PROSTITUTION AS EXPLOITATION

Kathleen Barry is feminism's preeminent spokeswoman against prostitution. The foundational premise of her work is that prostitution epitomizes women's subordination and constitutes the foundation of patriarchal male domination: “[W]hile 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” (1995, 24; 1979; cf. also Jeffreys 1997 and the writings of Janice Raymond).⁶

While Barry is the best-known feminist critic of prostitution, she is not, to my mind, the best elaborator of the theoretical assumptions that undergird her position. For example, she uselessly defines prostitution as “sexual exploitation sustained over time” (1995, 29) and refuses the possibility of meaningful consent under conditions of male domination (1979, 1995), yet cannot explain what constitutes exploitation, aside from coercion (which must be ubiquitous under patriarchy anyway, given the impossibility of consent). Although Barry's later work drops the problematic trope of slavery, she is unable to provide an adequate account of the conditions of power, freedom, and agency under which she believes desire and consent are produced, and that therefore govern women's and men's lives to the extent that prostitution cannot be defined as anything other than sexual exploitation.

If Barry's work does not supply its own theoretical basis, then we must look elsewhere to explicate her position. In my view, the most powerful elaboration of the theoretical underpinnings of Barry's critique is to be found in the work of Catharine MacKinnon. Although MacKinnon is not primarily an anti-prostitution activist,⁷

The starting point of MacKinnon's theory is that there is no such thing as “just sex”; that is, there is no original or natural “way sex is” that is somehow presocial or precultural. “Sex” here means sexuality, which includes, but is not limited to, sexual activity of whatever variety. Indeed, sex here also refers to gender, for MacKinnon claims it is impossible to distinguish between the various phenomena of sex/gender/sexuality, since all are products of power relations. Power constitutes gender (understood as either social identity or biology “simply”), which creates and determines sexuality, which classifies bodies and behavior as “masculine” or “feminine.” There is no “just sex” for MacKinnon because there is no “before.”

This means, then, that all existing sexual relations, including prostitution, are in no way a reflection or organization of “natural” sexual desire. Barry concurs on this point, noting: “There are no biological givens about sex that are not social and political constructions. In that sense society precedes biology” (1995, 22). There is no “reason” rooted in the constitution of bodies, generalized patterns of behavior, or biological necessity for the sexual relations that we observe and in which we participate. Rather, MacKinnon argues, these relations are due to various imperatives and organizations of power, which, in our particular historical context, are forms of male power. Thus sex, sexuality, and gender are by necessity male constructions, and it makes no sense to talk about a separate “women's sexuality,” for it is not as though women could ever locate a sphere that is outside, beyond, or before the realm of male power in which they could construct it. Because men make the rules, men also limit the available options. To choose among them is indeed to make a choice of some sort, but it is in no way women's own.

It is unclear whether or not Barry subscribes to as totalizing an understanding of male power as MacKinnon's.⁹

Although neither Barry nor MacKinnon explains how or why women's choices have become so limited, both nevertheless agree that choice is a meaningless concept under male domination.

Barry also lacks an independent analysis of how and why the sexual exploitation of women is so pervasive. This is the crux of MacKinnon's theory and, to my mind, the major contribution of her work to feminist theory. For MacKinnon, male power is distinctly sexual, but not because men have it “as a sex” over women “as a sex.” Men's power is sexual because it creates the categories of sex itself—male power creates the genders man and woman. Moreover, it does not create them equal. The establishment of the genders man/woman is also the establishment of the genders active/passive, strong/weak, subject/object, dominant/submissive. MacKinnon concludes that men have not simply produced inequality—they have made it sexy: “Dominance eroticized defines the imperatives of its [sexuality's] masculinity, submission eroticized defines its femininity” (1989, 130). In order for sex to happen at all, in any form, MacKinnon argues, relations of hierarchy—of dominance and submission—must be present. Her conclusion: no power, no inequality, no sex. By extension, then, prostitution constitutes a purified form of male power: an industry of women paid to be subservient to male sexual demands. What MacKinnon writes of pornography also explains the dynamic of prostitution: “Possession and use of women through the sexualization of intimate intrusion and access to them is a central feature of women's social definition as inferior and feminine” (1989, 195).

There are a number of critiques of MacKinnon's work that may be consulted for an elaboration of its various difficulties (Brown 1995; Cornell 1991; Haraway 1991; Harris 1990). However, if this account of MacKinnon seems in accord with Barry's critique of prostitution, the two nonetheless diverge when we ask them each the question, “What, specifically and fundamentally, is wrong with prostitution?”¹⁰

Barry's texts, by contrast, refuse this amoral reading. What emerges from Barry's work is precisely what Denise Schaeffer (2001) argues must be present in MacKinnon's work if it is to be coherent—namely, a notion of selfhood that is possessed of integrity and capable of agency. Barry writes:

In explicitly adopting a human rights perspective in her later work, Barry argues that prostitution is wrong because, as sexual exploitation, “it harms the human self and destroys through sex, dehumanizing women” (1995, 71).

