Introduction
Living on morally wrong earnings and exercising control over prostitutes are criminal offenses. Interestingly, at the same time as constructing prostitutes as a social class of ethically different and sexually indiscriminate women, the social critics also see them as different from other women by virtue of some type of relations that they possessed. Radical feminists see prostitution as a social problem caused by the low status of women in society and the patriarchal structure of society (Campbell and O’Neill 78).
When discussing a proposed structure of prostitution, radical feminists recommend that young prostitutes should be remanded at an early stage in their working career in order to permit a full social report to be submitted. Prostitution is a social problem that affected society and its communal life. Prostitution is considered a criminal offense because of its illegal status in society. In practice, the only way that prostitution can be practiced without committing a criminal offense is as a one-to-one agreement between two consenting adults in the private sphere. Furthermore, while the law does not regulate the exact encounters or relations between prostitutes and men, it does control other relations that prostitutes have – mainly those which are judged to be abusive of prostitutes (Campbell and O’Neill 76).
Prostitution Defined
In terms of radical feminism, prostitution is a result of gender differences and a dominant role of men in society. Sanders argues that women’s oppression by men is generated by
- a labor market that is structured on the notion of men breadwinning and women dependetoy, which leads in the exclusion of women from effective economic contribution, and
- the segregation of domestic and child care duties from the labor market.
Sanders supposes that female employees with few marketable skills and little training are especially disadvantaged by such social system.
For Sanders, women’s oppression and segregation are created by social and economic problems in which women have limited access to economic and financial means of supporting themselves and any dependents women may have, separately from men. Consequently, some women, of need, have to find another means of earning a living. In this part of her analysis, Sanders sees prostitutes as ‘economic class and as employees who are the same as other female workers and not different by virtue of being criminal or socially undesirable people who are part of a abnormal social culture (Sanders 44).
Matthews defines prostitution as an economic activity. “Prostitutes are women workers whose choice of employment is conditioned by ‘capitalist relations of power’ and who resist those relations by achieving a degree of economic independence” (44). In this situation, Matthews is trying to capture the fundamental influences structuring and channeling ordinary but oppressed women in a certain direction (towards involvement in prostitution) while accepthat female workerrkers do have choices. The evident disagreement between constructing prostitutes as both the same as and different from other female employees is resolved by Matthews’s explanation of the legal discrimination experienced by prostitutes (Matthews 31).
Male Oppression
Noting particularly the sex-dominant behavior, the critics emphasize dorsoventral or male mounting. The main person in a pair did percent cent of the mounting regardless of its sex (Letherby et a 31). In natural social groups made up of both sexes, the dominant role usually falls to the men because of their superior size and strength and, as an effect, critics think of dorsoventral mounting as typically masculine. Its correlation with male supremacy may help to explain the oppressed behavior frequently observed in immature persons. Later, when the sex drive has become more specific, male behavior naturally predominates.
Oppressive male approaches remain restricted for the most part to the expression of supremacy. This would support the interpretation of prostitution behavior as an admission of social weakness and a supplication to the more powerful for favors. At this time a woman that normally enjoyed high dominance assumed a secondary role. In cases where it was usual for a woman to dominate a male, oestrus caused a reversal in relative rank (Sanders 20). Radical feminists underline that somewhat different findings are reported for free-ranging rhesus women. Under these conditions, men are at all times totally dominant over prostitute women (Day 43).
During oestrus, a woman’s status actually rises within her own sex group. This makes it difficult for the man to maintain his dominance, and he may have to use force to bring the woman to submission. At the same time males show more broadmindedness for the women, admitting her to closer association than normally and allowing her to feed with him from small food trays. The woman seems to gain this increased tolerance both by copulating with the male and by the mutual grooming which she seems to invite during the period of sexual skin activity (Letherby et a 34).
In the study to which critics referred above, ratings on dominance as well as on sexual behavior of prostitutes are determined (Letherby et a 34). They revealed a universal tendency for the men to lead and control and for the female to follow and assume a secondary role. It is this men violence which is responsible for the atypical copulations occurring outside of oestrus. To the command of a eccentric, unfriendly, dominant man, the more timid women may acquiesce regardless of sexual stage or preference. Other experiments are specifically designed to determine the effect of oestrus on dominance status following a technique introduced by Maslow, food tidbits are offered one at a time to a pair of prostitutes.
