[PEN-L:11740] Re: Prostitutes and "Choice"

["Harry M. Cleaver" <hmcleave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, 10 Aug 1997, James Michael Craven wrote:

> Harry,
>
> Thanks for the response. On one level I can see what you are arguing
> and why. Yes, I too have known prostitutes who have told me directly
> that yes, they know well the probable costs (risk of AIDs and STDs,
> beatings by pimps, murder or beating by a John, psychological damage
> from dehumanization, incarceration, payoffs and favors for cops,
> rapid aging and a jaundiced view of life etc),

Jim: The conditions of work in the sex industry vary enormously, just as
they do in other areas of the labor market. Your summary portrayal is
brutal and certainly applies to the conditions facing many sex workers.
But the dangers you describe make me think of similar
dangers in other jobs: beatings by company and union thugs in factories
almost anywhere, dehumanization in damned near all alienated waged work,
work ages and work kills as a general rule in our society; a jaundiced
view of life or a realistic view of life? I am uncomfortable with your
portrayal as it stands it is too much of a caricature. Just as we need
to recognize and understand the array of working conditions in other
industries, so too here. One of the most widely held assumptions about sex
work is that sex workers wind up with a "jaundiced" attitude toward sex
itself.  It is, after all, their work. Yet, in Japan my student has found
that prostitutes spend considerable sums, every week, hiring other
prostitutes for their own pleasure! At a recent West Coast conference by
and for sex workers, there were, I am told, several panels in which the
sex workers gave glowing descriptions of the power their sexual competence
gives them. I see no a priori reason to dismiss all this as mere delusion
by perhaps once abused individuals. Just as other workers can subvert
their work for their own purposes and empowerment, so can some sex
workers. "Detournement" as the situationists called it, is a common
element of subversion in many jobs. Why not this one?


 that they regard sex
> as a business and that housewives and girlfriends are essentially in
> the same business they are in,

Jim: And they are all too often right, I would say. More frequently than
many would like to admit a marriage is just a long term contract to
provide sexual and other services in exchange for income and job tenure.
(Jane Austin wrote about his in her novels, without calling a
spade a spade but the lesson is spelled out clear as day.) Prostitutes
negotiate short-term contracts, spouses negotiate long term
ones (often with legal documents these days). In general I think one of
the best descriptions of capitalism is a society of generalized
prostitution. We are all prostitutes, the only choice we have is which
part of our selves are we going to make available for work. Some make
their genitals available, others their hands and arms, others their minds,
others their personalities and emotional expressiveness (McDonald's hires
only those who can smile on demand).

and that they have calculated costs and
> benefits and calculated that probable benefits outweigh probable
> costs and risks. But these women are very few and studies show that
> almost all of them suffered physical and sexual abuse at young ages
> suggesting they may be simply rationalizing their limited options and
> the real reasons for their "free choice".

Jim: What studies are those? What does it mean to "rationalize their
limited options"? What are the "real reasons" and what do they matter?
What are the "real reasons" some of us are professors; what are the
"real reasons" others refuse to prostitute their minds and stick to manual
labor? The answers, I think, are as many as the people, at the level of
individual psychology. We are shaped by myriad forces, we make choices the
way we do under lots of different circumstances and for lots of reasons,
conscious and unconscious.

>
> And yes, there are Filipinas, Koreans, Thais and women from other
> countries going to Japan who know they will be involved in
> prostitution (as opposed to being lured by promised jobs as "maids",
> dancers, nannies etc). But even those who know they will be involved
> in prostitution, scarcely have any real idea what is waiting for them
> (passports taken away, peonage practices promoting perpetual debt and
> servitude, extremely brutal sexual practices, Yakuza violence,
> isolation and alienation in Japanese society etc, police protection
> of pimps.)

Jim: While there are certainly naive women who don't know what they are
getting into, I think you overstate the case. Not only do many Thais for
example, come to Japan from the sex industries of Thailand --everybit as
developed-- but the conditions of work are hardly a mystery to anyone in
the trade. As are the possiblities of income, repatriating wages and
supporting your family back home. Even in the case of those "lured" their
fate, while sometimes fatal, is not entirely out of their hands.
Originally Satoko, who is doing the research on prostitutes' struggles in
Japan, was going to do a comparative study with Filipino "mail-order
brides" who are brought to Japan to marry Japanese men. This interested
her because of evidence that they are NOT the docile alternative to ever
more assertive Japanese women that they are expected to be. On the
contrary Japanese men often find that women with enough gumption to
undertake such an engagement are tough and out to improve their lives, not
to be be slaves! They turn out to be not "desperate" as you describe
below but as recalitrant as the women the men were avoiding.

>
> I know that there are some Japanese, I am certainly not suggesting
> that your graduate student is one of them, who, driven by their own
> "nihonjinron" and "Japanese nationalism" focus on the "free
> choice" aspects of prostitution by foreigners in Japan in order to
> cover-up the predatory, brutal, racist and sexist attitudes and
> practices prevalent in may corners of Japanese society that lead to
> larg-scale importations of these desperate women as well as
> oppression of some Japanese women as well.
>
> Thanks for your comments.
>
>                                    Jim

Jim: Frankly, by raising this the way you do, I find that you ARE in fact
impuning the motives of Satoko. Not good. Insulting even. In fact,
while there are people like those you describe, there are other
Japanese who do worry about the conditions of prostitutes. What Satoko has
found, however, is that their general attitudes and assumptions are quite
similar to your own; they see only victims to be helped and freed of their
slavery. They are as loath as you seem to be to recognize and appreciate
the self-activity of these women, not only that they struggle, but that
in many cases they have won a great deal for themselves.

This discussion is but an example of a kind of dialog in which I find
myself from time to time. Those of us on the Left, following to an
uncomfortable degree in old Charles Marks' footsteps, know a great deal
about exploitation and the brutalities of work. We are generally quite
capable of describing in gruesome detail the nefarious effects of
alienated and exploitative labor under capitalism. Where we are usually
much less knowledgeable and less eloquent is on the forms and degrees of
self-determination, of self-valorization and empowerment which workers
achieve --this despite the centrality of creative living labor power in
Marxist analysis. It is for this reason that my own work in recent years
has shifted somewhat, from terrain well known (exploitation and
domination) to terrain needing to be explored (self-valorization and the
creation of new ways of being, doing and interrelating). The women's
movement, like the ecology movement, has been particularly fruitful in
seeking out and exploring alternatives to the kinds of gender and
human-nature relationships characteristic of capitalism. Given the
centrality of sex work (paid and unpaid) in capitalism, I think we would
do well to investigate the self-activity of sex workers both on the job
and off to discover what they may have to tell the rest of us about what
can be realized in terms of human sexuality beyond the wage/profit,
worker/boss nexus.

Harry

............................................................................
Harry Cleaver
Department of Economics
University of Texas at Austin
Austin, Texas 78712-1173  USA
Phone Numbers: (hm)  (512) 478-8427
               (off) (512) 475-8535   Fax:(512) 471-3510
E-mail: hmcleave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Cleaver homepage:
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Chiapas95 homepage:
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Accion Zapatista homepage:
http://www.utexas.edu/students/nave/
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