Читать книгу The Prostitution of Sexuality - Kathleen Barry - Страница 11

Although often represented as sexually liberating, prostitution, fitted to male customer expectations, is a reactionary, regressive, and repressive sexual act. The market is driven by secrecy. Customers require anonymity and secrecy, and therefore prostitutes’ protection from exposing their identities. Secret sex is what they buy. The origins of sexual repression can be found in the secreted buying of women’s bodies. Marginalization of women in prostitution stems from this protection of the customer’s secret sex, his requirement of anonymity and secrecy. He requires that she be the “other,” the outsider, marginalized to sustain his secret. Secrecy is a foundation to sexual power in prostitution as sex industries display women on printed pages, in cages, on billboards, in storefront windows, but men, the customers, carry out their sex purchases in secret. The clandestine character of prostitution is part of the sexual experience and excitement customers buy. When we reach a time, as we surely will if feminism does not vigorously intervene, when prostitution is so normalized that men do not invoke secrecy to sustain their purchase of sex, we will have reached the dystopia of Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale where prostituting women is the only sex.

In the first instance and the final analysis, prostitution is not about women at all. The fact is that whether women claim prostitution as a right or condemn it as an exploitation of them is irrelevant to the promotion and continuation of prostitution. Prostitution and traffic in women are not perpetuated based on whether or not women want to do prostitution or are forced into it. Women are in prostitution because men buy them for sex; men buy children for sex, and men buy other men for sex. Sometimes society is concerned about buying of children. Sometimes society is preoccupied with men being bought for prostitution. Rarely does anyone question men buying women for sex, despite the fact that in some countries women in prostitution are no longer counted in the thousands but in the millions.

Prostitution is a male consumer market. The intense public focus on women’s will, her choice or her “right to prostitute,” deflects attention from the primary fact that prostitution exists first because of male customer demand. Sex industries are in place—from trafficking to brothels—to provide female bodies to satisfy that market demand. What matters in terms of the prostitution market and male demand is that there are female bodies provided for sex exchange. How or why they get there is irrelevant to the market.