The results time and again showed the dominant person, whether male or female, to yield priority at the food chute to a woman partner in heat. In mates, the male that is usually in control of the situation permitted his woman to take all the food in exchange for sexual favors while she was in her swelling. In the less usual cases of women dominance, it is the women that yielded privilege during heat.
Where two women are paired, the dominant one was likely to grant privilege to the secondary during the latter’s swelling. If the dominant parsons are receptive herself, she might encourage or permit the other to act as men. In experiments where the expectation of success was more nearly equalized for the partners by a technique of prefeeding, genital swelling was still a decided asset in the females’ attempt to obtain food at the chute. They enjoyed this advantage whether paired with men or other women whose ovaries had been removed (Letherby et a 56).
In prostitutes, oestrus is responsible for readjustments in the social relationship between the genders and sexes. It would be an oversimplification to describe these changes as shifts in dominance status. In the prostitutes, although the male maintains strict dominance over the female, he allows her greater privileges than when she is not receptive. In the prostitutes the general pattern is for dominance in the food situation to be temporarily traded in for sexual accommodation.
An oestrous woman may entice her dominant mate away from the chute or, on the other hand, may funding privilege to her subordinate man presumably in return for favors. Analogous conclusions are applicable to women pairings. Oestrus affects prostitutes’ dominance, to be sure, but does not bear the fixed relationship to it that one might expect if the physiological factors are solely responsible. In the prostitutes, the physiological state affords a means of shifting the existing dominance status in line with the motivation uppermost at the moment. At the anthropoid level, the sociosexual relations depend on shared recognition and agreement. To the biological function of mating, companionship is added as an end in itself. As we have noted, personality differences, with all they entail in the way of compatibility or its opposite, become conspicuous.
Like married couples, prostitute mates present a variety of conjugal pictures (Day 98). Although there are as definite sex differences in behavior as in figure, independence seems more influential than fixed traits of masculinity and femininity. Many factors affect social relations and responses. Significant as are such physical characteristics as size, strength, and vigor, we should be careful not to underestimate emotional traits. In conclusion, critics may point out that within the primates, biological mechanisms are increasingly less rigid in their operation and the social influences more numerous and intricate in their effects. Personality makes its appearance, and sexual as well as other specific behaviors must be viewed in relationship to the total structure (Letherby et a 65).
The patriarchal home, the established pattern for economic as well as social reasons, offers little opportunity for independent family living, but the need for it is recognized, especially among the modern younger generation. The higher up in the social and economic scale and the more educated, the greater is the number of separate families, each with its own compound. But whether there are separate homes or not, the feeling for the large family group remains and the dominant position of the head of the family is an accepted fact.
Yet, though the traditional authority of the husband may not in general be questioned, educated women have considerable influence in family affairs and there is a growing sense of partnership in marriage which is the natural result of mutual interests through education. Social life is also reaching beyond the narrow limits of the immediate family to include the ramifications of the larger family relationship, and even the broader circle of close friends (Moghissi, 92). The degree of social intermingling varies with individual families. A number of young married couples who are quite advanced and Westernized meet regularly for small social gatherings in their homes.
These normal social groups of young married couples, though numerically negligible, represent a significant departure from the traditional social segregation required by the veil, and are an example for other liberal groups. The members are usually those who studied in Europe and America and most of them are in educational or Government service, or young business men with their wives, who may have been in the United States.
Of basic concern to educated Afghan women, as to Moslem women elsewhere, are the two related problems of polygamy and divorce. The uneducated women accept fatalistically whatever comes. The small educated minority is aware of social injustice and legal inequality, but as a whole makes no vocal protest. Some returned students seriously discuss polygamy and voice an adverse opinion (Sanders 20).
Economic Inequality
Letherby underlines that not only are prostitutes the same as other women, but that prostitution is the same as any other form of business activity. Thus, in terms of radical feminism, prostitution is activity caused by oppression and dominance of men in all legal spheres. Jeffreys’ idea of proposition is that this activity is like any other form of work; thus prostitution displaces the construction of social order and legal activity and replaced it with the structure of prostitutes as workers.
Letherby (12) states that the economic position and poverty descriptive model has shifted and added an additional difficulty to the types of issue that can be asked about prostitutes and prostitution and the possible answer that can be provided. Jeffreys combines this with a separation between the practice of selling sex and prostitution as a social institution, which enabled the author to raise questions about how women’s involvement in prostitution is planned by the same (or similar) social, landscape and ideological activities as those structuring and conditioning all female’s financial participation.
