Date: Sun, 27 Jul 1997 00:44:17 +0200 (SAT)
From: Peter van Heusden <pvh-AT-leftside.wcape.school.za>
Subject: Re: M-FEM: Prostitution


On Sat, 26 Jul 1997, malgosia askanas wrote:

> Paul wrote:
> 
> > My wife was a lawyer in Poland thru 1980 and she said prostitution was
> > illegal.
> 
> I stand very much corrected.  But in connection with this, I would love
> to see a discussion of prostitution on this list.  I'll venture some
> underbaked beginnings.  It seems to me that in the present system, the
> illegality of prostitution is part of the oppression of women and that,
> at least in principle, opposition to this illegality should be on the 
> feminist agenda.  I am also not convinced that prostitution -- viewed as
> a certain kind of societally accepted service provided by both men and women
> -- is necessarily something that is incompatible with a vision of a socialist 
> society.  I have to say that when I think about this, I feel I am moving
> in some kind of inner mire of various received ideas about sex, none 
> of which are worth a dime.  
> 

I am in two minds with regards to the question of the illegality of
prostitution. One must ask what purpose prostitution serves under
capitalism as a starting point. I know I'm hardly up to it (and I'm sure I
should be consulting some books first) but I'll give it a stab...

In early instances of class society, the consequences of sex for men and
women would have been sharply differentiated. For women, sex would always
carry with it the question of reproduction - and in fact it is this
possibility which allowed the harnessing of women's reproductive function
in the interests of the (physical) reproduction of class society. For men,
however, reproduction did not necessarily come into the question of sex.
Thus, for men, two classes of women - those where it mattered if sex led
to procreation, and those where it did not matter - arose. Women's
sexual function was thus commodified in two different forms - on the
one hand, as a reproductive function, and on the other hand, a sexual
function.

The interesting suggestion which this opens for me is that with the
development of the pill, and 'free love' (which in our society is of
course not free), the institution of prostitution declined in importance,
and the existence of male prostitutes who serve women became a reasonable
possibility. It would be interesting to examine the prostitution industry
to see if this prediction in any sense is born out by reality.

An interesting point is the fact that for the prostitute, sexuality is a
commodity. In other words, the prostitute is alienated from her own
sexuality by her labour - in using her body, she loses it. I see this as a
rather viciously invasive form of alienation.

Now, on to the question of whether prostitution should be legal or not. I
think the question is, who gains by making prostitution illegal? To answer
this question, I would note that, in my experience, making prostitution
illegal is just a way of controlling prostitutes - an activity the state
has an interest in since it has an interest in the control of sexuality in
so far as sexuality is linked to reproduction. The illegality of
prostitution, at least in Western countries, tends to just mean that
prostitution is practiced within the context of a set of unevenly applied
vice laws.

I would similarly think that socialists should argue against measures used
to control or register prostitutes, following the argument that such
measures are attempts by the state to put bounds around the distinction
between the two forms of commodification of sexuality, and act as an
attack upon prostitute's as workers. Similarly, I would argue for the
support of genuine prostitutes' unions (whilst recognising that
prostitutes exist in a contradictory class position, somewhere between
being workers and being petty-bouergois (with their bodies as their 'means
of production')).

Finally, I doubt that anything akin to modern prostitution would exist in
a socialist society, on the basis that a socialist society would at the
same time act to destroy the commodification of sexuality (resulting in a
more genuine form of 'free love', which would militate against the need
for prostitution) and also remove the conditions of poverty which is 
the most common force behind the supply of female prostitutes in our
society.

As I said above, this is just an initial stab at the problem - I think its
a great topic for debate.

Peter
--
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