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Authors: Linda Lemoncheck

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Page 32
real alternatives.
11
The woman who "chooses" to earn money as a prostitute is an especially complex and controversial case of genuine choice. Homeless women and teenage runaways have been forced into the sex trade by abusive traffickers whose sexual coercion relies on a combination of economic blackmail, psychological manipulation, and threats of physical violence. Pimps often threaten runaways with the specter of jail sentences or with their return to the abusive familial or institutional settings from which they have fled. Some pimps regularly beat their prostitutes or abuse one as an example to the rest. Moreover, none of this treatment indicates the level of emotional blackmail involved in making a vulnerable young girl feel wanted and needed by an apparently powerful male. Poor families have sold their children into sexual service. Children have been kidnapped, chained, or imprisoned in brothels. If a woman is promiscuous only if her sex is noncoercive, then women who are the literal sex slaves of men cannot be called promiscuous solely in virtue of the number of their sexual partners.
However, being forced into prostitution can take much subtler forms. Many poor women inexperienced in the job market report feeling forced
by their circumstances
into prostitution because they perceive no alternative to support themselves and their families. In cultures where an infertile woman may be ostracized from her family of origin or where there are simply too many mouths to feed and too little paid work for men, women may regard prostitution as their sole source of survival. In an environment that restricts women's economic opportunities and defines women in terms of their sexual availability to men, prostitution is often the only means women have of earning a living, whether they prefer prostitution or not. While some prostitutes report that they choose their work for the money, flexibility, and independence sex work affords them, others report finding the stigma, exploitation, and abuse in an illegal (and, some would say, immoral) line of work impossible to avoid. The stereotype of the drugged-out prostitute is often a startlingly real picture of a woman using the mind-numbing effect of narcotics to blot out the emotional and physical pain of her work. Many erstwhile prostitutes liken their experience to rape.
12
Under such conditions, describing all prostitutes as "choosing" their line of work ignores the complexity of women's cultural, economic, and sexual oppression under patriarchy. The epithets "slut" and "whore" are commonly used to denigrate promiscuous women who are perceived as freely pursuing an immoral sex life. Such epithets reveal the socially degrading stigma of sex work, but they also reveal how little is understood about the nature of many prostitutes' "choice'' of work. This is not to deny that many of us feel social and economic pressures to work for a living or that many individuals have jobs that they do not particularly enjoy. What I am suggesting is that many prostitutes in particular, and many women in general, may be under the kinds of social constraints that are not simply influential but, rather, coercive. If the victim of rape is not considered sexually promiscuous because her sex is performed under circumstances for which there is no real alternative and for which she cannot determine the conditions of her consent, then we must seriously question the ascription of promiscuity to those women whose variously oppressive conditions compel them to become prostitutes.
My conceptual analysis of promiscuity also suggests that the sexual partners of the promiscuous person are typically
other people
, although special cases of sexual ac-
 
Page 33
tivity with animals may variously be described as promiscuous. A compulsive and solitary masturbator is not usually described as promiscuous when there is no sexual partner present to share or encourage sexual stimulation, even if such stimulation is achieved with a wide variety of objects in a wide variety of ways. Popular disdain of masturbation might label such behavior neurotic or oversexed, even promiscuously perverse, but not promiscuous
simpliciter
. Make this same masturbator into a frequent exhibitionist whose sexual stimulation is, in part, his public display to a wide audience, and the behavior begins to look more like promiscuity. What this example suggests is that some so-called perverse sexual behavior may be considered promiscuous when that behavior engages other persons for sexual satisfaction; but other forms of sexual perversity may not be promiscuous because of the lack of that engagement. An especially interesting case is the husband who is sexually faithful to his wife except for his occasional and private indulgence in bestiality. I suspect that if she were to discover him, his wife would brand him sexually perverse before she accused him of promiscuity, although a person with a favorite pet sheep has a decidedly different sort of sex life than someone who takes on the whole flock. Is the latter sort of person "promiscuously perverse," "perversely promiscuous," or something else entirely? A promiscuously perverse man sounds like someone who practices a wide variety of perversions alone or with partners, or, like the bougainvillea, exhibits an abundance or profusion of one kind of activity. On the other hand, a perversely promiscuous man sounds more like someone in active pursuit of several sexual partners, where the pursuit is itself somehow perverse or where each of his many partners can indulge his perverse sexual tastes.
