Envisioning a world beyond prostitution.

 Speech at the International Day of No Prostitution Conference at Graduate Centre, University of Melbourne, October 5, 2002. Sheila Jeffreys.

Prostitution seen as inevitable

I was talking to the producer of a Radio National programme trying to get media coverage for this event this week. She said to me that surely prostitution was inevitable and so the only reasonable approach was to try to help the women but accept that it could not be ended. I think that this is indeed the understanding of middle Australia, and it is seen as the correct liberal position. I want to suggest today that we have to change hearts and minds. We have to enable people to believe that prostitution can be ended along with other forms of male violence. Few people would say that rape and domestic violence are inevitable and cannot be ended, though in fact this journalist did just that. In order to believe that prostitution can be ended we need to be able to envisage a world beyond prostitution. This gives us something to aspire to. It gives us a sense of direction.

Most of the responses to prostitution of world, city and state governments, of media, of ‘right thinking’ citizens, of UN agencies, of the Financial Pages of newspapers for whom it is a nice little earner, are based upon the idea that prostitution is inevitable. This is particularly the case in the last twenty years as globalising forces have given the sex industry, mainly through pornography, new markets and powers to build their empires. The burgeoning sex industry has greatly affected the world that we all inhabit and makes it very hard to imagine a world beyond prostitution. Despite the recognised harms of prostitution, the massive multibillion dollar industry of trafficking women and girls into prostitution and pornography, the psychological and physical harms to the women in the industry, the degradation of neighbourhoods by men’s prostitution behaviour and the ill effects of training new generations of men that it is OK to pornographise and prostitute women, there is still an overwhelming sense that prostitution is ‘natural’ and nothing can be done about it.

Why is prostitution seen as inevitable?

At the very basis of male supremacist societies, at least those that are usually called ‘civilisations’ lies the exchange of women between men. This has taken two forms, marriage, and prostitution. Prostitution and marriage developed in a primitive stage of male dominance when women were simply exchanged between men for a price. In ancient Babylonian ‘civilisation’ women who were captured from the enemy in war were placed in brothels, and historians credit this with being the origin of brothel prostitution. The prostituted slave women belonged to all men for sexual use. The code of Hammurabi required that non-prostituted women, i.e. those available through purchase or other forms of marriage for men’s individual use, should have their heads covered to distinguish them from the ‘common’ women. Non-slave women were exchanged between men for a price and to cement their relations with other men. In all cases the women were men’s property. This system in ‘civilisations’ in which men had available both ‘common’ women and individually owned has existed relatively unchallenged until recently. It is only since the 1980s that the law has been changed in some 27 countries in the world to make marital rape an offence. In all the other countries women’s bodies still belong to men in marriage. Until so recently and in most countries today, the idea that women should have the right to withdraw their bodies from men’s sexual use seemed bizarre and outlandish. The prostitution of women in marriage, however, is coming to an end. It is no longer regarded as inevitable by responsible citizens in Australia that women should be penetrated against their will because of a marriage certificate. But this is seen as inevitable in prostitution where women hate the violation just as much but dissociate to survive.

Marriage is changing. Women are expecting equality in relationships with men. They may be disappointed but they expect a great deal more than women did a generation ago. Feminists have expected for a hundred years that prostitution would end as women moved nearer to equality. But this has not happened. Instead a massive international industry of prostitution has developed at great speed in the last few decades. It could be that the sex industry compensates men for the loss of privilege they experience with women’s demands for equality in relationships.

The idea that prostitution is inevitable, I suggest, comes from the idea that women exist to be exchanged, bought and sold between men, in different forms to service men’s range of needs. As marriage and other relationships between women and men move towards equality we need to be able to bring to an end what Kate Millett called a ‘living fossil’ i.e. a relationship of slavery from another time that exists as an anachronism in the present i.e. prostitution.

Harm minimisation

The effect of seeing prostitution as natural and inevitable is that the only public policy responses that can be envisaged are ones of ‘harm minimisation’. This approach recognises that there is harm in prostitution i.e. street prostituted women suffering severe violence and death, all prostituted women suffering the risk of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases, the continual existence of a very large black market, always bigger than any sector of the industry that governments seek to legalise and control, but the underlying philosophy is that prostitution will and must continue. Harm minimisation covers forms of maintaining women in prostitution but trying to keep them alive and prevent the infection of the men who buy them. It includes the provision of clean needles and condoms, the legalisation of brothel prostitution, the creation of tolerance zones and even the intention, as in St Kilda in Melbourne, of creating state brothels, called ‘sex worker centres’ where street prostituted women can take the men who abuse women in prostitution.

