Rethinking Prostitution

Purchasing Sex in the 1990s

Graham Scambler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781134806997
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery

The growth of AIDS has focused renewed attention on the institution of prostitution. In contrast to the moral panic reaction of some sectors of society, very different initiatives are being displayed by other groups in relation to the need to scrutinize the social, moral and legal status of prostitution and to reflect on the arguments in support of and against legalising brothels, paying particular concern to prostitutes' own health.
Rethinking Prostitution covers male as well as female sex workers and considers in detail their status in law; drugs; issues of health and health care; the changing nature of sex work; partners, boyfriends and pimps; and the potential for redefining prostitution.
By drawing on the expertise of researchers across all aspects of the industry, this up-to-date text focuses on an institution and industry ripe for re-assessment.
Rethinking Prostitution will be of considerable interest to students, lecturers and researchers in medical sociology and women's studies as well as to social workers in training and practice.

Part I

An overview

Chapter 1

Prostitute women now

Maggie O’Neill

INTRODUCTION

In contemporary society prostitution, for some women, offers a good enough standard of income for shorter working hours and some degree of autonomy and independence for those working for themselves. Sex work has always been an alternative form of work for women (Henriques 1962; Finnegan 1979; Walkowitz 1980; Bullough and Bullough 1987; Day 1990; Meil Hobson 1990; Roberts 1992). But sex work also brings fear, violence, criminalization, stigmatization and reduced civil liberties and rights of human dignity, as well as the risk of disease and, for some, death.

The history of prostitution is one of immense contradictions as the prostitute is a figure represented in varying guises: whore/priestess, whore/goddess (Mesopotamia, circa second millennium BC). Whores achieved a certain level of autonomy leading to education and status within Ancient Greek society. They became bad girls, especially as the growth of Christianity and later Protestantism contrasted the ideal of the good wife and mother with bad girl and sinner. Increasingly within the Victorian period ideals of social purity and morality contrasted with dire economic poverty for working class/underclass women involved in a prolific sex-for-sale market, particularly in London (see Henriques 1962; Zola 1972: Finnegan 1979; Walkowitz 1980; Kishtainy 1982; Bullough and Bullough 1987; Roberts 1992).

Currently women working as prostitutes are perceived as bad girls, contravening norms of acceptable femininity, suffering whore stigma (Pheterson 1986) and increasingly criminalized by the state, policing practices and the lack of effective action taken by the state to address male violence against women (see Hanmer and Saunders 1984; Hanmer and Maynard 1987; Hanmer et al. 1989; Hoigard and Finstaad 1992; Radford and Russell 1992; O’Neill 1993b, 1994, 1995). The social stigma and criminalization experienced by female prostitutes is further compounded by the masculinist organization and development of the sex-for-sale industry and the increasing feminization of poverty resulting in part from Conservative economic, employment and welfare policies in Britain, and the failure of social policies to fundamentally address the needs of the single female head of household.¹ Unequal sexual and social relations are ideologically and materially recip-rocal, underpinned and enacted by lived relations, by jurisprudence, by socioeconomic and cultural practices and processes.

The history of prostitution is a history framed by attempts to repress and make morally reprehensible the women involved in prostitution (Corbin 1987, 1990), whilst aestheticizing the desires and fantasies symbolically associated with the whore, the prostitute, the fallen woman. The history of prostitution is also tied to the history and social construction of sexuality, cathexis and the social organization of desire; gender relations; masculinity; and capitalist exchange relations which increasingly commodify everything, even love (Fromm 1967; Bertilson 1986; Luhmann 1986; Jackson 1993).

Some women working as prostitutes have spoken to me about the challenge prostitution poses to the nature of women’s work in our society and to the representation of ‘woman’.² Women’s work is stereotypically associated with the ideology of domesticity and the private sphere, with long hours, little independence and/or autonomy. Representations and images of stereotypical femininity in contemporary culture are associated with the good wife and mother, the good girl, reliable, passive, nurturing, often fragile, gentle and emotional. Some whores claim to challenge these stereotypes for all women by resisting the pressure to conform to the stereotype of the good girl by bringing into the public sphere and to many men the services women usually perform in private for one man; and by insisting that prostitution is work, a service that anyone of age can offer or seek. For these women dressing as ‘bad girls’ reduces the power of patriarchy to divide women into madonnas and whores, thus destabilizing patriarchal power over women’s bodies, sexualities, images and representations.³ Furthermore, they claim that prostitution is work and that prostitutes should have the same rights and liberties as other workers.

By making the exchange relationship of money for sex (exchange value for use value) very public, by showing the heterosexual sexual encounter without the dressing of romance and romantic attachment, it could be argued that sex work and sex workers reveal inequalities within traditional heterosexual gender relations, particularly relating to ‘masculinity(ies)’ and the interrelated structures of work, sexuality and power (see Connell 1987) in contemporary society. ‘All men make out that women’s sexuality is dirty, but deep down it’s their own they can’t stand. So they blame women. We take it for all women, for all the others’ (Jaget 1980:93).