For Barry, objectification and violation are synonymous—to treat another person “as a body” and not “as a human being” is to violate her. This reliance on a self that is degraded through the practice of prostitution is a familiar argument, and the bedrock claim of much anti-prostitution feminism. Carole Pateman's famous answer to the question of what is wrong with prostitution is that precisely because of the close connection between the self and gender, prostitution can never be a healthy or nondegrading occupation for women:

For Ryan Bishop and Lillian S. Robinson, sex work is the quintessence of alienated labor, labor that is “alienated in the emotive sense: that is, separated and causing separation from authentic feelings, giving rise to isolation and revulsion” (1998, 247; original emphasis; cf. their identical locution in 2002, 19). The implication is that there is some locus of “authentic feelings” from which the sex worker becomes alienated, causing “isolation and revulsion.” And in arguing for a valorization of masturbation as one means of reducing the pervasiveness of prostitution, Julia O'Connell Davidson claims that if masturbation were “valued in the same way that heterosexual coupling now is,” then “we would all be in a position to recognize and realize ourselves as sexual subjects, without turning anyone else into an object” (2002, 95).

Unfortunately, the self on which these feminist critics of prostitution rely is an ideal that remains unexplicated. This leads to significant problems—most obviously, it is unclear what else human beings are besides bodies, which would thereby make it illegitimate to treat them as only bodies (or “objects”). Barry implies there must be something else, since she defines objectification as treatment in which a person is “reduced to a body” (my emphasis). But if we have no account of the self, we can have no idea why objectification is a problematic way of treating someone. If feminist critics do not present an independent account of a self that somehow exceeds or is distinct from the body, the force of their argument remains tautological, not normative—objectification is bad because it has already been defined as violation.

The root of this tautology is the Abolitionist understanding of social meaning, which so saturates the self that there is no need for an independent account of it, since to be a woman under male domination is to be an object by definition. Clearly, then, this holds for women in prostitution. Male domination, as the hegemonic discourse, simply forecloses the possibility that prostitution could ever mean anything to anyone besides the exploitation of women. Thus, objectification is always violation: Male power so totally creates sexuality that it determines the entirety of its social meaning, whether individual choosers acknowledge that meaning or not. Because “women” and “men,” like prostitution and other sexual practices, are social entities, and because the realm of the social is governed by the hegemony of male domination, there is simply no space for any other meanings (or selves) to proliferate.¹²

The ability of male domination to reproduce itself in the Abolitionist account is staggering, but it is in fact MacKinnon's and Barry's theories that foreclose the possibility of innovation in social meaning. Their absolutist positions mysteriously focus exclusively on the meaning and nature of women's choices and identities under patriarchy. This conspicuously fails to acknowledge the ways in which men are produced as men under hegemonic gender discourses. Because power is described and understood as “male domination,” men are somehow “responsible” for the production of women as passive, violable, and so on. But if sex/gender/sexuality are as radically constructed as MacKinnon and Barry insist, men too must be the constructed subjects of masculine power. Who, then, instituted male domination? After all, men first needed to become “men” in order to figure out what “men as a gender want sexually.” What does it mean to say that power is masculine if there is no base or “substance” that exists before that denotes who these men are, to which power is, in MacKinnon's scheme, inextricably linked?

This gap between power's effects and power's instigators suggests that domination, whether defined as “male” or not, cannot belong to some preexisting substrata of malevolent men who are busily plotting the domination of those they produce as “women.” Although it is true that men generally possess greater physical, political, and economic power than women, they are not therefore exempt from the coercive structures of gender identification that “male domination” produces for them, too. Masculinity is no more “natural” than femininity, and it is no more primary, first, or “before” to be dominant than to be submissive. This means that although male domination may produce prostitution as primarily and specifically a job for women, and on the other hand also demand female sexual purity (hence, the derogatory usage of “whore”), nevertheless men as clients of sex workers are also produced by “male domination.” The idea that men's sexual desires are more urgent, more powerful, and more numerous than women's certainly contributes to tacit acceptance of prostitution; the notions that men are actors in the world, better suited to displays of courage and bodily strength, and the romantic or sexual aggressors, are also reliable expectations of masculinity that shore up the image of men as buyers of sexual services. Yet it is important to remember that definitions of masculinity, even when those identifications look oppressive or domineering, are no more “intrinsic” or “natural” to men than any other kind of identification. Men are no more suited to these identificatory categories than women are to the roles of “virgin” and “whore.”

