Prostitution Policy

Revolutionizing Practice through a Gendered Perspective

Lenore Kuo

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9780814748688
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

While widely acknowledged as the world's oldest profession, and often glamorized or demonized in the media, prostitution is a critical part of American culture and its economy, as well as a social problem in need of an updated public policy.

In Prostitution Policy, Lenore Kuo combines feminist social research and legal studies to tackle issues raised by heterosexual prostitution in the U.S. Through the lens of feminist theory, Kuo examines the milieu of prostitutes and the role of prostitution in contemporary society, and how the interplay of those two works itself out in practice.

Moving beyond theoretical analysis of prostitution, Prostitution Policy turns to the complicated problem of formulating a reasonable legal policy that minimizes harm. Kuo discusss criminalization, legalization, and decriminalization as possible approaches, ultimately arguing for a unique form of decriminalization including detailed legal oversight and mandatory social services.

1
Contextualizing the Discussion
Feminism and Policy Analysis

In 1992, I traveled to Europe for the first time, with a friend who was attending a conference in Amsterdam, and so found myself one evening walking around the city with four U.S. academicians who were attending the same conference. When we walked through the infamous red-light district, I was truly overwhelmed. The neighborhood is romantically beautiful; located in the oldest part of the city, it is filled with lovely old leaning Dutch buildings, some reputedly dating back to the eleventh century; canals often draped by trees; and bridges whose curved arches are lit with white lights that reflect off the water. On a pleasant June evening, the narrow streets fill with throngs of tourists and men seeking prostitutes.

The ground floors of most of these buildings are single narrow rooms containing a bed, a sink, and sometimes other “amenities.” All have large commercial windows overlooking the street. Female prostitutes sit in the windows or occasionally stand or sit outside, usually dressed in “tacky” “revealing” outfits. In general, the women are clumped in ethnic groups: South American women are located near the tram station; African women are more centrally located, by the Old Church; nearby are Asian (usually Thai) women; and so on. As I was later to learn, Amsterdam alone has 430 such windows, rented for two to three separate shifts daily. Men approach the women and bargain for specific services and prices. When an agreement is reached, the customer enters the establishment, a curtain is drawn across the window, and the contracted services are provided.

At my first exposure, I found the dynamics of window prostitution truly disturbing and remarkable, but I was equally struck by the behavior of the men in the many bars that dot the area. With the bar windows open, it was easy to observe the physical play and raucous conversations of the customers. It appeared that large numbers of men were getting reasonably drunk and engaging in contemporary “male bonding” behavior (high-fiving, patting one another on the back, and the like).

After we had walked in the area for perhaps ten minutes, one member of our party asked that we leave. I still remember my frustration, perhaps most of all with my own acquiescence to the middle-class professional conceptions of courtesy that constrained me from objecting and with my succumbing to the middle-class gendered timidity that initially prevented me from continuing on my own, unescorted, through such a bizarre atmosphere. It was an extraordinary spectacle of women, most of them non-Dutch and many nonwhite, on display while crowds of gawkers, foreign and native sightseers, and potential johns swirled around them. The air was filled with contrasting and conflicting sensations—the physical beauty of the environment juxtaposition with layered emotions of excitement and rawness, thrill and sadness, falseness, desperation, anticipation, and brittleness emitted by the women in the windows and the people in the crowd. I was overwhelmingly assailed by a deeply visceral sense of being subsumed by the raucous crowd transformed to body, an entity, a being funneled through the narrow streets in a human stream—a feeling akin to losing oneself to the ephemeral unity of a crowded, warm dance floor. It was nothing I could ever have envisioned, neither its organization nor its intensity. I was furious and frustrated at having to just walk away, failing even to attempt to absorb something of the reality of so many women’s lives.

The experience was pivotal to my decision to research prostitution policy. I had no idea what I was taking on. I had no suspicion of the diversity of the practice, of the dynamics of the differing forms and the myriad aspects that needed to be accounted for. I was unprepared for its ability to confound, to contradict, and sometimes to my perspective and presumptions.

Although my methodological approach evolved over time, from the outset I was committed to analyzing prostitution through a gendered lens, with an insistent awareness of how the power dynamics of racism, economic classism, homophobia, ethnic and religious bigotry, and especially patriarchy shape and impact on the practice. After reading a variety of American feminist legal and philosophical treatments of prostitution, I returned to the Netherlands in 1993, looking for data to support the prevailing American feminist view that prostitution was an exploitative practice that embodied the violation of women, their dignity, and sexual acts as a source of emotional intimacy. I was altogether unprepared for the differences in empirical information and feminist perspectives I would encounter.