But prostitution is abusive male behaviour and it has been possible to criticise and build social outrage against other forms of abusive male behaviour, such as wife battering, child rape, and create educational programmes, legislation and services to end them. This approach has not been tried anywhere in the world in relation to prostitution, though Sweden comes closest.

I want to suggest today that prostitution is far from inevitable and encourage us to think of what a world would look like without prostitution. We need to be able to imagine an alternative or it is very hard to get there. We need to have a clear vision of our goal so that we are not just reactive. We need inspiration as well as rage.

I want to look at what sex and relationships, women’s safety, the social environment in which women live, travel and work, might look like in the world beyond prostitution.

Women would not be prostituted

Most importantly, in the world beyond prostitution, women would not be prostituted. It will be unthinkable that girls and women might be reduced to, forced to consider or forced into prostitution. The idea will be abhorrent in societies based upon men’s equality with women. Whole sections of the class of women will not be set aside by child sexual abuse, by poverty, war and other disasters, to be held in common for men’s sexual use.

In the world beyond prostitution there would be no trafficking in women and children for prostitution. There would be no sex tourism. There would be no ‘mail order brides’. These forms of trafficking would not exist because there would be no market.

Men would grow up in cultures in which the prostitution of women could not be imagined. With no demand from men sexual exploitation in these forms would make no sense. Poor young women would not be forced to exhibit themselves to men and try to be chosen for penetration as they are in the bars of the Philippines, Thailand, South Africa. Neither sex tourist men nor indigenous prostitution abusers would exist in the world beyond prostitution. Women and girls would not be trafficked around the world in their millions to be beaten, raped and kept in terror whilst they serviced men for no payment as they paid of their ‘debts’ to pimps. We would no longer have to see photos in the press of Asian women or Eastern European women with their faces obscured being rousted out of the back rooms of brothels in Melbourne, London, Amsterdam.

In the world beyond prostitution the international HIV/AIDS epidemic in which men transmit disease to prostituted women and to their wives would be considerably slowed.

The class of women would not be divided into the ‘good’ women and the ‘bad’. ‘Good’ women could not be policed by accusations that they are whores, or that their husbands will go to ‘whores’ if they do not do this or that.

In a world beyond prostitution there would not be the great gulf between women that has traditionally been created by men’s prostitution behaviour. Men have separated women into madonnas and whores, good and bad women, for their own purposes. They have been well served by having loyal wives who ask no questions and prostituted women in the brothels. ‘Respectable’ working women have been separated from their prostituted sisters. The gap between the young female executive and her prostituted sister is apparently huge, but it can collapse if she acquires gambling debts. In the world beyond prostitution women will be able to speak with each other without the tensions created by men’s prostitution behaviour. Women outside prostitution are encouraged to think that prostituted women are somehow different, women who actually like to take the smelly penises of many different men into their bodies every day. But they are not different, only made so for men’s purposes.

Sex

Let us imagine what sex would be like without prostitution. Now this is a big subject and I cannot do justice to it here. Back in 1974 in the UK the demand for a ‘self-defined’ sexuality for women was added to create the seven demands of the women’s liberation movement. At that time we wanted women to be able to develop their own ideas of what pleasure could be that were not dictated by men’s prerogatives. Women’s ideas of pleasure might include whole body sensuality, they might include affection, even love, as the basis of a sexual relationship, they might not include sexual intercourse, or any form of direct servicing of men that women felt disinclined to engage in. Who knows but that anal sex might not be in the list created by women’s imaginations. Certainly a self-defined sexuality for women would be likely to be based upon a woman only engaging in that which gave her pleasure and not having to perform for men. It would be likely to be a sexuality of equality based upon respect, and not just equality in degradation or violence, but a sexuality in which equality and mutuality were themselves exciting. A self-defined sexuality for women would be unlikely to include women feeling that they had to allow men to penetrate them or they would not be allowed to go to sleep, or the man would have a bad mood, or they would not get the housekeeping money, or they would have no money to feed the children. A woman might be sexual when the whim took her or not at all, though she might always want lots of warm love that was not conditional upon sex.