Davidson (34) underlines that the close link in the chain of views about female’s involvement in prostitution that men’s oppression and criminal subculture explanations explored is a multifaceted development in the story of prostitutes. In addition to following a radical feminist analysis, the social disorganization and criminal subculture explanations questioned (1) the exact social conditions in which participation in prostitution becomes likely, and (2) the different approaches in which prostitutes make sense of their lives in sex selling. The financial position and oppression explanatory model picked up and explored the first of these two issues and it is that expansion which is outlined by Davidson (65).
One of the more important consequences of Davidson’s idea of the difference between prostitutes and other women is that little theoretical freedom is left for others to follow more elaborate and multifaceted issues about the similarities between prostitutes and other women. On the other hand, this analysis does offer some promising theoretical explanation of prostitution and its role in the patriarchal world. Of particular significance is supposition that the differences that exist between prostitutes and other women are primarily social. This explanation is maintained throughout analysis, for failure to do so would have prevented an assessment of the unique and socially specific circumstances of existence for prostitutes.
As noted above, this assumption provokes questions about the specificity of the communal processes experienced by prostitute female workers, which in turn provokes an assessment of the specific sets of practices and relationships in which prostitutes are located.
Thus an analysis that places prostitute women in their culturally and historically specific social context is enabled. Davidson (22) deals with the social conditions that influence female’s participation in prostitution and their personal interpretations of those conditions including oppression and gender inequality. The authors agree that patriarchal structure of community and lack of state support results in the way the women themselves look for the prostitution experience and it is this, not the objective reality of the situation, which influences their economic situation and social behavior.
Gender Differences
The ma,e oppression and criminal behavior provides a more complex account of women’s participation in prostitution, and some of the possibilities inherent in the pathological explanations are picked up and developed. Although Campbell and O’Neill (32) follow a more intricate (and more sociological) set of issues about women’s involvement in prostitution, they are, however, reluctant to shed all notions of pathology. The chant of the notion of psychological deviance in what is otherwise a sociological analysis of prostitution, is partly influenced by Letherby’s (87) totalising message of ‘difference’, which resulted in her failure to provide a fully social analysis of prostitution.
Men see women as a weak gender that needs control. Thus this control is achieved by objectifying the bodies of women and oppressing them. Females who become prostitutes feel a state of drifting and disconnection from community; a social rootlessness that is resulting on various social deficiencies, so that participation in prostitution offers them ‘compensation’.
Social Perception of Prostitution
Radical feminists underline that prostitutes can be seen as poor women but this explanation does not replace the conceptual differentiation between prostitutes and other women. As an alternative, one of the issues informing the three analyses was: why do all poor women not become prostitutes? This issue opens the theoretical gap for questions about the moral differences between prostitutes and other women, which in turn created the circumstances for an increasingly intricate body of knowledge about sex workers. Therefore prostitutes’ failure to conform to expected behaviors, according to the social structure of gender roles in society, must be evidence of their difference and their social oppression (Matthews 65).
Brooks-Gordon (31) states that conception of distinction structures a concomitant origin of similarity between prostitutes and other women, ultimately prostitutes are presented as completely different from other women in all-aspects of their community lives. In terms of radical feminism, this building of difference is combined in Brooks-Gordon’s text with the removal of the separation line she drew earlier between prostitutes and prostitution: prostitute women became synonymous with their subcultural location.
Having discussed symbol of prostitutes as different from other women by virtue of their oppression and segregation prior to their involvement in prostitution and their subcultural location afterwards, it is essential to note that, inconsistently, the author also sees prostitutions as being the same as other women. As noted above, the hypothesis that all people are “forever searching for ways of belonging’ permitted her to invoke a normalizing argument whereby prostitutes are normal social actors embedded in deviant social networks” (Brooks-Gordon 65). By radical feminists, prostitutes are also depicted as the same as other women because they occupy a social culture that exists in tandem with ‘normal society’.
For Day (41), the prostitute social culture is not different (in the sense of radically distinct and separate) from normal community, but only a refraction from normal society. This conceptualization of the social culture position of prostitutes is not unique to Day (42). Many of the explanations of deviance that have highlighted the social culture position of females have represented deviant social culture as existing either in opposition culture, whereby the principles and norms that guide women behavior and actions are a response against mainstream culture, or in tandem with mainstream culture, whereby the social norms and values are a vague mirror-image of mainstream norms and principles.