I return to the importance of denaturalizing masculinity in the final section, because I think it offers the key to a successfully nonmoralizing redeployment of the gendered critique of sex work. I turn first to examine two different groups of feminists who deny the fatalism of MacKinnon's and Barry's approaches, and argue that prostitution must be understood as more than simply a gendered phenomenon.

PROSTITUTION AS SEX/WORK

Dissatisfied with Barry's and MacKinnon's monocausal account of prostitution, two major responses have developed from within the feminist and sex worker activist community. The first is animated by Gayle Rubin, who rejects the idea that sexuality is a mere by-product of gender (oppression), arguing that sex, too, “is a vector of oppression” (1984, 293). Rubin calls for a radical theory of sexuality, one that is “not reducible to, or understandable in terms of, class, race, ethnicity, or gender” (p. 293). Her “sex-positive” position has been profoundly influential in shaping the feminist debate over prostitution, and can be seen as foundational to “pro-sex” and/or Sex Radical perspectives on prostitution (e.g., Califia 2002, 2000; Nagle 1997; Queen 1997a, 1997b), just as MacKinnon's analysis grounds the anti-prostitution feminist position.

By contrast, the editors of and contributors to the collection Global Sex Workers (Doezema and Kempadoo 1998) argue for an understanding of prostitution as a form of labor, thereby taking the expression “sex work” literally. According to Kempadoo, “we view prostitution not as an identity—as a social or a psychological characteristic of women, often indicated by ‘whore’—but as an income-generating activity or form of labor for women and men” (1998a, 3). These writers thus acknowledge both the gendered nature of sex work—“Today the majority of the world's sex workers are women, working within male-dominated businesses and industries” (p. 6)—and the problems of exploitation that occur in the sex industry—“the exploitation of sexual labor is intensified under systemic capitalism, leaving it open to similar kinds of pressures and manipulation that any other waged labor faces” (p. 8)—without either categorizing all prostitution as violence against women or forgoing a critique of the often brutal conditions under which women (and men) work in the sex industry.

Both of these positions refuse the Abolitionist contention that women's engaging in prostitution is simply or only exploitation. When MacKinnon or Barry argue that women can never be understood to consent to prostitution, they are claiming a single, universal, determinist cause of both the existence and meaning of prostitution for women: male domination. Sex Radicals and Sex as Work exponents deny this monolithical meaning, arguing instead that prostitution both means something different than what the Abolitionists argue, and that this is possible because women themselves contribute to the production of that meaning (Zatz 1997). Rubin's assertion that sex, too, is a vector of oppression dislodges the patriarchal stranglehold on power that MacKinnon and Barry claim to document. If sexuality has its own modes of value and stigmatization, then prostitution can also be understood as a punished or problematic form of sexual activity. While this stigmatization may coexist with gendered forms of power and domination, it is importantly also a by-product of the cultural discourses of law, medicine, religion, and psychology, all of which argue for the sanctity of sexual relationships, the importance of monogamy for physical and psychic health, and the refusal of exchanging money for sex as a degradation of the human being. Notes Rubin: “Like homosexuals, prostitutes are a criminal sexual population stigmatized on the basis of sexual activity” (1984, 286).

The Sex as Work position, by contrast, simply tables the debate about social meaning altogether. Prostitution may in some cases be exploitive, and may in some cases challenge the gender or sexual status quo, but neither of these is due to anything about sex work itself as sex work. As labor, prostitution may be exploited or it may be unionized, and workers may have more or less bargaining power, freedom of movement, and desirable working conditions. But sex workers do not, as sex workers, carry the burden of determining the meaning of sex and gender relations on their shoulders. This successfully nonmoralizing position makes room for the possibility of all sorts of social meanings of prostitution, dependent upon the particular historical and geopolitical context in which it occurs, without forgoing the task of critique. Within this framework, sex work could be both transgressive of gender expectations and exploited as labor, or thoroughly reificatory of feminine sexual norms and yet utterly uncoerced.

Rubin acknowledges the distinction between sexuality and economic activity, noting that “[s]ex work is an occupation, while sexual deviation is an erotic preference” (1984, 286). Despite this, some Sex Radical feminists argue explicitly for an elision of the differences between erotic orientation and occupation. Joan Nestle (1998) has claimed that prostitutes and lesbians are powerfully linked by the challenges they pose not only to male definitions of appropriate female sexuality but also to feminism itself, which, she argues, similarly polices the bounds of appropriate womanhood: “Both dykes and whores have a historical heritage of redefining the concept of woman” (p. 250). Jill Nagle also analogizes sex work with lesbianism, implicitly claiming that both are “options” whose only drawbacks are in social condemnation:

Indeed, Nagle presents homosexuality and sex work as analogous practices of sexual deviance, which are deliberate political acts:

Carol Queen presents a slightly more nuanced account of how chosenness of deviant sexuality can come to be seen as an erotic orientation, noting that “queer whores seem most likely to define sex work as part of their sexuality, acknowledging the sex they have for money as desirable and one component of their sexual makeup” (1997a, 186). She thus goes to some length to emphasize that sex work can be an enjoyable and sexually stimulating form of income:

Queen's key claim, which informs her fundamental objection to the Abolitionist position, is that it is sex negativity that makes prostitution a generally wretched existence. Sex workers have it rough most often, on her account, because of their internalized fear and hatred of sex itself:

Indeed, if (women's) sex negativity were vanquished, she argues, an egalitarian, gender-blind sexual market would emerge, wherein persons of every gender are free to become both patron and solicitor of sexual services (Queen 1997a, 204).

Other Sex Radical feminists acknowledge the distinction between sexuality and economic activity, arguing that prostitutes offer a therapeutic service, akin to service work of all sorts (child care, domestic labor, flight attendant, etc.). This position presents the prostitute as a skilled laborer ministering to the needs of a vulnerable population seeking company and human contact, a population perhaps too undesirable or otherwise unlucky to find sexual fulfillment through more traditional, noncommercial avenues (Califia 2000, 264–65; Chapkis 1997, 75). A few even celebrate prostitution as a kind of sacred ritual of goddess worship, a practice of spiritual healing that confers sexual energy and positivity on both its practitioners and its clients (see the discussion of Annie Sprinkle in Chapkis 1997, “Afterword”; Queen 1997a). Whether as therapy or spirituality, however, prostitution in this analysis is solely about sex: Prostitution is stigmatized and criminalized because of sex negativity; it promises sexual fulfillment to all seekers, which is their right; it is empowering for the sex-positive prostitute who celebrates her professional duties; and, if it were to become available to all, promises a kind of sexual egalitarianism wherein perhaps even payment for sexual services would wither away, and all would engage in their own consensual sexual pursuits without shame.

Sex Radicals' overflowing valorizations of sex work as an exciting, fulfilling, and socially beneficial career option stem, I think, from these feminists' desire to produce a new meaning for prostitution—to redeploy “whore” in an empowering way, just as the epithets “queer” and “dyke” have been taken over by gay and gender activism. This makes sense in the context of the elaborate legacy of anti-prostitution feminism, whose determinist accounts of “male domination” seem to foreclose the possibility that the meaning of prostitution could ever change, much less be changed by sex workers themselves. To acknowledge this attempted redeployment of sex work, however, is to acknowledge the very privileged site at which the Sex Radical position is being articulated in the United States. Queen's list of the positive aspects of prostitution is, in fact, a list of benefits for a particular subset of sex workers, who already benefit from their social positionings as white, well educated, not homeless or otherwise economically vulnerable, and situated in both the richest country in the world and the most sexually liberal city in that country, San Francisco. These are sex workers who have a fair amount of power in determining what they do and who they are, such that they can, more or less, redeploy the meanings of these choices. Nagle acknowledges her perspective on this count (Nagle 1997, 2), yet by itself, this acknowledgment is insufficient for formulating an adequate Sex Radical feminist analysis of prostitution.¹³

Moreover, as Kempadoo points out, the conditions of global capitalism and the international relations between developed and developing countries are at least as constitutive of prostitution as the hegemonic discourses of gender or sexuality. The politics of race, geography, and migration are crucial for understanding the existence of sex work throughout the globe:

Understanding prostitution as merely or purely a gendered or sexual relation abstracts from these economic constraints, the international geographic and political relations that have produced them, and the issues of race and migrancy that determine which workers can work in which sectors, often leaving migrant women and women of color at the bottom of the labor pool.

Queen, Nagle, Califia, Nestle, and Chapkis all write about sex work from the perspective of their own experiences with it. This is an animating principle of Sex Radical feminist scholarship on prostitution—the groundbreaking collections of Sex Radical essays on sex work consist primarily of sex workers' first-person narratives (Delacoste and Alexander 1998; Nagle 1997). Such testimonies are valuable accounts of women's experiences of sex work, and are crucially important for the documentation of a dehumanized and largely invisible population. By themselves, however, these narratives offer no systematic theorization of the factors that produce sex work as both the most profitable form of labor for these women, and one that is always available to them and primarily only to them, no matter what their own legal status or the legal status of sex work itself. The activist figureheads for Sex Radical feminism, as sex workers themselves, direct remarkably little of their investigative energies toward the conditions under which many other women become sex workers, conditions that include poverty, racism, drug addiction, youth, runaway status, migrancy, responsibility for supporting a family, gendered wage gaps, unemployment, market shifts, and globalization. The Sex Radical view erases these vulnerabilities, literally whitewashing them under the rubric of sex-negativity.

