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Prostitution, the abolition of the victim, and post-modernism's defence of the status quo
Posted by Stuart at Scottish Socialist Youth on September 25, 2010
http://ssy.org.uk/2010/09/prostitution-the-abolition-of-the-victim-and-post-modernisms-defence-of-the-status-quo/#comments
I’ve just finished reading a book by the Swedish socialist,
anarchist and feminist Kajsa Ekis Ekman which she primarily devotes to
debunking the arguments used to justify prostitution and the
surrogate-mothering industry. Her book was written as a response to the
media’s misrepresentation of prostitution as some sort of smart and
glamorous career choice for young women to make and at the increasing
number of post-modernist academics and ‘queer-theorists’ who have been
questioning Sweden’s prostitution laws by, among other things,
ludicrously trying to frame prostitution as something ‘transgressive’
and which ‘challenges gender norms’.
The abolition of the victim
Ekis Ekman highlights at length the tactics which the
supporters of prostitution have adopted in recent years and exposes how
false, absurd and damaging their arguments really are. Particularly
interesting I think is when she writes about the attempts that have
been made to abolish the term ‘victim’ from the debate around
prostitution. To be a victim has come to be seen as something shameful
and to refer to someone as a victim is, according to the
post-modernists, to deny them their ‘agency’. Ekman exposes why this
lie has come about and what wider political consequences it has. Her
point here is summed up in a review of the book in Dagens Nyheter:
“To be able to defend that women sell their bodies
(and that men buy them) one must first abolish the victim and instead
redefine the prostitute as a sex worker, a strong woman who knows what
she wants, a businesswoman. The sex worker becomes a sort of new
version of the ‘happy hooker’.
“Ekis Ekman shows in a convincing way how this happens through
a rhetoric which portrays the victim position as a trait of character
instead of using the correct definition of a victim: someone who is
affected by something. In such a way the terrible reality in which
women in prostitution find themselves is concealed. The fear of the
‘victim’ in the prostitution debate … is something which mirrors
neo-liberalism’s general victim hate – since all talk of the vulnerable
person immediately reveals an unjust society. Through making the victim
taboo can one legitimise class inequalities and gender discrimination,
for if there is no victim there is no perpetrator.”
Those who defend prostitution, as Ekis Ekman points out in an
interview in the socialist newspaper Flamman, “have a contempt for
weakness, a cold and cynical view of humanity, which has the
consequence that you only have yourself to blame”.
To see evidence of this we need look no further than the works
of ‘academics’ such as Laura Agustin, someone who has gone as far as to
deny the existence of human trafficking. Victims of pimps and human
traffickers are referred to, in her language, as “migrant sex workers”
who actively choose their situation. Discussing women brought into
western countries by criminal gangs and locked into flats and
prostituted for months at a time, Agustin writes:
“These circumstances where women live in sex
establishments and seldom leave them before, without being asked, moved
elsewhere receive great attention in the media and it’s taken as a
given that this involves a complete denial of freedom. But in many
cases migrant workers prefer this arrangement for a number of reasons.
If they don’t leave the area they don’t waste any money and, if they
have no work permit, they feel safer in a controlled environment. If
someone else finds the meeting places for them and books their
appointments it means they don’t have to do it themselves. If they have
come on a 3 month tourist visa they want to devote as much time as
possible to making money”.
Another sickening example from Ekman’s book is that in
Australia, a country which has long championed legalised prostitution,
victims of child abuse have came to be referred to as “child sex
workers”. An official report there talks about a 9 year old abuse
victim having been “offered a warm bed and a nice meal” by his abusers
and of “thinking it was fantastic” when the men who raped him gave him
$50. Any details of the crime he was subjected to are on the other hand
almost completely absent, apart from the words: “sex took place”.
What these examples all have in common is that they remove the
focus from the perpetrator. They make it sound like the abused,
prostitutes, children, the victims of poverty, drug abuse and economic
exploitation, have themselves chosen the situation in which they find
themselves. By changing the definition of the victim so as to turn it
into a personal trait, by turning ‘victim’ and ’subject’ into the
opposite of each other, the post-modernists lift away all talk of the
deeper structures and power differences which affect people’s lives,
something which of course suits perfectly the interests of the rich and
powerful by masking the oppressive and unjust nature of the society in
which we live.Transgression of divisions as opposed to their abolition
In another section of the book she talks about what she
describes as ‘the cult of the whore’, about the district of Raval in
Barcelona, the people there who wear T-shirts with the slogan ‘Yo també
soc puta’ (‘I am also a whore’). The cultural admiration of the
prostitute is, in Ekman’s view, just contempt from another perspective:
“It is still not a recognition of women’s humanity, rather a love of
all that is nasty and low which the prostitute is associated with.”
Those who wear the T-shirts in Barcelona think they’re being radical,
that they’re transgressing norms. But “what they don’t understand is
that the whore is not a whore, she is a person”. As Ekman writes:
“White ‘wiggers’ absorb hip-hop, backpackers and
travellers absorb third-world cultures, male transvestites and
drag-queens absorb the female and the femme absorbs the prostitute. The
‘transgressing’ of divisions anticipates that the divisions remain.