However, prostitution is double edged and any study of prostitution in contemporary society needs to face up to the contradictions inherent in the analysis and critique of prostitution whilst also offering support to women working as prostitutes (see Barry 1979; O’Neill 1994). For most women and young women working as prostitutes, economic need is the bottom line where entry into prostitution is concerned. Prostitution is accepted by bourgeois society (it is after all legal), but the whore or prostitute is not accepted. The prostitute is perceived as immoral, a danger, a threat to ‘normal’ femininity and, as a consequence, suffers social exclusion, marginalization and ‘whore stigma’.

Sex, sin and morality: the politics of exclusion

Alain Corbin’s (1990) analysis of commercial sex in nineteenth-century France describes how the interrelated discourses of municipal authorities, hygienists, the police and judiciary combined to organize the regulation of prostitution around three major issues: first, the need to protect public morality, articulated via concern to maintain the innocence of young girls ‘from the spectacle of vice’ (1990:209); second, the need to protect male prosperity, for commercial sex was seen as a risk to social mobility and to patrimony; third, the need to protect the nation’s health, for the prostitute was seen as an active agent for the transmission of disease. These three major issues are rooted for Corbin in five key images of the prostitute: first, the prostitute as the putain ‘whose body smells bad’ (1990:210); second, the prostitute as the safety valve which ‘enables the social body to excrete the excess of seminal fluid that causes her stench and rots her’ (1990:211); third, the prostitute as putrid body and sewer is symbolically associated with the corpse, with death (Faculté doctors used the corpses of prostitutes from the morgue for dissection purposes and hygenists’ association of infection with rotting corpses, together with the symbolism associated with death and decay, further embedded the representation of the prostitute within sociocultural discourses of disease, decay and death); fourth, the symbolic association of the prostitute with syphilis; fifth, the prostitute as lower-class woman ‘bound to the instinctive physical needs of upper class males’ (1990: 213), submissive female bodies alongside the nurse, the nursery maid, ‘the double faced servant, both Martha and Mary Magdalen, whose body serves as an object of obsession in the master’s house’ (1990:213), and the old servant maid.

Prostitutes, then, appeared dangerous for the same reason as corpses or carrion: …the ambiguous status of the woman’s body, at once menace and remedy, agent of putrefication and drain…at the beck and call of the bourgeois body.

(1990:212–13)

Corbin goes on to illustrate how these discourses led to a series of principles which structured the regulation of prostitution. The principle of tolerances: as with all bodily functions we keep hidden but which are necessary for survival, prostitution is a necessary evil. The principle of containment: prostitutes should be isolated and contained away from purified public spaces. The principle of surveillance: contain and conceal, but keep under continual surveillance.

The first task of regulation is to bring the prostitute out of the foul darkness and remove her from the clandestine swarming of vice, in order to drive her back into an enclosed space, under the purifying light of power.

(1990:215)

With the rise of utilitarianism the image of the brothel, ‘a seminal drain’ (1990:215) closely supervised by the police, develops out of the image of the brothel, symbolic of debauchery, perversion, disease and decay.

The symbolic association of the prostitute/whore with death, decay, disease is maintained up to the present day.

Moira I have lost friends, they look at you totally different… it bothered me…. I thought fucking hell I am a prostitute…. I am but I’m not…. I have two different lives…work and me …my boyfriend’s friend sat watching telly and said ‘Look at them dirty prostitutes’…and I said ‘Just remember I am a prostitute and this is my settee paid for by prostitution and my TV and my carpet and everybody looked at me horrified’…. I was so horrified in the beginning…the first punter just wanted to look…. I had these durex and I wasn’t even sure how to put it on properly…. I had real horrible nightmares that night… and I just counted my money, that was my comfort.

(from a taped discussion with Jane, Sam, Moira, Susan and Mary 30 Sept. 1992, my italics)

Gail Pheterson’s (1986) pioneering work in challenging the myths and symbolic associations of the prostitute with death, disease and decay is joined by the work of the Scamblers (1990), women themselves (Delacoste and Alexander 1988), and my own participatory action research with women working as prostitutes (O’Neill et al. 1995a, 1995b).

Prostitution now

What about prostitution today? Prostitution is not illegal, although in contemporary society it is perceived as a crime against morality. The prostitute stands outside mainstream society, is morally suspect and criminalized. Many women lead double lives to get over the problems associated with ‘whore stigma’. Male violence against female prostitutes is endemic (Barry 1979, 1988; Hoigard and Finstad 1992; O’Neill 1992, 1993b, 1994, 1995). Women working on the street are constantly arrested for soliciting and suffer the extra burden of fines for their offence, followed for many by a stay in prison for fine default. Some women lose children to the care of the state (local authority) and sometimes do not manage to have their children returned to them if they are deemed ‘unfit mothers’. The tragic irony here is that some women move into prostitution from the system of local authority care due to economic need, emotional neediness and vulnerability often related to peer pressure. Or they drift into prostitution within the context of a peer group whose members have in turn been let down by the system of local authority residential care.