Similar errors pervade the Sex as Work position. Although these feminists are much better at analyzing the dominant structures of race and capital that adversely affect the women who are prostitutes, nevertheless there is an odd conflation of otherwise incompatible Marxist and liberal arguments, wherein labor can be both exploited and yet freely chosen. For example, Marjan Wijers explains the inherently paradoxical nature of attempting to exert control over one's life as a poor person under capitalism, noting that a “great many of the women who become a [sic] victim of trafficking end up in this position because they do not want to accept the limitations of their situation, because they are enterprising, courageous and willing to take initiatives to improve their living conditions and those of their families” (Wijers 1998, 77). This observation is significant for Wijers, not because it highlights workers' powerlessness under capitalism, but rather because it shows that “women who have become victims of trafficking cannot be classified as passive or stupid victims” (p. 70).

Other contributors argue that women may turn to prostitution not out of poverty, but simply because no other job pays the kind of money that sex work offers. This is meant to highlight women's agency, insofar as it shows that women need not be desperately poor in order to pursue sex work actively. Amalia Lucía Cabezas rightly points out that this sort of agency is gendered: While Cuban men who migrate to the United States in search of money and opportunity are seen as self-sufficient and worthy of respect, “[t]his large space of tolerance is not offered women who participate in sexual commerce. Their motivations may vary from travel, entertainment, and clothes to meals, consumer goods, and the vital daily necessities that make survival in this period of crisis possible” (Cabezas 1998, 84; cf. Kempadoo 1998b). Importantly, Cabezas notes that these motivations explain why anyone enters the ranks of wage labor, even if the jobs are dangerous or unpleasant:

She nicely illustrates the ways in which economic necessity is gendered, disadvantaging women twice over as both economically vulnerable and stigmatized insofar as they attempt to overcome that vulnerability by engaging in sex work. Her conclusion, however, is to protest the fact that women cannot safely or respectably “choose” sex work as a viable means of self-support, arguing that “policies and studies must aim to create the most advantageous conditions for women workers to sell their labor with the recognition that women's sexual labor is their own. It does not belong to the capitalist patriarchy or the state” (p. 86).

What these Sex as Work feminists choose to highlight about women's economic situations is the fact that in the face of oppressive economic and cultural conditions, women nevertheless choose prostitution as a form of work. Sex Radical feminists similarly celebrate the moment of choice as a kind of political resistance to sexual marginalization and stigma; indeed, choice is at the root of both groups' political activism. Such faith in the efficacy of choice, however, must implicitly rely on the idea of an at least semiautonomous agent who not only exercises choice, but also has some say over the meaning of that choice. Sex Radicals achieve this elision between choice and the social meaning of choice by focusing too narrowly on a subset of sex workers privileged by race, class, and education. These women do come closest to achieving the status of the autonomous agent our liberal politics sets up as the norm, just as childless, well-educated, well-off white women come the closest to approximating the male norm in employment (and thus come the closest to earning his salary). We cannot mistakenly extrapolate these conditions, however, to the majority of sex workers, who are neither all white nor well-off, and often neither childless nor in possession of the benefits of a college degree. Moreover, these Sex Radical prostitutes are hardly positioned to extrapolate their self-made definitions of prostitution to a venue outside their own local clubs and social circles. This community of meaning—as significant as it is—may not extend beyond the boundaries of (certain areas of) San Francisco.¹⁴

Similarly, although Sex as Work feminists acknowledge prostitution as a form of labor, and even the coercive nature of labor itself under capitalism, nevertheless these observations are marshaled in order to serve a political project wherein women must be increasingly able to exercise their choice of sex work, regardless of the existence of coercive structures. This position conspicuously lacks any critique of labor per se, a necessary and obvious task given its Marxist inheritance (Marx argues, of course, that all wage labor is compulsory insofar as it is necessary to survive [1977, 272–73]). While it is indisputable that women can and do choose to be sex workers, just as workers around the world can and do choose to work in sweatshops, factories, hotels, nightclubs, bars, and hair salons, what is missing from the Sex as Work position is a critique of the compulsion and exploitation of wage labor itself under capitalism. If, in fact, prostitution is one more kind of dangerous, illegal, and exploitative labor to which the poor, migrants, women of color, gender/sexual deviants, and other marginalized persons are inevitably relegated under strained (and even “normal”) economic conditions in the capitalist market, then what is needed is not a defense of women's ability to choose sex work, or an interpretation of sex work (or any labor) as “free choice,” but rather a critique of the economic, racial, and gendered power relations that coincide to produce sex work itself as the most lucrative option (and often because of its illegal status) for so many at-risk workers.

