Challenging that distinction and showing it to be compromised is central to my work today, and so I was forced to reconsider the position I had taken on it in Female Sexual Slavery. Thus this work represents not only a revision of my previous thinking but also, to some extent, a reversal—or rather, not exactly a reversal but a new theory and policy orientation that I discuss in the last chapter.
The chapter on pimping has been revised, but not as dramatically as the others. Changes in pimping have taken place not so much in terms of practices as in terms of new approaches by the proprostitution lobby to have prostitution decriminalized and legitimized. However, with the normalization of prostitution in both the Third World and the West, I have significantly revised and expanded my study of state laws on pimping, all of which are still reducible to the idea of the “state as pimp.” This book has been written while I have been directing the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women and we have been developing a new international human-rights law against sexual exploitation. Working on this law with Janice Raymond, Dorchen Leidholdt, and Elizabeth DeFeis in the Coalition and human-rights advocates, especially Wassyla Tamzali at UNESCO and others at the United Nations, has enriched this work as much as this new research was brought to bear on the development of this international law. Elke Lassan’s translations of German reports and interviews have been invaluable to the international scope of this work.
I have slightly revised the chapter on Patricia Hearst, to explain why, personally and politically, her case was important in my study then and is still important to consider now. Furthermore, I have been able to expand upon the method of symbolic interaction that led to my original interpretive understanding of her case, an important approach to revealing the silences in women’s lives. However, there is another important reason for retaining this chapter. Many feminists, workers in rape-crisis and sexual-abuse programs, and victims of prostitution have frequently told me of the importance of this chapter and the chapter on the befriending and love strategies of pimps in explaining what Susan Hunter called “terror bonding.” Indeed, these are central chapters, describing elements of what Dee Graham in her important new work, Loving to Survive, refers to as a societal Stockholm Syndrome that likens women’s loving in patriarchy to the captivity of hostages.
It is my hope that with this book I have theoretically advanced the work against sexual exploitation and especially prostitution. I am not treating theory as an abstraction from reality. Feminist theory is theory only if it is rooted in women’s realities and from there reveals and explains women’s class condition.
The other new dimension of this work, which was not possible in my first book because it did not exist in the 1970s, appears in the last chapter, in which I have brought together a sampling of strategies—personal, local, regional, and international—for individual survival and international action—strategies that have been developing throughout the movement and around the world since the early 1980s—strategies that were not yet known when I was stuck in my isolation writing Female Sexual Slavery—strategies that reveal a world of feminist action, global commitments to confront patriarchy. For me these strategies, and the people behind them, represent not only effective actions but an interconnected movement, a struggle, a love of as much as a thirst for our liberation. To them this book is dedicated.
1 Prostitution of Sexuality
“What is a woman? Ans: Support system for a pussy.” That sign, nailed to a post on the street of an outdoor bar, summarized the sex industries, not only there in Angeles in the Philippines, but everywhere. The next sign, “Protect yourself from AIDS, use condoms,” made it appear that under these conditions, aids was the only risk to women. This was only one scene that I thought about in 1993 as I was sitting on a panel in Manila, in a legal forum organized to address the question, “Are women’s rights human rights?” Listening to my colleagues on the panel, I thought of the women trafficked from Bangladesh to Pakistan, of the women trafficked from Latin America to the United States and Europe, of the bar women in Olongapo, Subic, and Angeles I had met and talked to during the previous several days. Most of them still had the naivete of many of the women who migrate from the distant rural countryside, some previously victimized sexually by incest abuse and rape, others without any knowledge or sexual experience, many not even fully comprehending what is happening to them, many still believing that their American “boyfriends” who left when the United States withdrew its bases from the Philippines are still coming back for them, some gagging into towels after each blow job, and others, those in the cheapest bars (as if these hell holes made for and usually run by American and Australian men could be distinguished between cheap and cheapest), who are known as “three holers” because no orifice of the human body is protected from sale and customer intrusion.1
On this typically hot (95o), Philippine summer day, as we sat coolly in an air-conditioned room that was unaffected by the Manila “brownouts,” my mind wandered back to the women from the bars I had met, some of whom I had come to know even during my too-short visits. I found my head swimming and my stomach clenched as my colleagues attempted to answer the question, “Are women’s rights human rights?” Given the realities I had just seen and had seen over and over again for the previous 15 years, I knew again how easy it is to become distanced, a distancing that oftentimes leads either to academic pretense of objectivity or to legal liberalism with its pretense of neutrality.2
The intense concern among the human-rights activists and lawyers gathered in this comfortable room was blurred for me by the reality of the days preceding. I was reminded of my walks through the areas of the maisons d’abattage in Paris 15 years earlier. The utter disregard for women’s humanity, as I saw it then and now, in Paris, in the Philippines, in Thailand, in brothels, on streets, and in storefront windows provokes a more direct but unasked question that must be placed before men, governments, their policies, and their institutions: “Are women human beings?”
When society becomes sexually saturated, sex is equated with the female body—where it is gotten, had, taken. In the sexualization of society, woman is sexed body. Sexualization of society constructs femaleness as an “essence” and as acquisition that is sex. As sexed body, woman is made universal, and women, accessible for sex, are made to be indistinguishable from each other. That is sexual essentialism.
By contrast, men may need sex, they may pursue it, they get it, have it, and frequently misuse it, and sometimes they may even be used for it. But men are not the objects of sexualization; neither as a collectivity nor in their individuality are they sex, sexed body. In fact, men are not reduced to their bodies or their biology or their drives. While male sexuality has been treated as driven by an imperative, however imperative their sexual drives are cultivated to be, men’s identities are formed by what they do in the world, not by functions attributed to their bodies.
While sexual identities are socially ascribed to women, men achieve their identities as acting beings. Sexualization of society genders inequality. Sexual essentialism goes beyond promoting inequality to producing oppression. Patriarchal domination makes women undifferentiated among and from each other and makes them known, in the first instance, as different from men, and therefore lesser.
There are no biological givens about sex that are not social and political constructions. In that sense society precedes biology. Sexual “drives” are built into interactions as needs or necessities. Sex, accessible to men through the female body, is a social product of culture, a political product of gender hierarchy, and these are the conditions of male power. Sexualization is conveyed into society through body images of women in the media, in pornography, and in the “scientific” construction of sex through sexology, which reduces sex to its physicality.3 Further, the construction of sexuality that reduces sex to a thing and woman to an object is a public condition which affects private life but has a public reality