Prostitution is a market for men; women are paid for the sexual services they perform on (with/for) men. Mary McIntosh has argued that issues of sexuality and sexual need are sociological rather than biological issues, and, further, that the ‘ideology of male sexual needs both supports and is supported by the structures of male dominance, male privilege and monogamy’ (1978:3). Clients state that their involvement with prostitutes brings sex without commitment; thrills; compensation for a sterile marriage; sexual relief. Women experience relationships with clients some of which may be long-term friendships; others abusive and violent; others just business. Women who manage to ‘make out’ in prostitution talk about ‘doing body work’ and separating emotions from the physical embodied experience. Relationships with pimps are often business relationships, but can also be about ‘love’, ‘dependency’ and ‘protection’. Much of the literature on prostitution focuses upon the women. We need to turn our attention to the men involved in prostitution. Masculinity(ies), problems within marriage and the family, and the aestheticization of the whore in contemporary culture (including media images and pornography) need to be explored to fully analyse and understand prostitution today (McLeod 1982; O’Neill 1993b).

What is clear to me is that women’s lived experiences need to be contextualized within the gendered social, cultural, economic, historical and political backdrops to prostitution. The interrelationship between culturally situated lived experience and the wider social contexts need to be examined in order to develop policy-oriented practice to address the many issues and problems associated with prostitution, for all women. Socioeconomic structures mediate cultural practices. An exploration of the history of prostitution shows quite clearly that it is a cultural practice related to patriarchy. Walby (1989:2) outlines how:

the concept and theory of patriarchy is essential to capture the depth, pervasiveness and interconnectedness of different aspects of women’s subordination, and can be developed in such a way to take account of the different forms of gender inequality over time, class and ethnic group.

Documenting the changing shape of patriarchy through time, Walby (1989:24) argues we are living through a period of public patriarchy ‘based principally in public sites such as employment and the state’, and also through the patriarchal structures of household production, sexuality, violence and culture.

In everyday life our actions and choices take place within structures and practices already present and which are constantly being restructured by our very actions—the continuous structuring of structures (see Giddens 1984; Smith 1993). All our actions, intended and unintended, have the effect of structuring necessity, structuring gender, and gender relations (see Connell 1987). The law, the criminal justice system, social services, the health, welfare and benefit systems and the media are all instrumental in mediating prostitution as a cultural practice (and in turn are involved in the social reproduction and constitution of society). Knowledge about these agencies is central to understanding the circumstances, experiences and needs of prostitute women now. These major social agencies help to constrain and mediate the actions and attitudes of individuals by a mixture of service provision and the attitudes and behaviour towards prostitute women which they reinforce, legitimate or challenge.

My thesis here is that prostitution and the experiences of prostitute women now cannot be divorced from the sociohistorical, cultural, economic and political contexts which mediate and give rise to prostitution in contemporary society. By exploring various kinds of empirical research and other academic text-based research in Britain and other countries, this chapter seeks to develop an overview of prostitution in the 1990s. Committed to a woman-centred analysis of prostitution and the development of feminist knowledge as feminist praxis (as knowledge ‘for’ see Stanley 1990), I will also seek to develop possibilities for relating contemporary research to practice-based work ongoing within the various agencies and institutions associated with prostitution. The intention is to relate theory to practice and practice to theory in a reflexive way geared to resisting, challenging and changing sexual and social inequalities for all women.

What follows is organized into two major sections. First, a description of what has changed and what has stayed the same since McLeod’s ground-breaking work in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and the development of the major themes to be examined in the next section. Second, a section which follows on from McLeod and contextualizes these themes within a woman-centred overview and analysis of some of the current literature on prostitution now.

WOMEN WORKING

In 1982 Eileen McLeod published Women Working: Prostitution Now. McLeod, a feminist working with the Birmingham PROS (Programme for Reform of the Law on Soliciting) street campaign in the late 1970s and early 1980s, was working with and for prostitute women. McLeod is concerned to show prostitutes as ‘ordinary women’, and, furthermore, that analysing prostitution may ‘contribute to understanding more general social relations’:

as prostitutes, women are grappling with their disadvantaged social position in the context of a capitalist society. Recruitment to the ranks of prostitute is not appropriately characterised as only concerning a small group of highly deviant women. It is secured by women’s relative poverty still being such that for large numbers sex is their most saleable commodity.

(1982:1)

For McLeod ‘workers’ control’ is offset by male violence, male domination and superior purchasing power. The book relates the experiences of prostitute women, clients, the law/legal control and prostitutes’ campaigns (community organization), concentrating largely on the street scene, and, together with Judith Walkowitz’s Prostitution in Victorian Society (1980), was a great influence on my own work. Core them...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Foreword: Understanding prostitution
• Part I An overview
• Part II Social and legal status
• Part III The business of selling sex
• Part IV Health issues
• Afterword:Rethinking prostitution
• Notes
• References
• Index