in prostitution, who are able to stand away from themselves in the world and in the exchange of prostitution. They do not associate who they are in prostitution with who they are apart from being a prostitute. Distancing is an interrelated part of a complex web of other damaging, harmful effects of prostitution on women and girls. It causes women to become estranged from themselves in order to save themselves.
At a simplistic level, proprostitution groups argue that if prostitution were accepted as normal work for women, prostitute women would no longer be marginalized. But the reality of prostitution as a sex commodification is not that simple. Normalizing the sexual exploitation of women will not make it less sexually exploitative, it will only make it more available. In fact, if women are encouraged to incorporate within themselves, into their identities, the knowledge of themselves as socially acceptable sex objects, the damage of prostitution, of any sexual objectification, is intensified. However, distancing is only the first step toward the construction of woman as prostitute. Alone, it is not sufficient to ensure that women will survive prostitution or any other form of sexual exploitation. Distancing sets the stage for disengagement.
2. Disengagement. Disengagement is the up-front strategy of women in prostitution. Women engaged in the sex acts of prostitution report establishing emotional distance by dissociating themselves from the commodity exchange in which their bodies and sexuality are involved. Again, this is not different from what female teenagers, lovers, and wives report in the experience of objectified sex. As with rape victims, repeatedly they report that they are “not there.” They are disengaged.
Disengagement is conscious and intentional action. It is central to the sex act of prostitution. Because sex is interactive, for it to be mechanically reproduced as commodity, sex requires that the women be there and “perform.” For the women’s part, they are “not there” when it is done in, on, with, or through them. Not being there is how they are engaged in the prostitution power relations invoked by customers.
In a recent Norwegian study of prostitution by Cecilie Hoigard and Liv Finstad, prostitutes report their dissociation from the sexual exchange men buy from them. Pia says, “I have to be a little stoned before I go through with it. I have to shove my emotions completely to the side. I get talkative and don’t give a shit.” Elisabeth reports, “You switch off your feelings, you have to do it.” And Jane reports, “I’ve taught myself to switch off, to shove my feelings away. I don’t give a damn, as long as there’s money. It doesn’t have anything to do with feelings.”14 In many accounts from different countries women report becoming icicles. And they view their customers with contempt even as they fawn over and dote upon them as the “prostitution contract,” the implicit agreement with the customer, requires that they do.
Because the sexual relations of power involve women’s bodies and their actions through their bodies with men who assume the right to buy that, disengagement gives a woman the emotional distance to be able to distinguish her real self from that of her self that is being used for sex as a commodity.
Prostitute women construct barriers. Through disengagement, prostitute women establish limits for customers in terms of what of their bodies and their selves can and cannot be used. These are limits that they enforce. Parts of the self cannot be accessed for use, which means that certain acts cannot be employed, certain parts of the body are off limits; often prostitutes refuse kissing or require the use of condoms as barriers demarcating the self. Certain things are kept for one’s real self; as one French prostitute reported, “Never, never will he lie on my bed. He’ll lie on a special sheet, on a blanket, but not on the bed that’s my own bed.”15 In making these kinds of distinctions, women mark off parts of themselves that are real, personal—parts that they can, if they choose, engage for lovemaking that is not prostitution. Most frequently, however, prostitute women report being turned off to sex in their own intimate lives.
Differentiating parts of the self for sexual commodity is both vital to women’s mere survival of prostitution, and destructive of women’s humanity. It segments the self. But in fact, the self cannot be segmented. There are not separate parts of a self that can be taken as separate from the self. Some body parts, some physical acts cannot be relegated for sale while others are protected. Yet that is what is done and is why and how violation to the self occurs. When the self is segmented, which it cannot be, it is separated and its parts are used as separated fragments. Segmentation of the self is distortion and produces dehumaniza-tion. Sex is an integral dimension of the human being, of the self. When it is treated as a thing to be taken, the human being is rendered into a thing, an objectification that not only violates human rights but also destroys human dignity, which is a fundamental precondition to human rights.
Can women choose to do prostitution? As much as they can choose any other context of sexual objectification and dehuman-ization of the self. Following from distancing, disengagement invokes harm, harm that takes the form of forcing distinctions between what are essentially nonchoices. This is how women actually do not consent to prostitution or any other condition of sexual exploitation—in rape, in marriage, in the office, in the factory, and so on.
At the same time, appearing to choose is an element of survival. Agreeing to go with a customer, taking his money, and agreeing to and performing specific acts appear to be choices. The appearance of choice is especially necessary for prostitute women for without it they could, in this stage of prostitution, lose their selves entirely. In this sense, to choose simply means to act, a fundamental aspect of being alive. And so women become engaged in establishing the terms of their own commodification. This is the prostitution contract, which “protects” women by involving them, invoking their self-acceptance in what is essentially the terms of their objectification, thus intensifying the harm and abuse of prostitution.16 In the disengagement that follows from distancing, sex is made available in the prostitution exchange. Doing prostitution involves women in the dissociation of their own selves from their prostitution, over and over and over again. In the market exchange, if a woman stays in prostitution an average of 9 years and takes an average of 5 customers a day, 6 days a week, she will have sold sex in, on, and through her body 9,540 times to different men in anonymous contacts. This is a conservative estimate.
3. Dissociation. From her research and study of Swedish prostitution Hanna Olsson has described the male sexuality in prostitution as “male masturbation in a female body,”17 wherein the customer may demand, and in some cases may have to negotiate, where that takes place, either in the vagina, the anus, the mouth or all three. As Ulla points out, “They do it to empty themselves. That’s all.”18 But that is not all; although sex is reduced to this act of male masturbation that has nothing to do with the woman as a human being, customers generally require that prostitutes act as if they are engaged with the customer emotionally, psychically, and affectively by entering into a fantasy or by feigning the role of a lover. Either the prostitute is to act like a whore or she is to act like an affectionate lover. On one hand, themes of perversion abound, particularly acting out “piss and shit” fantasies by which customers associate sex with filth, dirt, excrement. On the other hand, prostitutes are expected to act out submissive, subservient, docile, and fawning sexual behaviors. As numerous studies report, the customers, like the by now well-known profile of the average rapist, are “average men who want average sexual satisfaction.”19
Men buy not a self but a body that performs as a self, and it is a self that conforms to the most harmful, damaging, racist and sexist concepts of women. Western men, particularly more “liberal” ones, often require from Western women an enactment that is sexually active and responsive as well as emotionally engaged. By contrast, traditional Western and Asian men may require of Asian prostitutes sexual
