in human experience, sexual interaction is dehumanized and exploited, then violation of the self occurs. Indeed, we do not know the self as separate from social interaction in which it is being produced. But that is not all. Oppression essentializes human life and determines those it subordinates. Biological and cultural determinisms theorize the essentialisms, such as that woman is sexed body, that produce subordination by constructing domination as intellectual truth.
French physician Suzanne Képés has carefully considered the body in relation to human rights and particularly in terms of the violation of prostitution. She identifies “human” as “the condition of existing in the world with a body which is a source of energy and a mind, a psyche, closely linked to that body, depending on and reflecting everything that happens in that body.” Understanding the body as a source of energy, “of different energies serving the motor, affective, intellectual, instinctive and sexual functions,” Dr. Képés points out that health requires that these multiple, human energies be balanced through self-awareness and self-acceptance. For the body/self to negotiate in a world that supports its existence and also threatens it, self-awareness and self-acceptance are necessary to derive introspective knowledge that only comes “from the feeling of being present with oneself.”8
Pursuing the duality of the individual and society, Dr. Képés distinguishes between the outer world, “that of everyday tasks, of joys and sorrows,” and the inner world, “a permanent fabric of sensations, emotions, ideas, images, imagined or imaginary actions” that become known as the ego, or personality, or self.9 Dr. Képés presents a “conventional medical view” of how the body responds to and interacts with its own energy:
The sympathetic and parasympathetic systems are connected in the hypothalamus, the oldest, instinctive part of the brain, and then in the thalamus, where the image of the body is formed. In the thalamus, which is itself connected to the limbic emotional centre and the regulatory matter known as reticulate, are stored actions, all the acts of our unconscious which will be released at a suitable moment. These are no stereotyped actions but actions which respect and reveal the original and specific structure of each individual, in a word: “true” actions. If these actions, which come from the depths of ourselves, are frustrated or corrupted, they block our energy.10
Dr. Képés’s medical approach to the body physically reiterates the foundation of human rights, which recognizes each human being as a distinct person whose personhood has the inalienable claim to human dignity and rights. Violation occurring on the body, oppression absorbing the self, violates human rights because it segments human beings, separating them from their bodies.
When one loses contact with one’s body, one dissociates from “’the only thing in the world which we can feel both inside and out,’ and which is therefore the channel through which we are able to get inside of everything.”11 The human need for “somatic anchoring” is disrupted. “If you are out of your body . . . you need a substitute for the feeling of being grounded.”12 Sexual exploitation, an objectification, is a disruption to the continuity of human experience, the undermining of sexual development for the subordination of women.
Human beings are incredibly resilient in the security of their bodied location just as they are fragile in the development of a self. In constructing the self, they are constantly negotiating their relationship to that which is not in their body. In the tension between inner and outer, the interaction between self and other, human beings negotiate their world and construct their identities. Violation is bodied—whether it is psychological and emotional, sexual, or physical. Violation occurs in exploiting those tensions between what is the self and what is outside of it. Distorting them destroys human experience. Following R. D. Laing’s formulation, “If our experience is destroyed, our behavior will be destructive. If our experience is destroyed, we have lost our own selves.”13
The Social Construction of Sexuality: Stages of Dehumanization
Under male domination today, when sex is not explicitly treated as/a genuine human interaction, it dehumanizes experience and thereby dominates women. The meaning that is the product of interaction can reveal how sex is experienced as an enhancement of human development or how sexual interaction destroys human experience. This study joins feminism with human rights to explore how meaning is produced in the experience of sex. Feminist theory exposes power and domination, but it goes further. It posits a reality above and beyond the present exploited condition from the conviction and commitment that power can be deconstructed and socially reconstructed into human and egalitarian relations.
Were it not for the groundbreaking feminist research over the last two decades that has revealed the personal harm and human cost of sexual exploitation, especially the work of Evelina Giobbe and WHISPER, of the Council for Prostitution Alternatives, and of Hanna Olsson in Sweden, of Liv Finstad and Cecilie Hoigard in Norway, and the work on incest abuse of Judith Herman, Florence Rush, Louise Armstrong, and Sandra Butler in the United States, were it not for the courage of women who have dared to speak their experiences of sexual exploitation, were it not for the unfailing feminist confrontation against the sex industries, particularly by Asian women’s organizations and feminist activists against pornography worldwide—were it not for all of these women, their efforts and more, my understanding of how sex, a human activity, is turned into harm, a dehumanization, a human-rights violation, would not be possible.
On the other hand, were it not for the exploitation of women in prostitution, were it not for the transformation of the sexuality of prostitution into the prostitution of sexuality, were it not for the normalization of prostitution, accompanied by the silence of women who cannot or will not give voice and visibility to their private sexual exploitation, this study would not be necessary.
From all the above research and activism, from my own 20 years of work on this issue, from the women I interviewed when I wrote Female Sexual Slavery and since then, I have identified four stages in which prostitution socially constructs the sexual exploitation of women: (1) distancing, (2) disengagement, (3) dissociation, and (4) disembodiment. Prostitution is sexual exploitation sustained over time. Commodification is one of the most severe forms of objectification; in prostitution it separates sex from the human being through marketing. Sexual objectification dissociates women from their bodies and therefore their selves. By examining the social interaction of prostitution sex, we see more closely the harms of prostitution and of prostitution normalized.
1. Distancing. Prostitution sex, the act of prostitution, begins for women with distancing strategies in which they separate their sense of themselves—that is, their own, human, personal identity, how they know who they are—from the act of prostitution. Separation in prostitution begins with geographic relocation and extends to psychological dissociation. Once a woman has “turned a trick,” she knows herself as an outcast (or in some few cases, namely, those women who promote prostitution, outcast takes the form of outlaw). Distancing begins with separation of self from family, home, and worlds of social legitimacy. When women are “turned out” for prostitution, they usually take a new name and get forged identity papers, which is frequently necessary in order to falsify one’s age. As extreme and as violating as this appears, it is not unlike the separations women make from their family of origin, their own friends, and their own name when they marry. Even when women are not evidently coerced into prostitution, they begin by changing their name (“Lolita,” etc.), an act that is central to their dissociation from their old or previous identity. These are acts of distancing from one’s real identity and real self; they intensify the dissociation produced in the act of prostitution itself.
At
