women as a public fact. The fullest patriarchal reduction of woman to sexed body is prostitution.
The everyday practice of equating female with sex is typified in the way Melinda entered prostitution. She had been a prostitute in the United States for several years when I met and interviewed her. She told me about her experience as a teenager coming home from the movies with her girlfriend one afternoon. She was waiting for a bus when a man approached her and told her he’d pay her $50 for a date. Being female and on the street was all that was required for her to be taken as a prostitute. But she was a naive 15-year-old who believed that he really wanted to take her out on a date. She talked with him for a few minutes and accepted his offer. With no idea that he had actually solicited her as a prostitute, she went to his hotel room, where she learned that being a “date” meant that he was buying her for sex. By the time she realized she actually had been picked up as a prostitute, she could not leave. Faced with the expectation that she provide sex, she reasoned, “Why not?” She thought, “It will be over quickly. I’ll get out of here.” At 15 she was picked up as a sex thing and “turned out” for prostitution. Once begun, she couldn’t get away. Afterward, prostitution kept coming back to her.
In many cases like Melinda’s, prior sexual abuse, particularly when it has been sustained over time, as in incest assault, has already predisposed women, made them particularly vulnerable to other sexual exploitations and to not fighting back. In exploring Melinda’s story with her, I learned that it was not only the trick who picked her up on the street that had taken her for sex, so had her stepfather. What made her a prostitute to each of these males is that she was a female, and therefore could be taken as a body for them to use for sex.
When the human being is reduced to a body, objectified to sexually service another, whether or not there is consent, violation of the human being has taken place. The human being is the bodied self that human rights is meant to protect and human development is intended to support. However, in the American legal context, consent has become the defining factor in determining whether violation has occurred. In this way, the fullness of human experience and the human self is reduced to will, intent or consent, as if that is all that is involved in violation. Human will is the cornerstone of liberal theory and law, which makes the individual central and singular in the Western concept of rights. In this way, liberal legal theory does not consider oppression, the condition of class domination which is so pervasive that it actually invokes consent, collusion or some form of cooperation from the oppressed. Prostitution is structured to invoke women’s consent, as is marriage, as is socially constructed sexuality.
In this work I am shifting from the nearly singular standard of consent or force in the determination of violation to its full human, interactive bodied experience, to span the range of oppression from individualized coercion to class domination. In the fullness of human experience, when women are reduced to their bodies, and in the case of sexual exploitation to sexed bodies, they are treated as lesser, as other, and thereby subordinated. This is sexual exploitation and it violates women’s human rights to dignity and equality. Therefore, while pornographic media are the means of sexually saturating society, while rape is paradigmatic of sexual exploitation, prostitution, with or without a woman’s consent, is the institutional, economic, and sexual model for women’s oppression.
To the oppressor, sexual differences and racial differences are visible evidence that all women and people of color, being unlike whites and men, are the “other,” the lesser. That is the significance of reducing woman to sexed body in the sexual saturation of society. It is how she is known, no matter what else she does, or who she is. In “otherness” time is made to stand still for the oppressed. By representing the oppressed as biologically or culturally different, by reducing them by means of their difference to “others,” patriarchal power dismembers women from their history. That is how human beings are deprived of their humanity. The making/doing of history is the way in which human social action takes place over time. In violating contrast, oppression is a historical condition in which, for the oppressed, time is shrunk to the moment; for that is what it means to be ahistorical, outside of time, immanent and therefore not transcendent. This is the most ancient and contemporary form of subjugation in the world. These are the ideological justifications that underpin relations of power in racism, apartheid, and colonialism.
Sexual oppression, through its biological determinisms, halts women’s forward movement and thereby attempts to annihilate the possibilities of their progress, change, growth, and development. Sexually subjugated women cease to be treated as if they exist in time, and to varying degrees they internalize atemporality contained by immanence. These are the conditions by which the subordinated are effectively deprived of the fullness and potential of their humanity. Men make themselves historical at the cost of those whom they have physically differentiated from themselves by race and by gender, those whom they have reduced to “other.” To them, women are not just a different body, but sexed body. It is therefore not coincidental that when women begin to claim their own history—indeed, to enter into history because they are making it—men reinvoke woman as sexed body with a vengeance. That vengeance saturates the society with pornography and enters women’s bodies through sexual exploitation.
Domination by sex, race, and culture is encoded in human beings.4 The body is our connection as human beings to both our personal inner world and the social outer world, our self and society, and the body is the material location of differentiation, the connection to the world outside of oneself through which one knows oneself as a separate and distinct human being. The body both encases human experience and transcends itself as hu-manness is achieved and sustained in interaction with others and with and in the world. “Body image extends beyond the borders of the body,”5 as Morris Berman points out. He quotes Paul Schilder: “In the construction of the body-image there is a continual testing to discover what could be incorporated into the body. . . . The body is a social phenomenon.” Therefore to influence a person in terms of image “is to have an impact on that person somatically.”6 The body cannot be taken as a discrete object, separate from its interactive moorings, for as Berman and others have pointed out, “I am” also means “I am not.” Interaction in the world and with others is simultaneously the source of one’s differentiation as an individual self and the means by which the world and our interpretations of it are brought into the body. The self “has no other root than a visceral one.”7 Yet it has humanity because it is social.
Simultaneously and artificially, racism and sexism etch inferiority or superiority onto, and socially construct human life through, social interaction. Interaction is the most specifically personal means for encoding domination in human beings, onto human life, in the human condition. When domination is encoded through social interaction, it dehumanizes in each instance. Racism invokes the body, with the use of physically differentiated racial characteristics to claim the superiority of one group through the domination of another. In different historical moments those physical differences are attributed to biology or to culture. The effect is the same—the reification of difference to dominate. Likewise, sexism invokes the body in power relations of domination in that physically differentiated sex/gender characteristics are used by men to sustain their subordination of women. Sexual saturation of society is a political accomplishment of male domination. With sexism, domination is brought into the female body through sexual interaction. When sex is objectified and human beings are reduced to vehicles for acquiring it, sexual domination enters into and is anchored in the body. This is the foundation of prostitution and its normalization in the prostitution of sexuality.
Sex, an embodied dimension of the self, is not a preexisting physical or physiological fact, not an already-shaped fact of human experience that merely realizes itself when it is stimulated. “Drives” or impulses that are engaged in initiating sexual desire dictate neither the nature nor the quality of the sexual experience. Rather, sex is socially constructed. In patriarchy, it is a political