Now all this might sound a little quaint. That is largely because, in the last twenty years, the sex industry has constructed an understanding of what sex is that is in complete opposition to what so many women have said that they wanted. Through pornography and other forms of prostitution the sex industrialists have created a form of sexuality in which men pay to gain access to a woman who desperately wants to be anywhere else but there and is dissociating to survive. The man is able to penetrate her mouth, anus or vagina with his penis, fingers or tongue and grab at other parts of th her body that are not on the menu. He has no regard for her personhood or pleasure. This is the sex of pornography and other forms of prostitution.

This is also the ‘sex’ that women in relationships with men find most difficult. Yet the sex industry with its influence on politicians, media, is able to sell this commercial sexual exploitation as what sex really and truly is. The sex industry is the most powerful sex educator in western societies. No other source of sexual information can compete with the scope and power of pimps as sex educators. Generations of men and boys are being trained to this view of what sex is by the powerful inducement of orgasm. This is in opposition to the vast efforts of women to get men to value them for more than sex, to value affection that is not sex related, to value sex that is not just about being a hole for men to enter whilst women think of tomorrow’s work problems.

The sex industry has called men’s use of a woman as an object with holes to stick a penis and fingers in whilst she dissociates to survive emotionally, sex. What could be more confusing than that? For whom is this ‘sex’? And what are its implications?

One implication is that the boys and men require girls and women to act out the scenarios they have learnt from prostitution to be exciting to them. The women have to take up positions, wear particular fetishes, and engage in practices that they may hate in order to gain male approval. As a result there are reports that teenage girls at parties have to suck off groups of male teenagers as routine. More and more, young women tell me, anal sex is becoming an expected part of sexual interaction. The practices of pornography and prostitution educate men and very swiftly become expected of girls and women.

Women do not have resources or an industry to portray what they might want from sex outside the hubbub created by the sex industry. We do not have a voice, unless we are coopted to speak within the voice of the industry and say how much we love precisely the sex that it sells. A sexuality beyond prostitution would be something very different, something which becomes harder and harder to imagine as the sex industry takes up all available space for ‘sex’ and portrays itself as a ‘sex educator’. A sexuality beyond prostitution would be a sexuality of equality in which women and men, women and women, men and men, find pleasure in each other as equal partners and companions.

Relationships between men and women

What sort of relationships between women and men would we like to see in the world beyond prostitution? Relationships of equality, respect and honesty in the home, in the workplace and in all areas of life. The sex industry endangers the possibility of equality in all relationships between men and women. As new generations of men are trained in prostitution behaviour this will inevitably affect the way they are able to relate to women in their lives, family, partners, workmates, friends. Equal relationships between men and women are still a pipedream for many women but have to be the ideal form of heterosexuality. The existence of strip clubs, brothels, pornography and the advertising of these forms of sexual exploitation create the ideas that boys and men have about women.

One young woman in CATWA was amazed to discover that tabletop strip clubs only came to Melbourne in 1993 because she had grown up with them. Boys have grown up with these clubs too. Once upon a time there were not huge billboards advertising ‘Gentlemen’s clubs’ in which women place their naked and shaved vagina and anus in front of men who may stare into them for a few dollars. The old gentlemen’s clubs were for rich upper class men. In them these men made deals, political deals and business deals.

The new gentlemen’s clubs which are a form of brothel in which naked women are offered to men to bathe with them, to dance on their laps and of course, offer other ‘sexual services’ are much more democratic. Any men with the entry fee can go in. But the deals are still made there. The men bond and network with other men, clinch business deals, hold meetings of corporations. Major companies hire the meeting rooms at the venues and get whiteboards plus naked women on the tables at tea break and lunch. What does this do for the chances of equality for women in these companies? They can attend meetings and suffer the pain and embarassment of watching other women treated in this way. They can learn how the men in their company really feel about women. Or they can refuse to go and lose the chance of advancement.

Tabletop clubs already affect the lives of thousands of women. Women lawyers see the male partners go to the clubs at lunchtimes to bond and wonder why it is so hard to become partners. The secretarial staff have to lie to wives who ring up about where their husbands are.

Women executives are not in the same position as their male colleagues to take potential male clients to the sex premises of their choice or to arrange for prostituted women to be sent to their hotel rooms. The existence of the sex industry and the way it is currently entwined into the way in which Australian men do business make the idea of women’s equality in the business world a mockery.

