confined within the informal economic sector, not counted in the public economy. Sexual subordination and economic dependency resulting from women’s status as the property of their husbands is marital feudalism. In feudalism men may sexually exploit their wives, take concubines, and buy prostitutes with impunity as the privilege of male domination that services their promiscuity. By contrast, as women are sexual property of men, any sexual act outside of their marriage, including rape and forced prostitution, is usually considered infidelity and the victims are severely punished. There is little or no social space for women outside of the private patriarchal sector. However, prostitution prevails for men. In the private patriarchal sector, women and girls are supplied to brothels primarily through brutal trafficking and forced prostitution.
2. Military prostitution in war and in many areas where there is a massive military presence provides for soldiers’ rest and recreation, R & R. Increasingly wars are being fought primarily in Third World countries, or in somewhat more developed areas such as Eastern Europe was when much of it was reverted to underdevelopment by war. Likewise, military prostitution proliferates in the areas where women’s vulnerabilities from war, because of rape in war, in economic underdevelopment from war, and in the patriarchal traditionalism of the society where the war is waged, makes them accessible to be prostituted as sex commodities for soldiers who are usually foreign men—either aggressors or occupiers.
3. Sex industrialization accompanies economic development. With industrialization and the development of a public economic sector, larger numbers of women leave the privatized household in search of jobs in the public economy, usually in urban areas. As industrializing economies shift from domestic to export-oriented production, Western-originated sex industries work with local and regional traffickers to build sex industries. Women migrating from rural to urban areas constitute a ready pool for procurers. Their labor, having been unpaid and exploited at home, is devalued in the public economy, and they are marginalized from it. Exploitation in the family leads to exploitation of labor in the public economy. As industrialization accelerates, sex industries buy women’s sexual exchange at a higher rate than most women can earn in export processing labor. Sex industries prostitute significant proportions of the female population, which can no longer be spoken of only as forced prostitution in terms of trafficking in women. In this phase, the primary emphasis of sexual exploitation shifts from trafficking in women to sex industrialization that is usually not characterized by physical coercion or slavery. Rather, economic destitution in the displacement of women from rural to urban areas and the absence of work opportunities close down the world of possibilities for women. As sex industrialization develops, for some women it has the appeal of fast money in an increasingly commercialized world of commodities that are available primarily to men.
4. Normalization of prostitution takes place with higher levels of economic development in post-industrial societies. In post-industrial, developed societies, when women achieve the potential for economic independence, men are threatened with loss of control over women as their legal and economic property in marriage. To regain control, patriarchal domination reconfigures around sex by producing a social and public condition of sexual subordination that follows women into the public world. Sexual exploitation is individualized to fit the domination of economically independent women. Sexual saturation of society through pornography promoted by sexology sustains individualized sexual exploitation in the public domain. By contrast, public images of the sexual subordination of women are not necessary under feudal conditions, wherein sex is a fact of privatized property arrangements of marriage and there is no economic or social alternative to marriage for women. Nor is the issue of women’s consent important or even relevant when they are legal property of their husbands. But in the sexual saturation of society through pornography, when women are reduced publicly to sex, women’s sexual consent becomes paramount in importance to sustain their subordination. Pursuing work in industrialized sectors, women are removed from men’s control of them in the family. The social control of women is reinforced in the public world by invoking women’s consent to the prostitution of sexuality. Economic development and the potential for women’s economic equality produce a new public, social exploitation, which is built from the prior, privatized sexual exploitation of women in marriage. When single, economically independent, emotionally autonomous women evade sexual reductionism and become historical reality, publicly institutionalized sexual exploitation reverts them back to sex.
That was the experience of Anita Hill, a prominent African-American lawyer, when she reported her experience of Clarence Thomas’s sexual harassment of her to the congressional committee that would confirm Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1991. When Hill testified before the congressional committee, the committee saw in this African-American woman her refusal to be sexed body, reduced to sex. Her refusal to be sex deeply challenged the sexual power of racism and the historical reduction of African-American women in slavery to sexual property, that is, to the sexual ownership of their white masters.4
The committee’s interrogation of Anita Hill, especially the threats from Pennsylvania Senator Specter, were more than a reaction against one woman. The all-male congressional committee made of Anita Hill a nationally televised lesson to all women—and their message to U.S. women was to withdraw, to retreat. As she bravely and unswervingly stood up to that day of grilling, of intensive cross-examination, of unrelenting efforts to find a modicum of motivation, other than justice, for her allegations, women throughout the United States became aware, as many had never been aware before, of the reality that if a woman of Anita Hill’s character cannot be believed, none of us will be believed. That was the message from the congressional male bonding, racist as it was, that enveloped Clarence Thomas within its protective cover. Hill’s case acquired such prominence because she became paradigmatic of the woman who refuses to be reduced to body, sexist body, racist body, and the fact that she is African-American made her refusal to be sexed body an ultimate act of defiance.
Culture of Sex and Construction of Sexuality
Sexual power is a political condition of women’s lives that is either privatized and feudalistic or public and industrial, or both. In each historical period, under each set of economic conditions from marital feudalism to sex industrialization and normalized prostitution, sexuality is socially constructed, shaped in the society by social norms and values to fit to the particular conditions of patriarchy. Society (not biology, not drives, not needs, and not desires) precedes sexuality, giving structure and context to the individual experience of it.
As society socially constructs sexuality, acts of sexual exchange are where domination is produced and, in turn, they give shape and form to physiological sexual impulses, drives, or needs. It does not work the other way around, as sexologists would have it. That is, the sex drive does not manifest itself as some innate reality that then determines sexual behaviors. Christine Delphy has pointed out that “it is oppression which creates gender” and that “gender in its turn created anatomical sex, in the sense that the hierarchal division of homogeneity into two transforms an anatomical difference (which is itself devoid of social implication) into a relevant distinction for social practice.”5
In the industrialized world, the social, cultural production of “sexuality,” the sexuality of normalized prostitution, has developed and been deployed through the science of sex, sexology, and its counterpart, pornography, the graphic representation of prostitution sex. Foucault poses the question “whether, since the nineteenth century, the scientia sexualis . . . has not functioned, at least to a certain extent, as an ars erotica.”6 The public and social deployment of sex as sexuality, “proliferating, innovating, annexing, creating, and penetrating bodies in an increasingly detailed way, and . . . controlling populations in an increasingly comprehensive way,”7 created “discourses” through which sex, which has no pre-social definition or meaning, became sexuality, a condition
