File spoon-archives/marxism-feminism.archive/marxism-feminism_1997/marxism-feminism.9707, message 179


Date: Sun, 27 Jul 1997 09:50:26 -0400 (EDT)
From: malgosia askanas <ma-AT-panix.com>
Subject: Re: M-FEM: Prostitution


Peter wrote:

> 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.
> [...]
> 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.

Hmm, I don't know.  I mean, I don't know about the losing of the body and 
whether using one's body for offering sex services is a particularly viciously 
invasive form of alienation.  I know it's seen as such, but I am not sure how 
much of this has to do with viewing women as sex objects. 

Let's take athletes, who also sell their bodies.  Now of course the social
status of athletes in this society is grotesquely ambiguous and contradictory.
But would we argue that athletes lose their bodies in using them?  Or take
massage therapists, who use their bodies directly to give pleasure.  Again:
ambiguous and contradictory; but this only points, in my view, to the
contradictory relationship we have to the body and its pleasures in general.
But we would not say that the massage therapist loses hir body; and is 
massage substantially different, in terms of how one uses ones' body, from 
sex?  

Another interesting issue is that commercial use of women's bodies for 
carrying and delivering children, which one could argue is much more viciously
invasive, seems to receive no particular societal stigma.  The practice of 
paying poor women to carry and deliver children for rich women is basically
a societally sanctioned commercial transaction.  And neither have wet-nurses
ever been under the kind of social stigma that attaches to prostitution. 


-m 

   

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