This is a subject that I have given much thought to. Please bear with me as I have quite a bit to say.
I am very interested in the concepts of sexual and economic choices in regards to prostitution. Why is it that women generally do not choose to go to male prostitutes? Why do we believe that women would never choose prostitution?
What are women allowed to pay for? What are women allowed to sell? Our society uses morality to keep a tight control on women’s economic and sexual freedom. This is more apparent in our views of and the realities of prostitution.
It is still common for sex work to be equated with slavery. The idea that women would choose sex work is unthinkable. In her chapter on “white slavery”, Wendy Chapkis states, “One of the justifications for insisting that prostitution, unlike marriage, is necessarily abusive is the belief that no one could ever really choose to participate in such an activity ." Some people admit that actual physical coercion is not always a factor in prostitution. Undeterred, these souls say that women are economically forced in to such “degrading” work. Economics does play a major role in prostitution, just as it does in many lines of work. Lack of economic choices is not a new phenomenon, nor is it one limited to prostitution. Women are also economically forced to work in fast food, manual labor, domestic help and other occupations. There isn’t much outcry about how degrading those occupations are. The bigger question is: Why do we see prostitution as the worst possible option?
Prostitutes were not always pariahs. Some ancient belief systems included sacred prostitutes, who were held in high esteem. ).” As society changed, so did the acceptable roles for women. In recent years, women have gained economic and occupational power, which means a lot in a capitalist economic system where “money talks” and we “vote with our dollars”. Yet even today the “women’s work” that holds the most prestige are the jobs that pay the least. Being a mother (which involves hours of unpaid labor) is “the most important job in the world”. Teachers are held in high esteem, but their salaries show little for it. Again and again, society rewards traditional female occupation with moral approval but not financial gains. Conversely, sex work, which is seen as the lowest one can go morally, is highly profitable. Our strong cultural taboo against prostitution is very effective at removing the temptation to do such economically empowering work.
Protection of (read ownership of) “white womanhood” (or at least white reproductive abilities) plays a large role. Chapkis says that fears of sexual slavery play in to our racial fears. “White slavery” scares began around the same time as the emancipation of slaves and increased immigration. Chapkis attributes the racial connection mostly to scapegoating. Other theorists believe that women are divided into “good/evil” bianaries based on their abilities to produce white children.In other words, we judge prostitutes as immoral (as we do lesbians) because their activities do not usually lead to white offspring. Economics are not totally out of the picture, though, because these all-important white children represent the ruling class of the next generation. Giving birth to and raising this next generation serves a two-fold purpose; it ensures the future of the economic status quo, and it prevents white women, arguably the closest threat to that status quo, good and busy so that they do not seek that economic power for themselves.
Women who are not so cherished by (nor threatening to) society, such as women who are not white and lower class white women, fall into the spaces that are forbidden to “good white women”. They are already “beyond the pale” in society’s eyes, so they are less likely to meet the barriers that middle class white women deal with when going in to sex work. We incredulously ask the middle class white sex worker “What could you possibly be doing here?” We simply shake our heads and nod at the black sex worker, automatically assuming an economic necessity. We allow them to make the choices that we do not allow middle class white women, but we disguise it by saying it is not really a choice. We take away the power wielded in sex work by saying that it is not power: it is desperation.
Just as prostitution taboos are used to strip women of economic power, they are used to strip women of sexual power as well. Women’s sexuality has long been seen as owned by males. For a woman to have the gall to charge for something that society sees as belonging to men is outrageous. They implore, “How dare you sell something that is not yours?” The ways that they use their sexuality is not their choice. In most of the United States, this is actually encoded into law, and enforced by a patriarchal police system that punishes women for choosing prostitution, yet sees their male customers as innocent bystanders. There is actually an organization of uniformed (mostly) men, who use handcuffs and jails to force women not to do consensual sex acts if there is money involved. That is sexual disempowerment if I have ever seen it! Instead of keeping women out sexually disempowering situations, negative views of prostitution actually explicitly enforces male control of female sexuality.
This is best illustrated by reversing the situation. Male prostitutes marketed towards straight women don't exist There is no cultural concept of women to announcing their sexual desires and acting on them. We normalize that by telling ourselves, “women don’t enjoy the physicality of sex, anyway”. We pretend like women don’t have physical desires, and make negative moral judgments about the women that display them. One of the ways that we deny women sexual choice is by denying the actual forces that would cause choices to be made. Our belief that “men always want sex and women sometimes grudgingly give it” hurts straight women by taking away their choice in men. I was told many times that male prostitution services would fail because women could “always go to a bar and pick up any guy”. We expect horny women to go home with random bozos (who probably aren’t interested in giving women the sexual pleasure they want) instead of seeking out ways to fulfill those desires on their own. No one would use our service because women aren’t allowed to make those kinds of choices. They are not allowed to choose to forgo the bar full of men looking to get laid for a man who is interested in what the women themselves want (even if it is a commercial interest in pleasing the customer, at least the customer gets pleased). They are not allowed to wield their dollar as a tool of sexual satisfaction.
Race, class and sexuality all play a role in what women are allowed and not allowed by society to do with their money and their sexuality. Prostitution stands at the intersection of sex and money. Our culture’s current views on prostitution keep women from fully harnessing their economic and sexual power. We keep women from choosing to gain or use economic power in sexual ways. Perhaps one day there will be a time when women can make real choices. I envision a day when a female prostitute can hold her head up and own the choice she made. I envision a day when both men and woman will proudly walk up to my ideological heirs and trade money for sexual satisfaction freely. I look forward even more to the day that sexuality and economics divorce completely, and sex stops being a part of the economic power structure.