In the world beyond prostitution there would be true equality in the world of business for women and men. The idea that deals can be made through the sharing of women’s bodies will be unimaginable. Men will not stagger back from the strip club at lunchtime and have difficulty distinguishing between their female colleague and the vagina he has just paid to stare into. Women academics who study the male atmosphere of the world of business that keeps women out, and it is both acknowledged to exist and very effective, need to examine the way that prostitution in all its forms is one important foundation of this atmosphere. In the world beyond prostitution this support to men’s bonding against women would not exist.

In the world beyond prostitution boys and girls would not grow up in a world in which women are sold to men, naked or half naked, pouting, spreading their legs on billboards, on the porn racks in the corner store, in the video store, in music videos. Girls would not be taught that they are meat for men to buy, exchange and consume. Boys would not be taught that it is reasonable to do this to girls because they like it, and they are for that. Girls and boys would grow up in an environment in which one half of the human race was not enslaved into sexual service of the other half. Very different ideas and values would have to be developed by advertisers. Windsor Smith shoes could not use images of women in prostitution to sell products because that could not be imagined.

The sex industry is secret men’s business. In a world beyond prostitution it would be unthinkable for men to bond through sexual exploitation. Presently, however, this is burgeoning as an ordinary way for men to socialise. On bucks’ nights they will sexually exploit women. At other parties they will watch porn together. Once upon a time 18 year old boys did not have such clubs to attend with other males as a form of initiation into their power as men. Local papers carry whole pages of prostitution advertising to teach boys that women’s bodies can be bought for their pleasures.

Destruction of heterosexual relationships

Men can not be equal to women in sexual relationships if they are involved in the sexual exploitation of other women. The 60,000 men who use women in prostitution in Victoria each week are likely to have female partners. As the industry grows more and more men are involved and more and more women are directly affected. When male partners abuse women in prostitution what are the women to do? Either it will be a secret and the wife will not know what her husband is doing which means that the basis of trust and honesty that should underly any equal relationship is destroyed casting the woman, the one who does not know, into subordination. Or will find out about her husband’s behaviour and have to work out how to relate to this man. She is likely to leave him. His daughters will have to think about what it means that he stares into the shaved genitals of women their age in the local strip club, who are all some other men’s daughters, or penetrates them as they dissociate to survive.

The more men become involved in prostitution behaviour, the more impossible the ideal of egalitarian relationships between men and women inevitably becomes. The expansion of the sex industry and the creation of more male consumers is in direct collision course with the possibility of equal relationships between women and men. Let us try to imagine what relationships between women and men would look like in a world beyond prostitution. In such a world there is the opportunity for men to be the equals of women.

Environment without prostitution

Women from other countries, such as Sweden, where the sex industry is not tolerated, suffer considerable shock in Melbourne at the fact that there are brothels in the main streets. I have to walk past one on my way to work and back. The normalisation of the sex industry in all its forms now has a clear and present influence on the environment in which girls and women struggle to achieve equality. The idea that women are men’s sexual slaves would not exist let alone be plastered all over the walls, newspapers and stores.

The effect of this on popular culture would be that advertising of products would not depend upon the sale of women naked or offering themselves to men. Advertisers would need to find other forms of humour for instance that would appeal to women and men as equally respected citizens. That would be a change.

Fashion would change. In a world without prostitution the fashion industry would not be presenting women with naked breasts as a matter of course on catwalks. Clothing which women would not buy, i.e. which shows most of their bodies or represents them as pornographic in other ways, would not be the basis of catwalk shows. It would not make sense to portray women as prostituted if prostitution did not exist.

Art would be quite different. Over the last twenty years male artists have over and over again shown how transgressive and exciting they are by producing what is essentially pornography but which is accepted by the male art establishment as great art. The photos of Helmut Newton might be an example.

The values of prostitution extend into so many areas of cultural life that it is hard to imagine forms of entertainment, art, fashion that do not depend upon them. But men’s fashions, for instance, do not depend upon them. I came across a photo of men parading on the catwalk at the first London men’s fashion show in 1998. The men walked comfortably in flat shoes, in loose trousers and loose short sleeved shirts. No areas of their bodies were exposed to view. The clothes were all wearable in everyday life. They all allowed movement, running, reaching up to a shelf, bending over. They embodied a kind of privilege it is now hard to imagine for young women.