I spent my first day gathering materials at the IIAV. Over dinner that evening, exhausted but curious, I began flipping through the literature I had gathered that afternoon—and became riveted by the complexity and conflict exhibited in the relatively small number of materials I had perused. Even in one fundamentally anti-prostitution brochure that had collected various articles on international prostitution, particularly on trafficking, sex tourism, and sexual exploitation in underdeveloped nations, I found contradictions. On one page was the testimony of a prostitute from Cameroon, who stated, “I am a woman who enjoys life … and I don’t hide the fact by any means. I get on with people—tourist or otherwise. What matters to me is simply that the customer pays enough.” Juxtaposed against this was an article containing what remains one of the most grotesque statements I have encountered in eight years of research. Despite the fact that prostitution is illegal in Thailand and prostitutes and former prostitutes are socially and legally stigmatized there, that country has for some time been a center for sex tourism and trafficking in women and children.¹ Boonchu Rojanasathien, former vice premier of Thailand (“and internationally well-known banker”), in a veiled reference to prostitution, stated in 1980:

Within the next two years, we have need of money. Therefore, I ask all governors to consider the natural scenery in your provinces, together with some forms of entertainment that some of you might consider disgusting and shameful because they are forms of sexual entertainment that attract tourists. Such forms of entertainment should not be prohibited if only because you are morally fastidious. Yet explicit obscenities that may lead to damaging moral consequences should be avoided within a reasonable limit. We must do this because we have to consider jobs that will be created for the people.²

By the time I looked up to discover that it was 3 A.M., I had come to understand the inappropriateness of any broad, generalized policy claim about what is a genuinely diverse, complex, and nuanced industry. From that short exposure, I realized that I would have to disabuse my analysis of presumptions of values, such as that of a natural or ideal connection between sex and intimacy, which, I was quickly recognizing, emerged from the perspective of white privileged American scholars but was unlikely to be shared by women in underdeveloped nations, whose primary focus was survival of themselves and their children. One evening was enough to convince me that it was essential that I globalize the discussion. Prostitution does not respect national boundaries. The lives of Thai prostitutes bear directly on the lives of U.S. prostitute and nonprostitute women alike.

As I also quickly came to understand, I could not limit this research solely to the question of the governance of prostitution. Given current practice, I needed to consider how the three-way relationship between prostitute, facilitator (pimps, brothels, etc.), and client impacts both on prostitution and on the larger society. Ultimately, this has led me to conjoin a prostitute facilitation policy with a policy governing prostitution activity.

Feminist Public Policy Analysis—Basic Methodology

Those working in traditional disciplines generally pursue their inquiries by following established methodologies in their respective fields. The problem for the public policy theorist is that there is no clear paradigm, no system of rules that tells us how to go about doing policy analysis. What sorts of questions must be addressed to determine a reasonable public policy? Who needs to be considered? How must different concerns be weighed? The problem is only exacerbated for the feminist policy analyst. How do we ensure that women’s voices and lives will be pivotal in the determination of policy? Which voices and lives are relevant to U.S. policy? How can we evaluate what is really in “women’s” interest when the available data are already so skewed by patriarchal power?³

When I first began this project, I found myself rather intuitively reading materials from incredibly diverse disciplines. I sensed these various resources somehow fit together, and I was regularly brought up short when a social scientist would express puzzlement about my concern with ideals or a philosopher would be perplexed by my insistence on interviewing individuals working in the field. In explaining the breadth of my concerns to them, I began better to understand the mosaic of information I have come to believe is critical to policy analysis in general and to prostitution policy in particular.

Having been trained in philosophy, I could not come to a position on prostitution without understanding how that decision was being made. Was the method I was using sufficient to justify a legitimate policy decision? But because public policy questions have no preexisting, defined rules or structures for arriving at answers, let alone feminist ones, I felt it was not enough to offer strong reasons and arguments in favor of my proffered policy. The structure of my analysis and many of the standards and strategies I apply are original and constitute my contribution to emerging methodologies of public policy analysis that are contesting traditional gendered “rhetorical spaces.”⁴ Hence I want to make explicit the structures and principles of my evaluative analysis for the theorists in my audience. This discussion, however, particularly the portions on methodological contextualization and data gathering in this chapter and Chapter VII, may not be of interest to readers who are concerned solely with the question of prostitution policy. Those individuals may choose to skip over the discussion in these sections of the more theoretical issues (save for the summary conclusions).

Whose Voices? Including Anti-Abolitionist Prostitute Voices

One of the most revolutionary influences of feminist and postmodern theories has been their contribution to undermining traditional epistemologies. Whereas historically and in mainstream contemporary Anglo-American analytic epistemology the concept of “objective” truth and knowledge has been virtually deified, postmodern and feminist theorists like Lorraine Code, have argued that there is no such thing:

The dominant epistemologies of modernity … have defined themselves around ideals of pure objectivity and value-neutrality. These ideals are best suited to govern evaluations of the knowledge of knowers who can be considered capable of achieving a “view from nowhere” that allows them through the autonomous exercise of their reason, to transcend particularity and contingency. The ideals presuppose a universal, homogeneous, and essential human nature that allows knowers to be substitutable for one another. … The project of remapping the epistemic terrain that I envisage … abandons the search for—denies the possibility of—the disinterested dislocated view from nowhere.⁵

Instead, feminist epistemologists argue that, minimally, “subjectivity contributes to the production of knowledge,” where “subjective” means roughly “pertinent to the locations and identities of knowing subjects.”⁶

In such an epistemic framework, the need to recognize the perspectives of innumerable populations is apparent. Most contemporary feminists have abandoned any attempt to offer a universalized account of the “woman’s” point of view, because it is clear that features such as race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and economic class, as well as differences in individual lives, are part of the subjectivity that contributes to the production of knowledge. Most feminists have therefore attempted to be as inclusive as possible in the perspectives that inform their research.