Frederick Elliston has written one of the few sustained, albeit dated, accounts of promiscuity in the philosophical literature. In that account, he attempts to justify a set of individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for sexual promiscuity. For example, Elliston implicitly acknowledges my claim that the promiscuous person is a sexually active person when he says that the telos, or goal, of promiscuity is sexual intercourse.
13
For Elliston, this telos is not an incidental or inconstant feature of sexual promiscuity. He stipulates that a
necessary condition
of sexual promiscuity is sexual intercourse or "copulation." While copulation can be described as oral or anal, Elliston appears to have only vaginal penetration by the penis in mind: he states that while not every seduction succeeds, "the intention to
consummate the relation
must be present on all occasions and realized on some" (my italics).
14
A suspiciously convenient consequence of this requirement is that married men can rationalize that they have not been promiscuous because they have "only" engaged with other partners in oral or anal sex, sex with dildos or vibrators, or any other sex not requiring the vaginal penetration by the penis of "consummated" sexual intercourse.
15
Moreover, in the contemporary language of feminism, to require of promiscuity the intention to consummate heterosexual relations betrays a kind of heterosexism: some lesbians are sexually promiscuous but have no intention of engaging in the penile penetration that Elliston implies is necessary for promiscuous sex; and promiscuous gay men eschew the heterosexual penetration typified by "consummated'' sexual intercourse. Moreover, the gay or heterosexual promiscuous pedophile need not "intend to consummate the relation" with the children he fondles in order to be sexually promiscuous with them; and certainly we can imagine the
 
Page 34
promiscuous heterosexual who, out of fear of AIDS,
never
"copulates" with his sexual partner, oral, anal, or otherwise, but strokes and caresses a different woman every night because it turns him on. What will become even clearer as we examine more of Elliston's analysis is that Elliston's insistence on a single and comprehensive definition of sexual promiscuity invites a host of counterexamples. Such an insistence obscures any legitimate distinctions he wishes to make, as in his distinction between unfulfilled sexual intentions and promiscuous sex. In many cases Elliston simply misses important features that a feminist appreciation of the dialectic between gender and sexuality would not ignore, such as the absence of voluntary sex involving rape victims and women compelled into prostitution or the promiscuous nature of some gay sex. Elliston's apparent "view from nowhere," which does not countenance the bias of social location, will become especially noticeable when I describe, later in this section, the investment that a patriarchal society has in conjoining intimacy with women's heterosexual exclusivity.
Elliston also argues that "
both
partners must be
adults
"
16
(Elliston's and my italics). A cavil, perhaps, but sexually promiscuous people have been known to have sex with more than one person at one time, so the "both" in Elliston's phrase seems too conservative. I would also take exception to the claim that the partners of a sexually promiscuous person must be adults: the pedophile who repeatedly fondles a variety of children is a
sexually promiscuous
pedophile, in contrast to one whose sexual gratification comes from fondling children but who has little opportunity to satisfy the desire. In fact, nowhere in Elliston's analysis is there any indication that the so-called sexual perversionsbestiality, pedophilia, incest, and the likeare sexual preoccupations of persons to which the term "promiscuous" can be applied.
17
Elliston also stipulates that promiscuous sex is necessarily repetitive: "[T]he pursuit of a new partner
must
recur" (my italics).
18
I agree that someone like the sexually faithful lesbian in a monogamous relationship is not promiscuous, nor is the man whose one sexual experiment consists of an ill-conceived one-night stand; and I agree with Elliston that to stipulate the precise number of partners required for promiscuous sex would be an arbitrary judgment that creates more problems that it solves by limiting the contexts in which the term is actually used. But is repetition an
essential
feature of promiscuity for all speakers who refer to promiscuous sex?