The oppression of women and criminal subculture explanatory model focuses on women’s relationship to, and position in, the wider community to explain their involvement in prostitution. Issues are asked about the extent to which female workers are segregated, or cut off, from legitimate or acceptable communal relationships and institutions, and attention is focused on the degree to which they may have ‘fallen through’ what are perceived as normal, constraining social groups and relations such as the family or employment.
In addressing what it means to be a sex worker, integration and engagement in illegal and often illegal relations and institutions is stressed so that the degree of involvement in, for instance, a criminal subculture, can be mentioned. In its ideal type, the community dislocation and criminal behavior model posits a ‘social problem, whereby involvement in prostitution is seen as the result of subtle and complex social segregation.
Thus, for instance, prostitute women are seen as belonging to and committed to a normative society that makes their involvement in prostitution virtually inevitable. Klinger’s (16) analysis is a long description of the various social practices that females who become prostitutes go through and the environments they occupy, and how those practices and environments ‘guide’ and ‘channel’ them into low classes. By examining those practices the social researcher can uncover Klinger’s construction of prostitutes as social satellites.
By radical feminism, prostitution is seen as constituting two particular evils: a problem of public annoyance and a problem of community sexual health. Hence prostitutes are seen as the objects of both criminal justice (through arrest, conviction and the imposition of fines) and sexual and community health interference (educating them in terms of their high-risk practices). The circumstances that make these interventions promising are structured and underpinned by the fact that current authorized framework constitutes prostitute females as unlike other women by virtue of their supposedly diverse sexual principles and morals and by the assumed threat that prostitutes’ bodies and lifestyle pose to the general community.
Campbell and O’Neill (41) underline that understanding of prostitutes is constituted within the spaces created by other theories, and thus the issues that can be asked about women’s involvement in prostitution and the explanations that can be provided have become increasingly complicated and detailed. For instance, conceiving of sex workers as different and low social class because they inhabit a criminal community a gap that makes issues and explanations about the specificity of the different social processes experienced by prostitute women rather more complex.
Radical feminists reject the idea of mental differences but see prostitution as social and economic oppression only. It is the body of sociological and criminological literature on position, furthermore, that provides the basis for assumption that sex workers are indeed both different from and the same as ordinary women.
Certainly the sex workers discussed above are described with the purpose of exploring how they make sense of the contradiction that has been the central point of scholastic work on prostitution, that is, their being both different from and similar to other females. Prostitutes are not located within the restraining and constraining relations and institutions that lock non-prostitute women into ‘legitimate’ community and into regular and accepted practices and ways of behaving. Females who become prostitutes live outside mainstream community. In this respect Letherby (31) constructs prostitutes as different from non-prostitute women by virtue and as a result of inequalities and gender differences existed in modern society.
In sum, radial feminists have an impact on consciousness and self-identity of prostitutes. The importance of feminist movement is that it helps women to overcome old traditions and adopt a life style, start education and enter workforce. At the same time that equal opportunity policies are beginning to be implemented, many policy-makers and activists are questioning the extent to which equal opportunity policy is an effective strategy for reducing the wage gap.
Instead, it is being suggested that equal opportunity policy needs to be supplemented by other policies specifically designed to attack that problem head-on. Once a female involves in prostitution a process of stabilization occurs. The female worker finds a sense of embeddedness and belonging that was before impossible: Prostitutes become ‘normal’, if abnormal, members of community in that they are hooked into specific and deviant social organizations and structures.
References
Brooks-Gordon, B. The Price of Sex: Prostitution, Policy and Society. Willan Publishing, 2006.
Campbell, R., O’Neill, Sex work Now. Willan Publishing, 2006.
Day, S. On the Game: Women and Sex Work (Anthropology, Culture and Society). Pluto Press, 2007.
Davidson, J. Prostitution, Power and Freedom. The University of Michigan Press, 1999.
Jeffreys, Sh. The Idea of Prostitution. Spinifex Press, 1997.
Klinger, K. Prostitution Humanism and a Woman’s Choice. The Humanist, 63, 2003: 16-18.
Leuchtag, A. Human Rights Sex Trafficking and Prostitution. The Humanist, 63, 2003: 10-12.
Letherby, G. et al. Sex as Crime? Willan Publishing, 2009.
Matthews, R. Prostitution, Politics and Policy. Routledge-Cavendish; 1 edition, 2008.
Sanders, T. Paying for Pleasure: Men Who Buy Sex. Willan Publishing; illustrated edition edition, 2008.