individualized.
When in the second half of the 1970s I was writing Female Sexual Slavery, I did not consider that I was writing a book on prostitution. Nor, as I’ve already established, was I trying to break open the next “new” feminist issue. My effort then and since has been to integrate the violation of women by prostitution into the feminist struggle and to move it, as one of several connected issues, into the forefront of the feminist agenda. I have approached this struggle by understanding prostitute women not as a group set apart, which is a misogynist construction, but as women whose experience of sexual exploitation is consonant with that of all women’s experience of sexual exploitation.
What I was doing in Female Sexual Slavery was writing about the use of sex/sexuality as power—to dominate—as a condition of oppression. I am concerned with a class condition. My study of sex as power then and now inevitably, continually, unrelentingly returns me to prostitution. I knew then that one cannot mobilize against a class condition of oppression unless one knows its fullest dimensions. Thus my work has been to study and expose sexual power in its most severe, global, institutionalized, and crystallized forms. I reasoned that we could know the parts because we would know the whole. From 1970 I had been involved in initiating radical feminist action against rape, but until I learned of the traffic in women and explored the pimping strategies in prostitution, I did not fully grasp how utterly without value female life is under male domination. Women as expendables. Women as throwaways. Prostitution—the cornerstone of all sexual exploitation.
To confront the whole, the female class condition, strategically and politically, I launched action in an international arena of human rights because sex is power over all women. As the female condition is a class condition, sex power must be addressed as a global issue, inclusive of all of its occurrences in the subordination of women. To do that prostitution must be centered in this struggle.
I have chosen to focus my militancy and strategizing against oppression on human rights. While promoting individual civil rights, I believe that human rights can be taken further. Expanded to the human condition, it has been used to recognize that peoples—such as those under apartheid, and those under any form of colonization—have a right to self-determination. The appeal of human rights to me is its ability to protect the class, collective condition—and this is a protection not yet available to women. However, the decolonization of the sexually exploited female class has not yet begun. In 1970 I participated in issuing the Fourth World Manifesto, written in response to socialists who tried to coopt the women’s movement to serve the left as if men were not imperialists of sex. In that manifesto we established the colonization of women as a condition of patriarchy. Where the United Nations will protect the “sovereign [read independent] rights of all peoples and their territorial integrity,”1 in our present human rights work, I intend to see that women, as a territory sexually colonized, are granted that protection. With the struggle of our movement, we will one day see to it that, according to U.N. human-rights standards established for other groups, sexual exploitation is treated as a class condition that is a crime against humanity as much as it is a crime against any individual human being.
Thus, in studying sex as power in Female Sexual Slavery, I found the class condition of all women to be fully revealed in prostitution. That finding led me into almost two decades of work on developing an international human-rights approach to confronting that class condition globally.
But to get to that point in our struggle we must go back to the original premise of radical political feminism: that the personal is political and therefore, the separation of them—the “whores”—and us—the “women”—is utterly false, a patriarchal lie. And that means that we must talk about sex. The sexuality of today. Not only in pornography. Not only when it is explicitly “against our will.”
In this work, I am shifting from my previous work on the sexuality of prostitution to my new work on the prostitution of sexuality. I am taking prostitution as the model, the most extreme and most crystallized form of all sexual exploitation. Sexual exploitation is a political condition, the foundation of women’s subordination and the base from which discrimination against women is constructed and enacted.
The feminist international approach of this study recognizes that there are worldwide commonalities to women’s subordination and that therefore there must be a commonality to power arrangements across races, classes, and state boundaries. The word “gender,” intended by feminists to refer to the social basis of sex ascription and thus to reveal sexual politics, has been neutralized by academics so that it now simply refers to biological differences between the sexes. “Gender” has become an apolitical term, a word that makes it possible to not have to specifically designate “woman.” “Gender” makes patriarchy, the historical and political context of power, disappear. That is the context in which female sexuality is prostituted worldwide today in order to secure the domination of women.
The facts of women’s subordination and patriarchy do not disappear because language is depoliticized and neutralized. In this work I am studying prostitution as institutionalized and industrialized sexual exploitation of women, developed from patriarchal feudalism. Theoretically, I have developed a macro-level analysis of the global condition of women that is lodged in the micro-level analysis of human interaction and personal experience. Sociologically, this work explores sexual exploitation by bridging the “macro-micro” gap, which has been noted as a problem whenever research is confined to one level or the other. From a feminist perspective, this is the bridge from the personal to the political. It recognizes that sexual exploitation is a condition that includes all women in prostitution. As prostitution has become industrialized and a global economy has come to shape international relations, it is more important than ever to feminist research and activism that these different levels of analysis be joined.
For the study of prostitution, traditional measures are not available. Beyond general estimates of prostitution populations, there are no reliable statistics on prostitution because it is by and large illegal. Even where prostitution is legalized, greater percentages of it remain illegal, and it is controlled by organized crime and therefore inaccessible for measurement. And prostitute women are not counted in the development of demographic data and trends in research on women in development.
The most reliable knowledge and documentation of trafficking in women and children come primarily from three sources: (i) human-rights organizations, which are primarily concerned with children and operate from a distinction between “free” and “forced” prostitution in a context of severe poverty, (2) AIDS activists, researchers, and foundations who in the last 5 years have begun to address prostitution, considering it central to the spread of AIDS and being concerned with it from that standpoint, and (3) feminist organizations concerned with women’s rights and human rights, which address the concerns of the other two groups in their particular focus on women. Only feminist/human-rights organizations and activists are addressing the full range of conditions that promote trafficking and sex industrialization because only they are concerned with women (and therefore children and AIDS and poverty). Therefore, research on this subject draws both from first-hand observations and from the documentation and statistics produced primarily by these groups. In the case of prostitution, sex trafficking, and sex industrialization, the reports, statistics, and estimates from state governments are the least reliable. Frequently, local police and border guards are either involved in the trafficking or taking bribes. In fact, some national government officials have made the point that human-rights workers give the government a bad name by exposing cases of trafficking.
A combination of qualitative methods is the best approach to exposing practices that are otherwise inaccessible, especially because they sustain exploitation.2 The approaches I have taken to the study of sexual exploitation are
1. to document the dimensions of prostitution and traffic in women globally and to trace them historically
