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Authors: Linda Lemoncheck

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Page 115
it. These industry professionals ask what the feminist charge of degradation could possibly mean in such contexts other than that sex for pure pleasure and public enjoyment is indecent. The searing description by Linda Marchiano, a.k.a. Linda Lovelace, of her coercion and abuse throughout the making of the film
Deep Throat
is in stark contrast to the reports of porn models and actresses who attest to agreeable directors, steady incomes, and the chance to feel glamorous in front of a camera. Some activist prostitutes reject feminist support that requires them to leave prostitution, regarding prostitution as one of many legitimate occupations that women should have the opportunity to pursue.
20
Other prostitutes and ex-prostitutes regard poverty and women's refusal of poverty as the cause and attraction of prostitution. From this perspective, prostitution is a last resort in the absence of dignified and economically sustaining work. Until such work is available, such women advocate the recognition of prostitutes as legal workers. As Nina Lopez-Jones remarks, "We are not interested in legitimizing prostitution, but in legitimizing all prostitute women."
21
Still other ex-prostitutes are much more adamant in their condemnation of prostitution. They perceive all prostitutes as victims and reject decriminalization of prostitution as its solution, since such a measure would, in their opinion, perpetuate "the lie that turning tricks is sexual pleasure or agency for women ."
22
In addition, non-political, mostly silent sex workers who simply want to be left alone to support themselves and their families often find feminists' and prostitutes' rights organizations inevitably serving white, middle-class interests and needs. From this perspective, using sex work to subvert the sexual status quo presumes a political platform and power base that women of color in the industry and poorer sex workers, particularly those from less industrialized nations, simply do not have.
23
Legal responses to sex work as well as research attempts to locate a causal connection between pornography and violence against women are similarly inconsistent. While the 1970 U.S. Commission on Obscenity and Pornography concluded that there was no significant correlation between the use of pornography and crimes against women, the 1986 final report by the Attorney General's Commission on Pornography cited evidence of increased sexual violence against women due to men's exposure to violent sexually explicit material. The commission further claimed that such exposure encourages belief in the myth that women want to be raped. However, questions have since arisen concerning the research methods used for such reports, indicating that the 1970 commission tended to rely on surveys whose data was derived from exposure to nonviolent pornography, while the 1986 commission used surveys by researchers most of whom exposed their subjects only to violent pornography. Still other data suggest that harmful effects can result from pornography that is either violent or nonviolent in its depictions. To further complicate matters, published accounts by researchers and other academics suggest that surveys on how people react to pornographic material may be skewed by the artificiality of the surveys' surroundings, the undetectable duplicity of the respondents, and the fact that what respondents may
say
they will do may not reflect how they would in fact
behave
.
24
In 1983, Minneapolis passed an antipornography civil rights ordinance drafted by Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin that would allow women to sue pornographers for damages that women claimed were the result of using pornography.
 
Page 116
While the ordinance was drafted at the request of the Minneapolis city council, it was ultimately declared unconstitutional, as it was perceived to have the effect of illegally censoring freedom of expression.
25
Gail Pheterson reports that in some countries, like Norway, pornography is censored but prostitution is decriminalized, while in the United States pornography flourishes and prostitution is illegal.
26
Nevada law allows prostitution in townships of 250,000 or less, yet regulations prohibit prostitutes from socializing in many public places after business hours. In most states it is not a crime to
be
a prostitute or to have sex
with
a prostitute, but it is a crime to do any business
as
a prostitute or
for the purposes of
prostitution, such as solicit, pimp, or pander. Since pimping is defined as "living off the earnings of a prostitute," a sex worker's elderly aunt, boyfriend, or baby-sitter can be arrested for pimping. Ironically, the state may collect fines from arrests and not be so charged. Feminists argue that such laws are designed to protect customers, who can be accused of no crime simply by being found with a hooker.
27
Instead of trying to locate a single politically correct voice from within the sex industry, social research, feminism, or the law, I suggest that we adopt the "view from somewhere different" to understand some of the complexity of a commerce in sex whose culture both rewards and punishes women for being the sexual objects of male desire. In this way we can move the dialogue away from the polarization that arises from attempts to reduce and not embrace the tensions that exist among sex workers and feminists alike. My claim in this chapter is that stalemate in feminist dialogue about the nature and value of sex work is inevitable if we require that sex work taken up for profit or pleasure be degrading to women. I will argue that one way to make progress toward understanding whether and how sex work is constructed in the lives of individual women is to reconceptualize a sex worker's life in terms of a dialectical relation between commodified object and active subject, which allows us to view sex work both in terms of women's sexual subordination and in terms of women's sexual liberation from oppressive sexual norms.
For those sex workers who view themselves or would like to view themselves as the sexual subjects of a self-determined life, feminists' accusations of victimization or patriarchal brainwashing appear misplaced. Because the only alternative explanation for the accusation of degradation appears to sex workers to be one of sexual indecency, and because feminists have aligned themselves with moral conservatives on the issue of sex work (albeit for different reasons), feminists who lodge such charges are inevitably stamped with the moniker of sexual puritan. Furthermore, because they fail to appreciate the subject/object dialectic of sex work, feminists critical of the sex industry appear to condemn sex workers who are the true victims of coercion and abuse to a life in which they cannot transcend their subordination by men.
On the other hand, too strong an emphasis on a sex worker's subjectivity ignores the ideological, economic, and legal constraints of patriarchy within which the sex worker plies her trade. My aim is to show the interplay of the subject/object dialectic within sex work and to argue that such an interplay helps explain the apparently contradictory claims that women and men inside and outside the industry make about sex work. I contend that not to acknowledge this interplay forestalls discussion and polarizes debate on the meaning and morality of sex work; and I argue that to
 