Sex Radicals and Sex as Work feminists are surely right that as a public policy, Abolitionism harms sex workers much more than it helps them. “Rehabilitation” of prostitutes only deprives women (who in many places are not traditionally expected or sometimes even allowed to work) of the most lucrative employment available, sending them in search of scarce positions in various other industries with just as poor (if not poorer) working conditions, and for significantly and predictably lower wages. Moreover, Sex Radical and Sex as Work feminists' worthy goals of easing punitive criminal and immigration laws will alleviate some of the most damaging harms of trafficking and international sex work for women.

These policy positions, however, neglect the more radical critique that the practice of prostitution demands. The emphasis on choice seems to suggest that our only goal can be the mitigation—not transformation—of coercive structures, and therefore only the facilitation—not overcoming—of women's participation in prostitution. Systems of domination—like capitalism, for instance, but also gender and racial hierarchy, not to mention immigration law and police regulation—thus become naturalized, insofar as these difficulties are seen as extrinsic to the practice of sex work (and all labor under capitalism), rather than constitutive of it. They are thus impervious to change. Although the possibility of transforming such pervasive and pernicious systems of domination like sexism, racism, and economic exploitation may seem an impossibility, we cannot allow our theories to compromise in the face of this formidable task. Absent the transformation of the more fundamental relations of gender hierarchy, racism, and (global) capitalism, it is highly doubtful that the practice of prostitution could ever be anything but harmful for women. These problems are not incidental to prostitution, any more than they are incidental to domestic labor, secretarial work, cleaning services, child care, or social work. It is because of these relations of power that such professions are produced as “options” for women, as the jobs that most men do not (want to) do. That women—but especially poor women, migrant women, and women of color—are relegated to such economic strata without question or comment belies the reality that, unlike the free agent our liberal politics valorizes, women are indeed not free to “choose” just anything.¹⁵

The question thus becomes how to theorize the constrained choice to become a sex worker, without moralizingly declaring all sex work to be exploitation or violence against women. This cannot be accomplished through the Abolitionist reliance on a humanist ontology (for this is the root of their moralism), but neither can it be accomplished by relying (however implicitly) on a liberal notion of the autonomous agent, a fiction that obscures the very structures of power and domination that render its realization impossible. MacKinnon's theory comes the closest to offering a nonmoralizing analysis of power and coercion, but, as I have argued, it also fatalistically forecloses any possibility of political change. This fatalism is the result of her failure to consider two very important consequences of her own theory of gender oppression; namely, that men too are the constructed subjects of male domination, and second, that if there is no “before” power, then men cannot be held “responsible” for the existence of male domination.¹⁶

I therefore suggest that if we are to understand the multiple ways in which women's choices in and around sex work are constrained, we must return to an examination of prostitution as a function of gender hierarchy, albeit not in the way in which any of the Abolitionists recommend. Instead, I propose we consider sex work as both a product of masculinity and a practice that (re) produces masculinity as an identificatory norm for men. The three most prominent feminist perspectives on the problem of prostitution approach women themselves as the conundrum to be deciphered—the paradox of “women as sex workers” is what theorists and researchers have sought to explain. I suggest that we reverse perspectives and seek to explain the problem of “men as consumers of women's sexual services.” Understanding sex work as a function of masculinities offers a crucial unifying framework by which to understand the almost historically universal development of a sexual market in which women cater virtually exclusively to the needs and desires of men. This offers new possibilities for understanding the social meaning of prostitution, and it opens up potential for radical transformation of its exploitive and oppressive conditions.

MASCULINITY AND RADICAL TRANSFORMATION

The Sex as Work position offers a crucial reminder that prostitution cannot simply be understood as a by-product of relations of gender and sexuality. By focusing on prostitution as a form of work, Sex as Work feminists are able to resist the Abolitionist reduction of all prostitution to women's subordination, and yet remain flexible enough to accommodate important observations regarding the gendered nature of this work. Although it is reasonable to believe that women, like all workers, engage in sex work because they need to support themselves and others, nevertheless we must also interrogate the very existence of prostitution as a form of work for women to begin with. Occupational segregation is nothing new; documenting its existence (and its concomitant gendered wage gap) has been an important task of feminist economists for some time. Surely we can ask the same sorts of questions about prostitution. This particular form of work seems to cry out for such feminist scrutiny: Why is this form of work so readily available—and so lucrative—for women workers?

Although many of the contributors to Global Sex Workers neglect a sustained focus on gender, Kempadoo offers a striking insight in this direction when she describes prostitution as a practice in which “women and men … service vast sections of the worlds' male populations and render what many consider vital to the well-being of manhood” (Kempadoo 1998a, 3; my emphases). This important observation that sex work is “vital” to the maintenance of masculinity suggests that we must consider not only the economic or materialist underpinnings of the existence of prostitution, but also the gendered nature of power relations, such that sex work (even, as Kempadoo notes, when it is performed by men) is a market that is dictated and perpetuated by men's (sexual) needs. As Julia O'Connell Davidson and Derek Layder have noted: “Though ostensibly a commercial exchange, because sex is so powerfully attached to ideologies about gender, biology, and the proper relations between the sexes, the transaction between prostitute and client is not a simple market exchange” (1994, 216–17).

