Not for Sale

I've been reading a book called 'Not for Sale: Feminists Resisting Prostitution and Pornography' edited by Christine Stark and Rebecca Whisnant. It comprises a collection of essays on the subject by various authors and is both interesting and well written.

From the book:

Pornography is the documentation of prostitution. It is a technologized form of prostitution -- prostitution at one remove.
(Rebecca Whisnant)

Sexuality and conflict are unavoidably part of being human. But blow bangs and cluster bombs are not. There are choices about how to deal with sexuality and conflict. Blow bangs and cluster bombs are neither natural nor inevitable. ... Sexuality is natural and conflict is inevitable. We could choose to create a sexuality rooted in an egalitarian ethic of mutuality and respect. We could choose to create a world order rooted in an egalitarian ethic of mutuality and respect. In such a world, blow bangs and cluster bombs would not exist. ... Letting go of blow bangs creates the space in which new intimacy and sexuality can flourish. Letting go of cluster bombs creates the space in which we can rethink our own affluence and allow new relationships between people to emerge. ... Pornography and the wars of empire are based on the idea that dominance is inevitable.

(Robert Jensen)

'How can you sell your Self?' It is not difficult. Once a woman is abused, as a majority of women in the sex industry have been, she gains the powerful skill of dissociation. Once a woman's ownership rights over her body are stolen, the body becomes foreign, separated from Self. The body becomes a tool, a weapon, a burden to drag around. The body can be used for profit or further cause. Some victims feel betrayed by their bodies and turn to punishing them. The body can be caused with alcohol, food, starvation, self-mutilation, and even death. The victim of cause is left to frantically seek ways to regain her control (by abusing herself) and to increase her power (by abusing others). Promiscuity and prostitution fit here, for if you give sex away it cannot be taken and if you profit economically you are gaining power in this society. It is not difficult at all.

(Taylor Lee)

Most women now are treated as whores; and so are girls growing up, as if their sexuality should be a sexuality of sexual service. It's important to think about the ways in which women have been colonized, because it all has to do with our own bodies. We may also be hurt when men send ships and drop bombs and do all the other really exciting things they do when one takes the remote away from them. But since women are usually hurt by make intimates or acquaintances, and since the hurt takes place in our bodies, it becomes important to realize that the training to accept hurt is hand-delivered by a man or men to the body of a girl. Sometimes the mother is the instrument through which girls are trained to accept pain and humiliation. In childhood, for most women who are prostituted, the training begins with incest or child sexual abuse, often called molestation. Incest is boot camp for prostitution. Incest makes a prostituted consciousness as well as the compliant and knowing body: a human body in which there is the recognition that you do this and you get a reward, you do this and you get punished, including by the loss of what passes for love.

(Andrea Dworkin)

Inconvenient statistics, feral facts like the average life expectancy of prostitutes, the average age of induction into prostitution, the average income of prostitutes, and so forth -- hard demographics -- have never disturbed those who defined the sex business as a force of liberation. The fact that the 'freedom' being realised is mostly the freedom of men to access the bodies of women and children -- or of G8 nations to access the markets and raw materials of Third World nations -- is conveniently overlooked when predation is redefined as progress.
(D A Clarke)

I'm told that the authors are radical feminists. I'm not sure precisely what the term 'radical' means but I do know that, often, when I read the works of those described as being radical feminists, their ideas come across to me as being common sense with nothing especially radical about them. To ask that a human being be treated as a human being with inherent worth, value and dignity really doesn't come across as being all that outlandish.

Years ago, I did, however, start off with the idea of that prostitution should be legal. And I'm still not sure if it's a good idea for prostitution to be made illegal. I say that because in making prostitution illegal, prostitutes are almost certain to be criminalized, and unless a law is drafted which ensures that prostitutes are not made into criminals, as wrong as I think prostitution is, a law making it illegal is not a law I would ever support. I don't think that prostitution is wrong because it involves women sinning or some such thing. I think prostitution, like trafficking and porn, is wrong because it involves treating a person as a commodity, because it involves selling a person's sexuality, because it is the 21st century's version of slavery.

Similarly, when it comes to porn, I'd love to see it being made illegal without the people shown in it being treated as criminals. That, however, is unlikely to happen. Porn is somehow touted as being freedom and liberation. Freedom from what, I can't help but wonder. Is a woman freed from being the 'property' of one man (or more men) to whom she is really available by becoming the property of a thousand (or more) men to whom she is virtually available? I'm not sure how it is liberating and I find it truly appalling that the freedom of speech of those who produce porn is somehow more important than the ability of the women in porn to control what is done with images of their bodies, that the films and images produced by porn makers are protected by intellectual property laws such as copyright and that the women in the films have no such parallel protection under the law except possibly the right to publicity which wouldn't do them much good anyway.