Madonna or whore?
institution that differs from both the Playboy and Puritan contexts that are presently presented as the only viewpoints.
Puritanism is offensive, and so is the picture of the hooker trick dynamic as that of a nice girl providing a wholesome outlet for the sexual drives of some fine and decent fellow. There's damn little that's fine and decent in male sexuality, and the desire to buy sex as a service is a glaring example of the male mode of objectifying women. Clearly we need to create a third, and authentically political, framework.
We must start with an examination of the primary cultural assumption about prostitution which most of us have absorbed. We are taught that prostitution is a deviation from the social-sexual norm. In fact, it is the most blatant manifestation of the norm itself.
The basic fact of patriarchy is that men have power over women and create structures under which women must live. Among those structures are sexism and economic oppression (whose most recent development is capitalism). To survive within those structures, all of us, all the time, in some way or another, sell ourselves to men.
Through the legal institution of marriage (whatever the particular relationship between a given couple) woman contracts to sell her sexual and other services to an individual man, in exchange for economic security and/or protection from other men.
As secretaries or clerical workers, we often flirt with, or at least tolerate the sexual innuendoes of, male bosses. (If we are lucky enough to have bosses who don't demand this game we still do their typing and other shit-work in exchange for money, selling them the belief that their time and hence their lives are more valuable than ours). And even if we manage to survive financially in the counterculture, we contribute to the image of a free and benevolent society that tolerates its nonconformists, an image that is a useful tool in the preservation of patriarchal power. To say that some of us don't sell ourselves is like saying that some of us don't breath polluted air; it simply isn't possible. Our degradation may be more successfully disguised in one occupation than in another, but it is always there. Why do we ignore it?
We ignore it because we've been carefully taught to. The myth of the fallen woman is a vital part of our education. Prostitutes themselves serve as easy gratification to men, but the institution itself has a far deeper purpose in the maintenance of male supremacy. By creating a class of women for other women to despise, the patriarchy blinds the rest of us to the reality behind our own condition. Whether we condemn, pity, or "tolerate" the hooker, we isolate her from the rest of womankind, and ascribe to her alone the degradation under which we all live. Our acquiescence to the myth gives men a little more power over all of us — the threat that if we get too far out of line, we'll face the same punishment. It's the old game of Madonna-and-whore, and whether the Madonna wears the guise of right-wing puritanism or feminist separation makes little difference. Our very acceptance of this dichotomy causes our unwitting collusion with our oppressors.
Women choose prostitution for the same reason some choose factory work or clerical work: it is one of the few jobs that women are allowed; they should not be punished for choosing among the few jobs they're told they are "suited" for as women. For example, we do not accuse women working in the factories of maintaining capitalism, nor do we advocate the abolition of labor unions on the theory that if the workers' lives are more comfortable they won't rebel. In fact, we have learned that the process of fighting for small gains often politicizes workers even as it makes their lives more bearable. Therefore, there is an arrogance in demanding that prostitutes alone suffer for maintaining sexism and a false assumption in claiming that this could foster a feminist revolution.
Prostitution will not end until the social structures that surround it end. Neither legal sanctions nor feminist condemnation condemnation will halt it. The legal status of prostitutes causes them incredible suffering. Prostitutes can be raped or robbed by clients and have no legal recourse because the situation in which they are assaulted is itself illegal, indeed, they are also raped by cops, so the power of pimps intensifies because hookers have no one else to turn to. Hookers are jailed, and acquire criminal records that make "legitimate" work even harder to find if they decide they want to leave prostitution. For us to support the laws against them is to endorse their brutalization, not end the exploitation of women. Obviously the harassment to which they have been subjected for centuries hasn't stopped women turning to prostitution, and there's no reason to assume intensified persecution will stop it now. And what right do we, who have made our own compromises with patriarchy, have to demand that prostitutes trade their jobs for others which make us less squeamish?