Men’s ideas about women in a world beyond prostitution would be quite different. They would not be trained on pornography and grow up to visit strip joints and brothels. They would not have strippers for their ‘stag’ nights. They would not have ‘stag’ nights, I suggest, because in a world beyond prostitution there may be no marriage, or if marriage exists it would not be seen as a disaster for men. Men would be women’s companions and friends on a basis of equality. Going out with the boys may have no meaning because to envisage a world without prostitution we may have to imagine a world in which men are not so concerned with being men and may be able to be women’s equals. Imagine men as women’s equals, what a different world that would be.

Sexual violence

Prostitution and rape go together. Quite reasonably many prostitution survivors call prostitution commercial sexual violence or bought rape. In prostitution men pay to watch (as in pornography) or carry out upon women’s bodies a range of practices that, in their non-commercial form, are precisely the practices of male sexual violence that women are concerned to get out of their bedrooms, their streets, their childhoods, their workplaces. I do not suggest that prostitution is the only reason that sexual violence exists because it exists in cultures which do not have prostitution, and needs to be understood in terms of male dominance. However the sex industry trains men in these practices.

The main practice is unwanted sexual intercourse. In this practice the woman dissociates to survive whilst the man penetrates her with no concern for her personhood. He will then expect his female partner to do the same. In sex phone lines women have to dissociate to survive men’s abuse that they have paid to speak. In obscene phone calls men, sometimes the same ones, intrude upon and threaten women in their homes. In prostitution men speak foul and degrading words to women and sexually harass them, touching parts of their bodies they want to protect and demanding practices women do not want to allow. In streets and workplaces men do exactly the same except that they do not pay. The pleasure can be more acute when women's consent is clearly absent. In prostitution women are whipped, or have to dress up as babies or young girls. All of this trains and encourages men in brutality and child sex abuse. Many women in prostitution seek to graduate to be mistresses because this is less directly violating. But in sm brothels there are ‘slaves’ who still service the men, indeed mistresses can direct men to do things to the ‘slaves’.

Conclusion

We would have a world in which no young girl would be told ‘your fortune, you’re sitting on it’ which was quite a common phrase of my youth. Young girls would not be encouraged by offers of fame and fortune to open up their bodies to oral, vaginal and anal access in porn and then abandoned to their fate when they were no longer saleable. Young girls would have other models of how they are and can be valuable which do not just depend upon their bodies, getting naked or servicing men. They could wear comfortable, but beautiful clothing. Fashion designers might have to tax their imaginations to design clothes that showed respect for women, that did not show parts of women’s bodies, or restrict movement, that flowed and allowed running, and stretching and sitting even on the floor with ease.

I want us to imagine the country that Australia might become. We do have models. Sweden does not have licensed brothels. It has legislation to punish men for buying sexual services. The culture is not inundated by images of prostitution. Prostitution is simply not acceptable and is seen as violence against women in that culture. Sweden also has a very high percentage of women in parliament and good social policies towards women. In 2001 I was phoned up by a young Swedish woman who was working and living in St Kilda on her travels around the world. She saw something I wrote about prostitution in a magazine left on a tram. She was very distressed at the way that prostitution has been normalised in Australia. She told me that young men in her social circle talked of using women in prostitution and joked about it as if this was a reasonable everyday thing to do. She was appalled. She had the ability to be outraged because she came from a country in which this was not imaginable. We can aim for that situation here in Australia. France, Norway and Iceland are likely to adopt the Swedish legislation so that there is a very different model for dealing with prostitution gaining ground in the world. Australia is not in the forefront of this development but very much at the bottom of the pile.

But most of all a world beyond prostitution would allow for the creation of egalitarian relationships between women and men, at the workplace, in marriage, in friendship, in families. It will not ensure that such equality happens. There are many other material inqualities between women and men to be sorted out. But it creates a basis on which this can happen. Whilst prostitution exists and grows the idea of equality between men and women is confronted by the huge problem that it is not sexy. It is not the basis of a huge and profitable industry. Equality requires the elimination of men’s prostitution behaviour so that we can then look at men’s relations to women and work out what else needs to be changed.

A world without prostitution in any form, including pornography, for men might seem very threatening indeed because it removes the sexual prerogative of being able to degrade and use women irrespective of their personhood or pleasure. It means that men cannot access the sexual pleasures of women enslaved to their will by purchase. A world without such pleasures may seem an unsexy world to many men. What it means is that we will need to totally reconstruct what sex is and can be outside the pornographic imagination and without the model of prostitution.

In a world beyond prostitution women can relate to each other without the division created by the different, and conflicting uses to which men put them. Women will have the opportunity to unite to pursue goals which do not include sexual subordination, even for a fee.