Let us return to my first proposition about condom distribution. Many (though certainly not all) parents who believe that distributing condoms to high school students encourages them to be promiscuous are not simply or even primarily worried about their children pursuing new and different sexual partners from the ones their children already have. These parents are worried about their children's having
premarital sex
. Condom distribution, many parents fear, will give their children
the license to have sex
when those children would otherwise abstain. Are such parents misusing the word "promiscuous"? Is the proposition only referring to those parents who fear that their already sexually active children, now with steady sexual partners, will be encouraged to "play the field"? Or has Elliston misidentified a necessary condition of sexual promiscuity?
To answer these questions, we must discover why someone might think that even one instance of premarital sex is promiscuous sex. Ironically, it is Elliston, convinced as he is of the necessity of repetition, who provides us with the answer. It is not only
 
Page 35
the specter of a series of different sexual partners that a concerned parent contemplates when she worries about her child's promiscuity. It is the
noncommittal
nature of the sex. As Elliston states, "Promiscuity asserts a freedom from the obligation within or without marriage to 'love, honor, and obey' and a freedom to engage in sex with any peer who agrees. These refusals to issue promissory notes for affection and support throughout an indefinite future and to issue a guarantee of sexual exclusivity are promiscuity's most significant departures from the traditional sexual norm."
19
For many parents, premarital sex is necessarily noncommittal sex, since it lacks the requisite "promissory note" of sexual and emotional commitment that the traditional Judeo-Christian marriage offers. For these parents, promiscuity is eradicated not through sexual exclusivity alone but through the sexual commitment inherent in traditional heterosexual marriage. A father who holds such views may accuse his teenage daughter of immaturity or foolishness if she marries her high school classmate, but when she marries, he will no longer consider her promiscuous.
The belief that the sexual commitment of traditional marriage is the antithesis of promiscuity is given further credence by many speakers who accuse the
adulterous
spouse of promiscuity. However, equating adultery with promiscuity obscures some compelling alternative uses of the term "promiscuous." Suppose George marries Sarah, his first and only sexual partner, and stays married and sexually faithful to her for twenty years. However, he suddenly finds himself extremely attracted to one of his newer professional colleagues, so taken, in fact, that he carefully and successfully executes a steamy night with her in a convention hotel room. Has George committed adultery? Yes. But is he promiscuous? If you use the term "promiscuous" based on the belief that promiscuity is the opposite of marital commitment, then your answer will be "yes." But if you use the term believing that promiscuity is the voluntary and
repetitious
pursuit of
different
sexual partners, then your answer must be "no." George's adultery consists of a single affair; and until we have more information about his disposition to repeat such an affair with a different colleague, George's adultery does not constitute promiscuity for all speakers who use the term. Even if George feels terrific after his affair, pursuing his relationship with the same colleague for three more years with no intention of telling his sexually available and doting wife, we can call George a ''sneak," a "rat," an "ingrate," "insensitive and self-serving," but we cannot call him "promiscuous" when the term "promiscuity" is used to refer to the repetitious pursuit of different sexual partners. This is why a woman who is unmarried throughout her life, but who in her mature years carries on a sexually exclusive relationship with a man she met in her square-dancing class, can describe herself as promiscuous only in her youth. If promiscuous sex is not pre-or extramarital sex but merely the repetitious pursuit of different sexual partners, then when one stops this repetition, one stops being promiscuous.
If parents complain that their already sexually active teens will be further induced to engage in the pursuit of different sexual partners, then their worry is one of promiscuity characterized this way. But if parents are concerned that condom distribution will encourage their teens to try sex out when they otherwise would abstain, then these parents' use of the term "promiscuity" may well be linked to their concern over the absence of their children's marital commitment, or some equally binding sexual and emotional commitment, to their sexual partners. For many parents, since for-
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