An integrated feminist analysis of sex work would acknowledge prostitution as a form of economic activity, but it would not abstract from the fact that this economic activity is engaged in primarily by women in order to service men. Indeed, this integrated feminist analysis would ask such questions as: What drives the market for sexual services? Who are consumers of sexual services? What influences consumers' choices with regard to sexual service providers, sexual services sought, preferred location(s) for pursuing sexual services (e.g., rural/urban, domestic/foreign), and amount spent on sexual services?

That there is shockingly little empirical data to answer these questions reveals just how naturalized the existence of prostitution is for so many researchers. That these questions have only begun to be asked by feminists suggests the degree to which the hierarchical racial, gender, economic, and sexual relations that govern prostitution's existence are (perhaps unconsciously) viewed as so overwhelmingly powerful as to be considered impervious to change. Rather than interrogate these power dynamics themselves, therefore, researchers have focused on the symptoms of power and the best means by which to alleviate these symptoms. The “problem” of prostitution is thus most often considered to be a quandary about what to “do” about women sex workers, a question framed as a choice from among the three traditional policy options of abolitionism, decriminalization, or legalization/regulation. But this policy approach assumes that prostitution is a perennial feature of human life, a cultural formation that transcends culture, a relationship rooted in the natural categories of masculine and feminine, male and female.

By shifting our economic analysis of prostitution away from questions of women's agency and sexuality and toward questions of men's buying power and habits of sexual consumption, not only will we learn dramatically more about the character of sex work throughout the world, but we may also begin to see it as a cultural and economic formation that is subject to change, reform, and transformation. As Holly Wardlow has recently argued, it is difficult to fit every practice that involves women exchanging sex for money into the widespread (and primarily Western) sex work paradigm (2004). This is because the “globalization of terminology like sex work … assumes particular kinds of subject positions, motivations, and gendered identifications that may not be accurate for all women who exchange sex for money” (p. 1037).

Yet thinking of sex work in terms of men's “subject positions, motivations, and gendered identifications” solves this difficulty. Wardlow describes the practices of “passenger women” among the Huli in Papua New Guinea, women who leave home in an attempt to abandon patriarchal family relations, and in the process have sex with numerous men, sometimes receiving a few dollars or small items in exchange. Wardlow notes that two of the major presuppositions of the feminist conceptions of sex work simply do not apply here—first, that women are sexually desirable objects, and second, that sex might be a form of work. Indeed, Huli culture believes men to be the objects of beauty and sexual desire, and dismisses the idea of paying for sex with women as ridiculous and contemptible. As Wardlow observes, this raises the more crucial question of why such sex for money exchanges happen at all. Significantly, she suggests that Huli men pay women for sex in order to construct a specific form of masculine identity:

Although Huli passenger women's practices of sex work defy conceptualization by any of the three feminist positions set out in this article, nevertheless we can see these women as acting within a framework wherein all of their actions (both as sex workers and otherwise) can be understood as (dis)confirming various forms of masculine identification for the men they encounter. To become a passenger woman, as Wardlow argues, may be a form of resistance to certain expectations of female behavior (e.g., that she will marry the man chosen for her) that reinforce the authority and legitimacy of male patriarchs. This means that a passenger woman's father or clan leader may experience a depreciation of his power or a destabilization of his masculine identification upon her exchange of sex for money. As we see, however, the man who pays this same woman for sex may experience a confirmation of his own modern, contemporary masculinity. Understanding sex work from the perspective of masculinity in this context successfully diverts attention from the passenger woman to the gendered cultural configurations of power as the “problem” to be deciphered by feminist analysis. We see how the very category of “passenger woman” itself may have been produced through the unwitting intersection of various masculine desires, and the ways in which women's falling into this category can both serve and undermine different forms of masculine identification.