Page 117
acknowledge this interplay is to reaffirm an appreciation for the dialectic between gender and sexuality that recognizes the contradiction, complexity, and diversity in the sexual lives of women and men.
In the following pages I describe some of the variety of sex workers and their work. I use this analysis to examine what some feminists mean when they say that sex work is degrading to women. I argue that this ascription of degradation risks investing an undesirable sexual puritanism and moral condescension in many of the legitimate objections feminists raise against sex work. I also contend that viewing sex work as degrading tends to universalize questions of degradation that are context-sensitive and precludes ascriptions of agency or autonomy to sex workers with which many may resist or transcend their subordinate status as dehumanized sexual commodities. I then examine the claim of some sex workers and sex radical feminists that sex work can be pleasurable, profitable, and liberating for women. I argue that unless sex work is situated within a larger cultural framework circumscribed by patriarchal constraints on women's sexuality, the freedom of sex workers to define the terms and conditions of their work is a more restricted one than many sex workers or sex radicals might think. I suggest that understanding sex work as a dialectical relation between commodified object and active subject can better represent women's participation in the sex industry than either anti-industry or sex radical perspectives alone; and I argue that this dialectic reflects the "view from somewhere different" by describing women's sexuality in terms that are neither exclusively oppressive nor unilaterally liberating. In the closing section I show how a feminist sexual ethic of care respect that appreciates the dialectic between gender and sexuality can help feminists and sex workers understand the strengths of each others' positions and find common ground in our efforts to secure the sexual agency and self-definition of all women.
Sex Work, Degradation, and the Sale of Women's Bodies
I may be missing something, but I don't see a lot of women lawyers, fem-
inist or otherwise, selling their asses on the street or looking for a pornog-
rapher with a camera in order to fulfill their sexual agency and I don't
think it is because they are sexually repressed.
Catharine A. MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law
Any normative evaluation of the sex industry is a complex one, made so by the variety of work that is performed and by the diversity of people who perform it. In the following section I describe some of that variety in an effort to avoid definitions of sex work and sex workers that marginalize or silence some of the voices within the industry. I also examine some of the ways in which the sex industry may mirror sexual relations purported to be of a noncommercial sort, in order to question the severe dichotomy between sex work and nondegrading sex that some might claim. I will then discuss some of the difficulties with arguing that sex work is degrading to women, as a way of previewing the subject/object dialectic that I believe better represents the variety of sex workers and their work.
 
Page 118
Conceptual Issues
Stripping, erotic dancing, prostitution, and pornographic film acting or photo modeling are the most common and best-known forms of work within the sex industry; they also comprise the sex work most often discussed by feminists. The picture becomes immediately complicated, however, by the variety and hierarchy within the professions themselves. Is the removal of a stripper's costume total or partial? Is it done at a private party or a public club? Does it include table dancing where customers are in close proximity? Does it include stage dancing in which the dancer performs with more theatrical autonomy? Does the strip show include a live sex show? Is the sex heterosexual or homosexual, group or in pairs, s/m or vanilla? Who owns the club, and how are dancers hired?
28
Is the prostitute a streetwalker or a call girl? Teenager or adult? Beaten or befriended? Part-time or full-time? Man or woman?
29
Is the prostitute's work in a private home, motel room, massage parlor, car? Does the work include bondage or discipline? Does the work involve intercourse, fellatio, or only masturbation, the "hand finish" of some massage parlors?
30
Does the work require genital contact with a sex partner, some contact, or none? Is the pornographic work for film, video, magazine layout, computer digitalization? Is the actress also a writer or director? Is the film sex simulated or real? Do we see her bound? Do we see her face? Do we see her unclothed? Is she Anglo or a woman of color? Young or old? There is also a debatable class hierarchy within the industry, in which porn modeling or private club dancing is at the top and prostitution is at the bottom. Within prostitution itself, expensive diplomatic escorts rank high and streetwalkers rank low. In Western industrialized nations, women of color tend to be concentrated at the lower end of the hierarchy, often comprising the majority of streetwalkers in any given city but the minority of prostitutes over all. Streetwalkers in less industrialized nations will rank lower than women of color in countries with greater capital incomes.
31
My point is that even when we limit a moral analysis of sex work to just one profession within the industry, this limitation does not guarantee that we will capture all of the variety within that profession. The social location of any one sex worker will affect how she sees herself; how club managers, customers, or porn producers treat her; how feminists understand her circumstances; and how society stigmatizes her, and all of these factors will affect any assessment of the "degradation" of her work. One of my aims in this chapter is to fill out the general charge that sex work is degrading to women, by supplying a variety of examples from the sex industry to illustrate both the charge and any responses to it.
32
This is not to suggest that there is no overlap across genres. Strippers service private customers in hotel rooms after club performances, porn models do table dancing, call girls get hired for magazine layouts. On the other hand, the hierarchy in the sex industry that I mentioned earlier can make it an insult to call a stripper a whore, whereas prostitutes often refer to themselves and each other as whores as a positive declaration of their work.
33
Indeed, some erotic dancers who refuse to dance "totally nude" regard their dancing as much in aesthetic terms as sexual ones.
34
Some sex workers regard pornographic work as safer and more familiar than the street, while
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