When the white play black or when academics declare themselves whores
and drug addicts, they are mocking those people who are black, who are
prostitutes and who are drug addicts”.
They are, she points out, acting from a position of power and
have a complete lack of understanding for what life is actually like
for those whom they imitate and shower with false admiration. The
difference couldn’t be starker between, on the one hand, the
post-modernist’s ‘transgression’ of norms and divisions between people
and, on the other, the revolutionary’s desire to abolish them. As Ekman
concludes:
“In the absolute meaning there are no whores.
There are people in prostitution for a longer or shorter period of
time. There are no ‘types’ of people, no characters. They are people
who have ended up in a certain situation. The fetishised
‘transgressing’ of divisions separates itself from the the
revolutionary ‘abolition’ of them. The abolition of divisions arises
from seeing the human being, the humanity in everyone, everyone’s equal
needs … It is an objective solidarity which is built on a subjective
understanding. One puts themselves in another’s place and imagines
themselves under different circumstances. It is to look into someone
else’s eyes and see yourself. And with this insight comes also an
insight into the cruelty of the system which has made her into a
‘type’.”
Fiction of unions for ’sex workers’
I also liked the section where Ekis Ekman highlighted the
fiction of so-called ’sex worker’ unions. The International Union of
Sex Workers (IUSW), for example, which is affiliated to the GMB and has
spoken at conferences of the Labour Party and the Green Party, is run
by a man called Douglas Fox. Fox claims to be a ’sex worker’ and
accuses radical feminists of being big meanies out to silence him. Yet
on closer inspection it becomes clear that Mr Fox is a liar. Sex worker
he most certainly is not, rather he is a pimp who runs one of the UK’s
largest escort firms. The IUSW’s membership, you see, is open to
anyone, to pimps, to men who buy sex, to sympathetic academics. Of its
minute membership of 150 (which compares to the 100,000 plus women and
men who work in the UK’s sex industry) only a tiny minority are actual
prostitutes. It’s the same all over Europe where similar organisations
exist (such as ‘de Rode Draad’ in the Netherlands) – their membership
is tiny, most aren’t even prostitutes, and they have never succeeded in
pushing any independent union demands.
Those who support prostitution though have of course never
been ones for the facts. We see this idea of ‘unions’ coming from both
the left and the right because it’s convenient, it gives prostitution a
certain false legitimacy. It doesn’t work and it never will work, but
it successfully diverts attention away from the deeper questions around
prostitution and why it exists in our society.
Related to this is the growth of the so-called ‘harm
reduction’ lobby who have gained influence in recent years within a
number of governments and international institutions. Ekman shows how
this influence grew particularly around the time of the HIV/Aids
epidemic of the 80s and 90s when the lobby was asked in by a number of
organisations to determine policy on the issue. The International
Labour Organisation (ILO) and World Health Organisation (WHO) have, for
example, both come out in favour of legalising prostitution on the
grounds that it will increase state revenues and make it easier to
fight the spread of Aids. Both organisations, Ekman writes, have
started using phrases such as “she is not a victim, but a subject” and
have called prostitution “a women’s job which should be recognised”.
The effect of this lobby gaining strength has of course been
to further legitimise prostitution and make it harder to fight. When
Ekman visited the offices of the organisation TAMPEP in Amsterdam, a
group for HIV prevention among ‘migrant sex workers’, and asked if they
couldn’t do anything to help women leave prostitution the reply she got
was “But why would we do that? Our goal is to teach women to be better
prostitutes” (ie. using condoms so as to protect the men who abuse them
from infection). This aim (of teaching women to be better prostitutes)
is supported with millions of euros of EU Commission money each year.
Similarly an official pamphlet produced with the backing of the
Australian government instructs prostituted women to “look like you’re
enjoying it all the time” and tells the women how to turn down a
violent man’s demands without “making him lose his lust”. In addition
the pamphlet points out that it might be a good idea to try to avoid
bruises because it “can force you to take time off work and as a result
lose more money”. for the rest click "Read More" bolded below
Reality of prostitution
As Ekis Ekman makes clear the whole point of the so-called
‘harm reduction’ approach is to protect and uphold the system of
prostitution. Those who champion it never ask any deeper questions
about the nature of prostitution, its causes and effects. To waste
millions on “teaching women to be better prostitutes” is a cruel joke
in a world where tens of millions of women and girls are enslaved and
systematically raped in the service of men’s sexual desires.
Why, she asks, despite the enormous harm caused by
prostitution, does it continue to be allowed in so many countries? The
statistics are hardly difficult to find and apply both where
prostitution is legal and illegal:
* 71% of women in prostitution have been subjected to physical violence
* 63% have been raped while in prostitution
* 89% want to leave and would do so if they could
* 68% show signs of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder
* Women in prostitution have a death rate 40 times higher than the average
* Women in prostitution are 16 times more likely to be murdered
Something which Ekman argues strongly characterises
prostitution is the splitting of body and mind/soul (I’m not sure how
best to translate the Swedish ‘jag’), often a survival strategy for
those involved in the industry. Almost all the accounts of prostitution
clearly show the existence of this splitting: often those in
prostitution create two completely different personalities, many stop
feeling certain body parts, they disassociate themselves from their
bodies.