One obvious exception to this approach occurs in the work of many, particularly U.S., feminists on prostitution, where it has been deemed acceptable, indeed necessary, to exclude prostitutes’ voices in the development of prostitution policy if those voices defended prostitution as a legitimate option for women. Having classified all prostitutes as victims, when U.S. feminists encounter prostitutes who defend the right to prostitute, many maintain either that this view represents an extreme minority position or that such a position comes from a false consciousness—and therefore can and should be dismissed.⁷ This view has, until recently, justified excluding anti-abolitionist prostitutes from participation in various forums, including UN Conventions, directed at developing prostitution policies.

Some feminists, especially from Europe and, more recently, from the United States, have rejected this approach. Indeed, its rejection is a recurrent theme in Shannon Bell’s eloquent Reading, Writing and Rewriting the Prostitute Body. She states, “Postmodern Feminism has shown that the three dominant feminisms [liberal, socialist, and radical] can oppress women of difference through the appropriation or occlusion of their spaces and the silencing of their voices.”⁸ And Gail Pheterson, whose edited volume A Vindication of the Rights of Whores and organizing of the First and Second World Whores Congresses constitute a backlash against the silencing of prostitute voices, maintains, “Never have prostitutes been legitimized as spokespersons or self-determining agents, not by those who defend them against male abuse and not by those who depend upon them for sexual service.”⁹ Various prostitutes’ rights organizations, both in the United States and globally, have insisted on inclusion in prostitution policy decisions. For example, the Network of Sex Work Projects, a global sex-workers’ rights organization, has maintained:

The dominant ideology about prostitution within the United Nations is that prostitution is a form of sexual exploitation which should be abolished. This view has been legitimized and passed into resolutions and laws at conferences such as Beijing with no input at all from sex workers themselves. Many sex workers feel that it is time to demand that we are heard in such a significant international forum. More than being simply heard it is essential to form some resolutions which reflect our demands for human rights, and have those passed rather than the resolutions which lead to repressive measures to abolish prostitution.¹⁰

Similar statements appear throughout the position statements of Coyote, the most visible U.S. prostitutes’ rights organization; De Rode Draad (The Red Thread), the most prominent Dutch prostitutes’ rights organization; and various papers issued by the World Whores Congresses.

I have found this silencing of “anti-abolitionist” prostitutes’ voices one of the most difficult features to reconcile in traditional U.S. feminist approaches.¹¹ When I have discussed the phenomenon with prostitutes, their responses invariably evoke bell hooks’s description of her experience with early second-wave white feminism:

When I participated in feminist groups, I found that white women adopted a condescending attitude towards me and other non-white participants. The condescension they directed at black women was one of the means they employed to remind us that the women’s movement was “theirs”—that we were able to participate because they allowed it, even encouraged it; after all we were needed to legitimate the process. They did not see us as equals. They did not treat us as equals. And though they expected us to provide first hand accounts of black experience, they felt it was their role to decide if these experiences were authentic.¹²

My approach in researching this book has been to rely as heavily on the testimony of working prostitutes as on other relevant sectors of the community. This means I include the voices of prostitutes who are what I call, for lack of a better term, “anti-abolitionist.” These are generally women who feel prostitution is a legitimate option, believe that prostitution is not always more or as exploitative as other options open to women, and, although they are aware of how abusive prostitution is for some women in the industry, feel that their own experiences and the quality of their lives as prostitutes is to be preferred over their alternative options. Many of these women view prostituting as, under some conditions, an act of feminist resistance. Mostly these women do not see prostitution as purely an outgrowth of patriarchy, although they often understand how patriarchy impacts on the practice.

In earlier drafts of this discussion, I referred to these voices in the singular as “the anti-abolitionist prostitute voice” because, although I am aware of the multiplicity and diversity of these voices, anti-abolitionist prostitutes have, I think, done an extraordinary job of developing a global lobby that attempts, as far as possible, to speak as one policy voice. Whether one looks at the suggested policies of U.S., Thai, or Dutch prostitutes’ rights organizations, one finds the basic structures and approaches, as well as many of the specifics, remain the same. There is also an impressive level of sanity and sophistication in their recommendations and their arguments for these. For this reason, I have put great weight on their views. But because my doing so is highly controversial, at least among some U.S. feminist groups, and because I believe anti-abolitionists’ inclusion in this debate is crucial, I suggest here some further justifications, in addition to the eloquent arguments of Bell, Pheterson, Kamala Kempadoo and Jo Doezema, and others, for insistin...