From: LeoCasey <LeoCasey-AT-aol.com>
Date: Wed, 25 Mar 1998 15:54:31 EST
Subject: M-TH: State-Run Brothels, Or The Community of Women and Children


But you Communists would introduce community of women, screams the whole
bourgeoisie in chorus.

The bourgeois sees in his wife a mere instrument of production. He hears that
the instruments of production are to be exploited in common, and, naturally,
can come to no other conclusion that the lot of being common to all will
likewise fall to the women.

He has not even a suspicion that the real point aimed at is doing away with
the status of women as mere instruments of production.

The Communist Manifesto

It has been striking to me that so much of this thread concerning state run
brothels has proceeded without reference to the above words from the Communist
Manifesto, which are so apropos of the idea. It is no less striking to me that
some who most loudly and continuously proclaim their fidelity to Marxism and
Communism could  advocate state run brothels. Perhaps the vitriolic attacks on
feminism speak more of the fundamental politics at work than all of the
recitations of the Trotskyist creed.

I agree with much of what Yoshie has to say, especially with regard to the
myopic and ahistorical romanticism with which many have chosen to view
sexuality in a sexist society and prostitution in a sexist, capitalist
society. The notion that the spread of markets and commodification through all
human relations is a positive development is a strange posture for anyone who
considers him/herself working for an alternative to capitalism. As Yoshie
points out well, exchange relationships involve a sovereign consumer who can
expect and act on the expectation that it is his needs, on his terms, which
are to be satisfied. This is hardly the basis of a relationship/exchange of
equality, even when sex is separated from an ongoing personal relationship.
She is also absolutely on target when she points out the reality of the sex
market, both in terms of what drives most individuals into prostitution and in
terms of the phenomenon of ‘sexual tourism,' a very large part of which is
child prostitution without the slightest pretense of dignity or consent, much
less pleasure and equality, on the part of the prostitute. And Yoshie is, once
again, very much to the point when she points that ‘sexual tourism' is very
much a part of a racialized sexual economy, in which the consumer is an
European or North American man. These practices, along with the use of Third
World children as laborers in factories, is really global capitalism at its
most rapaciously vile, and it is more than a little appalling to see it
presented in the de-contextualized, sanitized language (no starving, beaten or
exploited Thai or Philippine girls and boys in this idyllic picture) of sexual
libertarianism.

A lot of the discussion strikes me as very similar to one I once had with
someone who was arguing that rape was simply a form of physical assault, no
different from a kick in the teeth or a punch in the stomach, and should not
be considered any differently. It is only the sexual repression of our
society, a repression which false equate our sexuality with personal integrity
and dignity, he said, which lead us to treat rape as different from other
assaults. Whatever the truth of this argument on the highest level of
abstraction (and even there I find it quite problematic), it is so obviously
wrong in terms of how rape is experienced by its survivors in our society that
it can only be suggested by completely abstracting from and ignoring that
experience -- the experience of those who, in this context, are clearly the
oppressed.

What I have difficulty understanding is how Yoshie's points fit into her
continuing insistence that she does not make moral judgments. I would think
that all of the above observations are based on moral judgments, as they
ionvolve implicit moral criteria of what is and what is not morally acceptable
in a sexual act and relationship; they certainly are moral from my point of
view. I have to wonder how much we have been the captives of semantics here.
Maybe we could move forward on this front if she explained how she derives
these positions from her "meta-ethics."

Leo


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