The supporters of prostitution want us to believe that the
body is something separate, that selling it has no wider consequences
for those involved. They promote the idea of the body as something
which people own and exercise rational control over, a product which,
if they’re smart, they can make a bit of money out of. Being able to
close off parts of yourself, separate mind and body and, all the time,
keep a distance from what’s happening to you is something which has
been hailed as an ideal by the friends of prostitution, a sign of
strength. The consequence is that those who aren’t strong enough, the
majority who for example develop PTSD, are shown little sympathy for
it’s seen as their own fault for being weak and having gone into the
wrong job.
Post-modernism’s defence of the status-quo
Perhaps particularly important for the left and for those who
want to change society is when Ekman talks about how our language has
been stolen and used in a way which does nothing other than to support
the status-quo. She writes that since 1968 the powerful have had to
reformulate themselves and the arguments they use in order to justify
their existence:
“Institutions which hold power – capital, the
media, academia, the political classes, men’s sexual power and ruling
class privilege – have had to reformulate themselves to justify their
existence. They can no longer assert that they have power because it is
given by nature, rather all power relations have to be justified
morally. This is done by hiding them … The nobility, corporations, the
media, intellectuals – all suddenly claim themselves to be defiant,
marginalised or deviant.
“The story of the sex worker fits into this. It unites an old,
gender-role preserving practice with a new rebellious language. It
becomes a symbiosis between the neo-liberal right and the
post-modernist left. The neo-liberal right get a language which
declares prostitution a form of free entrepreneurship and as something
which relates to individual freedom. The post-modernist left get an
excuse to not fight the prevailing power structure by referring to the
voice of the marginalised.
“The post-modernist left is, as Terry Eagleton writes, a
reaction to the neo-liberal hegemony. After communism’s collapse parts
of the left reacted by masking their defeat as a victory … Instead of
pointing out injustices some sections of the left have gone over to
defining the status-quo as subversive.
“When it feels difficult to question injustices it becomes
tempting instead to redefine them – perhaps injustices are not
injustices if we look at them more closely but, on the contrary,
rebellious actions? All at once pornography, prostitution, veils, maids
and drug use begin to be explained as marginalised phenomena, as a
woman’s right, or as an individual choice with subversive potential.”
I think Ekman is absolutely right here and the worst thing the
left can do is give up its desire to fundamentally change society, to
analyse and expose the power structures and norms which exist and to
fight for their abolition. All around us we can see previously radical
movements selling out and instead seeking an accommodation with the
status-quo. The choice agenda being pushed by some feminists is just
one of many examples of this.
Swedish prostitution debate
Finally another thing I found interesting in the book was her
discussion of the development of the prostitution debate in Sweden in
recent decades. Her opponents such as Petra Östergren and Laura Agustin
have long accused Sweden’s sexköpslagen (law against buying sex) as
being a result of a complete absence of Sweden listening to the views
and interests of those in prostitution. Yet as Ekman shows the
government’s prostitutionsutredningen (prostitution investigation) of
1977, which shaped the Swedish prostitution debate for decades to come,
was revolutionary in its focus on the views and experiences of
prostituted women themselves and the questions it asked about the men
who used them.
The centre-right politician Inger Nilsson who had been put in
charge of the investigation had initially tried to suppress the women’s
accounts after having met with several sex club owners, publishing
instead a vastly trimmed-down version of the report with the personal
testimonies excluded. When this emerged though there was a storm of
outrage from feminists and the government was forced to release the 800
page investigation in full, which came out in book form. According to
Ekman:
“It went down like a bomb. It was a landmark which
changed society’s view of prostitution. It came to alter the direction
of prostitution research in the whole of Scandinavia. Prostitution,
just like rape, had become political … For prostitution research it
meant going back to the beginning. Of the 19th century research – where
the causes of prostitution were looked for in a woman’s personality and
in disease – much was repudiated. Instead there began the building of
new knowledge where the reasons were looked for in the relations
between the genders and in society. And where would the researchers
find the basis for this new knowledge? Yes, in the prostituted people’s
own accounts.”
Conclusion
While I obviously can’t go into all of her book here I found Ekman’s Varat och varan
highly interesting and informative and I think it provides extremely
useful ammunition in the fight against the post-modernist turn which
appears to characterise much of today’s academia as well as sections of
the left. Let us reject the post-modernist victim hate. Being a victim
is not shameful or an insult, neither is it a trait of character. For
in an unjust world there will always be victims, there will always be
people who have less power and wealth than others, who have less
control over the direction in which their lives take. That you are a
victim doesn’t mean you won’t find ways of adjusting to the situation
you find yourself in, it doesn’t mean that you lack the capacity to
think and act rationally. What it does mean is that we live in a world
sorely in need of change. By abolishing the victim and by framing all
of our actions as an individual choice the post-modernists are mounting
nothing other than a reactionary defence of the status-quo.
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