Noah Zatz has suggested that a primary difficulty with conceiving of prostitution as work is answering the question of what exactly is produced by it (1997, 283). This difficulty is solved, however, if, following both Wardlow and Kempadoo, we see that the major product of relations of prostitution is particular formations of manhood or masculinity. Amongst the Huli, as we have seen, the men who solicit passenger women do so in order to confirm or produce a self-image of modern manliness. By contrast, as Davidson and Taylor have demonstrated, white Western sex tourists pursue business and holiday excursions to Southeast Asia in order to live out a “racially fantasized male power,” a masculine identity that can be seen as “the flip side of dissatisfaction with white Western women, including white Western prostitute women” whom these men find too self-determined and resistant to their desires (1999, 38). As Bishop and Robinson have shown, the Internet diaries of sex tourists to Thailand reveal the ways in which their solicitation of Thai prostitutes serves the function of simultaneously confirming and erasing the authors' “dominant subject position, which like all dominant subject positions gets cast as progressive, liberating, commonsense, unquestioned, natural, logical, and unmarked” (2002, 21).¹⁷

Significantly, the American study found that no matter what the motivation of the prostitute solicitor, his reason for seeking out prostitutes was intensified and ranked as more important if he was a repeat customer (Monto 1999:81). In other words, the more often these men visited prostitutes, the more their motivations and incentives for doing so were strengthened and reinforced, confirming the suspicion that prostitution is not only a product of masculine desire and identification, but also a practice that confirms and reproduces it. While first-timers were nervous at the prospect of approaching a prostitute—indeed, some of the study participants had been nabbed by police decoys their first time out—repeat customers were not only more comfortable approaching prostitutes, but also more than twice as likely to feel “shy and awkward” about or “have difficulty” forming relationships with nonprostitute women. This suggests that men's use of sexual services may have a polarizing effect—it not only separates them out from other men, but also alienates them from nonprostitute women, insofar as it reproduces an already-existing anxiety regarding noncommercialized sexual relationships.

Since not all men seek out prostitutes, and not all men who seek out prostitutes do it (simply) because they are seeking sex (alternative reasons include companionship and care, or power and control), it is crucial that additional empirical research be directed toward critical scrutiny of prostitutes' clients. Davidson's 1998 research, wherein she analyzes the results of client interviews with men from eight different countries, suggests both the difficulty of understanding what exactly men “want” from prostitution, as well as determining what they “get” from it. Indeed, a sizable proportion of the men interviewed actively—although not necessarily consciously—understand or construct their interaction with sex workers as being about something “more” than just money. Davidson writes:

Queen's observations about her own clients are similarly striking, insofar as her experience suggests that men do not always get exactly what they “want” from prostitutes:

Her observations, of course, are particular to her clients, presumably American men living on the West Coast. But both Davidson's and Queen's observations, coupled with the data offered by Monto, suggest the complexity of formations of masculinity, masculine heterosexual desire, and the ways in which these produce motivations to seek out prostitutes.

There is, of course, no single, universal masculinity (just as there is no single, universal practice of prostitution), and no one description will resonate with every cultural formation of masculinity throughout the world. Moreover, it is important to remember that the masculine identification(s) reinforced by prostitution may differ from a culture's more general masculine identifications, because obviously not all men (or even most men, in many cultures) visit prostitutes. It is possible that the identification (re)produced by prostitution consolidates certain aspects of masculine identity, or produces a pathological form of mainstream masculinities by emphasizing some aspects of it to the exclusion of others. Specifying the relationship between these two formations, then, requires expanded empirical research not just into the solicitors of prostitutes, but also into the formations of masculinity that the larger culture demands and produces. Whether differences along these lines will emerge or not remains to be seen; nevertheless, it is crucial that they become part of our inquiry into the consumers of sexual services and their desires that drive the sexual market.

I think it is only by considering prostitution as a function of masculinity that sex work can be seen as a category that itself requires explanation, and therefore a political, cultural, and economic formation that is susceptible to transformation and change. This is not to say that prostitution is not or should not be considered a legitimate form of work, one that must be a viable and exploitation-free option for women who choose it. It is to say, however, that in order for prostitution to be a viable and exploitation-free option for women, it must no longer be an illegal, criminalized, stigmatized practice constituted by hierarchically gendered, racialized, and economic relations. Which is simply to say that if prostitution were a viable and exploitation-free option for women, it would not be prostitution anymore. It would, as Sex Radical feminists argue, be something else entirely—a practice of sexuality, perhaps, or therapy or spirituality. The abstracted, “philosophical” definition of prostitution as an exchange of sex for money denies the situatedness of prostitution as labor, as the labor of women, and in particular the labor of migrant women, women of color, and economically vulnerable women. To yearn for the day when any and every woman might be able to embrace an exploitation- and violence-free practice of prostitution as her profession is to desire that which is as yet unthinkable—for what would prostitution be without these things? Would it still be work? Would it still be work for women? Because the definition of prostitution does not reside somewhere outside of its concrete historical occurrences, but is rather embedded precisely and only within its practices, there can be no answer to these questions without further empirical research and analysis of prostitution as a function of masculine identity and desire, for it is these that drive the market for women's sexual services. Only then will we begin to grasp the possibility for radical political transformation, for a women's labor and sexuality that can become practices of freedom.