Читать книгу Companion to Feminist Studies - Группа авторов - Страница 60

In the Redstockings Manifesto introduced earlier, the notion of women's value being reduced to “enhanc[ing] men's lives” was identified. While women enhance men's lives as mothers, wives, lovers, and carers, a central concern for radical feminists is women doing this commercially through prostitution: as Thompson contends, “the only reason for the existence of prostitution is to service male sexual desire” (Thompson 2001, p. 42). Radical feminists are abolitionists and “view the industry of prostitution as a cause and consequence of inequality, not as work like any other” (Mackay 2015, p. 214).

The radical feminist opposition to prostitution is multilayered. First, the sex industry is viewed as another contribution to the maintenance of patriarchy. Ginette Castro argues that prostitution is symbolically oppressive, contending that “It is through the act of purchase that patriarchal man humiliates the prostitute whose services he acquires” (Castro 1990, p. 82). Thompson takes this further, saying that “Its sole reason for existence is so that men can pay money to have their penises stimulated to ejaculation by strangers who they hold in contempt” (Thompson 2001, p. 41). Symbolically, prostitution is viewed as a commercial encapsulation of how women are treated in broader society, as valued exclusively for the degree to which they enhance men's lives. Theorists like Jeffreys contend that rather than the sex industry being merely a way to capitalize on men's sexual desires, rather, “men's behaviour in choosing to use women in prostitution is socially constructed out of men's dominance and women's subordination” (Jeffreys 1997, p. 3).

While the misogyny that Castro, Thompson, and Jeffreys allude to is enacted symbolically through the bodies of prostitutes, radical feminists like Mackay quoted earlier, also argue that these acts should also be construed as physical acts of sexual violence. Atkinson, for example, describes prostitution as “institutionalized rape in its most public, brutal form” (Atkinson 1974, p. xlix). Evelina Giobbe articulates a similar argument:

The fact that a john gives money to a woman or a child for submitting to these acts does not alter the fact that he is committing child sexual abuse, rape, and battery; it merely redefines these crimes as prostitution.

(Giobbe 1991, p. 146)

Kathleen Barry takes this same position in her book The Prostitution of Sexuality:

Prostitution is sex bought on men's terms. Rape is sex taken on men's terms. The sex men buy in prostitution is the same they take in rape – sex that is disembodied, enacted on the bodies of women who, for the men, do not exist as human beings, and the men are always in control.

(Barry 1996, p. 37)

While the growth of the industry – fueled by globalization and the internet – keeps prostitution a concern, connected issues like trafficking have made radical feminist positions even more salient.