derive introspective knowledge that only comes “from the feeling of being present with oneself.”8
Pursuing the duality of the individual and society, Dr. Képés distinguishes between the outer world, “that of everyday tasks, of joys and sorrows,” and the inner world, “a permanent fabric of sensations, emotions, ideas, images, imagined or imaginary actions” that become known as the ego, or personality, or self.9 Dr. Képés presents a “conventional medical view” of how the body responds to and interacts with its own energy:
The sympathetic and parasympathetic systems are connected in the hypothalamus, the oldest, instinctive part of the brain, and then in the thalamus, where the image of the body is formed. In the thalamus, which is itself connected to the limbic emotional centre and the regulatory matter known as reticulate, are stored actions, all the acts of our unconscious which will be released at a suitable moment. These are no stereotyped actions but actions which respect and reveal the original and specific structure of each individual, in a word: “true” actions. If these actions, which come from the depths of ourselves, are frustrated or corrupted, they block our energy.