prostitution is so normalized that men do not invoke secrecy to sustain their purchase of sex, we will have reached the dystopia of Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale where prostituting women is the only sex.
In the first instance and the final analysis, prostitution is not about women at all. The fact is that whether women claim prostitution as a right or condemn it as an exploitation of them is irrelevant to the promotion and continuation of prostitution. Prostitution and traffic in women are not perpetuated based on whether or not women want to do prostitution or are forced into it. Women are in prostitution because men buy them for sex; men buy children for sex, and men buy other men for sex. Sometimes society is concerned about buying of children. Sometimes society is preoccupied with men being bought for prostitution. Rarely does anyone question men buying women for sex, despite the fact that in some countries women in prostitution are no longer counted in the thousands but in the millions.
Prostitution is a male consumer market. The intense public focus on women’s will, her choice or her “right to prostitute,” deflects attention from the primary fact that prostitution exists first because of male customer demand. Sex industries are in place—from trafficking to brothels—to provide female bodies to satisfy that market demand. What matters in terms of the prostitution market and male demand is that there are female bodies provided for sex exchange. How or why they get there is irrelevant to the market.
Beyond Limits
Distancing one’s self in order to become disembodied to do prostitution is an effort to set limits and establish barriers with customers, to mark off oneself from the commodity constructed from oneself. Although setting limits creates a false sense of control, it is at least an effort to sustain some control in order to sustain one’s self. When limits are quantifiably dropped, the self is abandoned. As rape denies women the opportunity to set limits on or establish the terms of exploitation, prostitution without barriers or limits is the merging of rape sex with prostitution sex.
Domenica, an older German prostitute woman and a leader in the movement for prostitute rights in Germany, worries about the younger generation of women in prostitution. In an interview with Alice Schwarzer, editor of Emma magazine, Domenica reflected on the changes she sees in prostitution today, describing it as like a “market fair” where the streets are flooded with women from all classes who do prostitution with no limits:24 there is no bottom line to what customers are allowed to do, there is no bottom price, there is no separation of women from their lived experience as sexual objects—and they therefore must become them.
There are hierarchies that have structured the world of prostitution, stratifying women from high-class call girls to the lowest class of street walkers. In the last decade this structure has bottomed out and given way to prostitution without limits. In contrast to her generation of women, who learned to set rules and establish limits that enabled their survival of (and in her case survival in) prostitution, Domenica points out,
My room is no dumpster. I am not a crap heap. We senior whores have our laws. We only do it with condoms, have always done so. We don’t allow kissing, because this is what you can only do at home, of course. Anally—nothing doing. But the young girls who usually get drugs from a pimp and are then sent on the street, they do everything. They cannot care less. They are so broken in spirit and body, they don’t have the strength to take care of themselves. . . . Today they are rather isolated, they completely surrender to their pimp.25
In other words, the construction of prostitution through the stages I have identified above is collapsed; the self is not distinguishable to these prostitute women or girls, because they do not set limits that define their own selves. This younger generation of women and girls in prostitution is not composed of women who stand behind the banners of a proprostitution movement to promote the idea that “all women are whores” and that “sex work” is a viable economic alternative for women. These are the teenage girls and young women who have experienced prior sexual abuse, poverty, and homelessness and have become the prostitutes without limits, selves that are synonymous with prostitution. Therefore the severity of the effect of prostitution on them personally also has no limits. In other words, the prostitution of sexuality through distancing, disengagement, dissociation, and dissembling, which has allowed women in prostitution to sustain some aspect of their selves and to keep a self apart from that which is sold, has collapsed in street prostitution in the 1990s.
Drugs play a different role in the debasement of women in prostitution than they did a decade or two ago. In the 1970s one could find ample evidence of drug use among prostitutes. Pimps often dealt in drugs as well as women. Women often reported needing something “to get through with it” as they turned one trick after another. But generally both pimps and prostitutes knew that a woman strung out on drugs would not generate much income and eventually would be useless on the streets. On a more casual or occasional level of prostitution, some women with drug habits would turn tricks just as they would steal to support their habits. But many never really entered prostitution because the drugs pulled them off in another destructive direction.
Criminologists Lisa Maher and R. Curtis have studied women into crack cocaine and street prostitution in New York City. They have found that “the widespread use of crack in many poor urban minority neighborhoods has increased the number of women participating in street-level sex markets.”26 Their study supports Domenica’s observation in Germany that there is increased isolation of women in prostitution, particularly in the heightened hostility prostitutes have for each other. A Detroit director of a clinic for addicts, Dwight Vaughter, explained crack cocaine in terms that are increasingly synonymous with street prostitution today: “It overwhelms every other human instinct. Crack comes first; something to eat and a safe place to stay means nothing in comparison. The instinct to protect your body, the instinct for life itself, is overwhelmed.”27
Maher and Curtis have shown that “crack-induced increases in the number of women sex workers” has caused a shift in the nature of prostitution “from vaginal intercourse to blow jobs, indoor to outdoor,” which has “deflated the going rates for sexual exchanges.”28 The fall in prices, combined with the virtual “anything goes” access customers have to women, reflects the latest changes in prostitution, the bottoming out of it. This is what Domenica meant by “they do everything,” and doing it for next to nothing ($3 for a blow job, $5 for a fuck) has made street life in prostitution a rougher place to be. It has increased customer violence—beatings and torture have become a taken-for-granted part of the prostitution exchange—along with the violation that is the prostitution of sexuality.
Norwegian sociologists Liv Finstad and Cecilie Hoigard have found that while prices in prostitution vary over time, there has been a minimum to which women have held. “The system of minimum prices is an exact parallel to the internal solidarity employees exhibit when it comes to the question of pay. Personal interests coincide with common interest. If someone sells herself cheap, it affects all the others. Prices fall.”29 And that sets women more intensely against each other.
Hoigard and Finstad found that in Sweden prostitution prices are set by the price of smack. “The women who see themselves as hooked have their daily routines, shifting between shots and tricks.”30 This direct relationship between drug costs on the street and the price of a trick was also found in Oslo, Stockholm, Hamburg, London, and New York. The price of a trick is not only related to the daily expenditure on drugs but is also directly related to the marginalization of women in the labor force and the homelessness forced on women through domestic
