by Chris Stark
What do you see when you see a whore? Dirt? Filth? A thing to be screwed?
What do you feel when you see a whore? Excitement? Disgust? Disdain? Curiosity? Contempt?
What do you think when you see a whore? She deserves it? She chose it? She likes it?
Do you think you are nothing like her and she is nothing like you?
Do you want to shun her? Hurt her? Use her? Show her who is boss?
When I see a 50-some-year-old white woman on Lake Street in south Minneapolis in a ripped parka and moon boots selling herself or being sold, I see a sister. I see myself, but for the grace of god, as the saying goes. I see myself should that grace run out-and it could.
When I see a woman on TV or in a magazine, with airbrushed exposed skin, long legs, extra large implanted breasts I see myself, painfully, acting the role taught to me as a girl, reenacting the abuse.
When I see a whore I feel sadness, despair, trapped.
When I see a whore I think how many times has she been yelled at? Told she's good for nothing? Raped? Beaten? Left for dead?
The "Other"
Prostituted women and children are the quintessential "other." When we go up against prostitution we are going against thousands of years of programming that says prostitution is the oldest profession (rather than oppression) glamorizing the sale of (mostly) female human beings to (mostly) male human beings. We are going up against a well-organized multi-billion dollar industry that is highly invested in keeping our perception of prostituted women and children as "other."
In the United States, the average age of entry into prostitution is 13 years-old, which means that by the time the "average" US prostitute is 18, she has been physically, mentally, emotionally, and sexually violated for five years, and then, when she becomes a legal adult, she has chosen, in the public's mind, the circumstances of her life. Not only has she chosen the circumstances of her life-she is also magically liberated into the contemporary jargon for the age-old lie that prostitution is a profession: she is now a sex worker. There's no other (illusory) transformation like it: chronically abused child, now a liberated, wealthy, empowered ho.
It's a fairy tale story. It's fiction-written by those who profit from it.
It is up to those of us interested in justice, liberation and human rights to take the authorship away from the pimps and tricks. It is up to those of us working to end violence against women and children to integrate the violence and dehumanization of prostitution into our work. Prostitution* is the quintessential rape and battery of women and children; yet those of us who have been in it or who are in it are considered "the other" even by much of the violence against women movement.
Prostitution and Child Abuse
First, prostitution does not work without the abuse of children. Prostitution cannot exist as it does now without the subjugation of youth. Prostitution is both the sexual abuse of children and it is linked to childhood sexual abuse since most prostituted women were incested as girls. As Andrea Dworkin said, "Incest is boot camp for prostitution." The violation of the child's body teaches her what she is good for, what her social worth is, what she can expect from the world.
For example, "By the time she was eight, Amanda had been sexually abused by her father's friend for four years. At 12, she was peddling crack. At 14, she was selling sex on the sidewalk. Her pimp beat her weekly to keep her working, stitching up her wounds himself to avoid questions at a hospital. Her average earnings of $600 for a 13-hour day of turning tricks bought him a car." (1)
Also, pimps-including pornographers-consciously blur the boundaries between legal adults and youth. It is one way they eroticize and sell prostituted youth to men. Pornographers have said their intention is to create sexual desire for girls. In other words, they want to make it socially acceptable and desirable for men to rape girls. (2) This, of course, is not just about those of us used in child pornography. This has grave implications for our society and the kind of place it will become for children not ensnared in prostitution and pornography.
Prostitution and Domestic Violence
Second, prostitution is the battery of women and children. (3) The perpetrators (pimps) abuse women and children using the same tactics as abusive husbands and boyfriends who are not selling their wives and children in prostitution. Pimps isolate, beat, verbally abuse, control money, rape, and "honeymoon" those they prostitute. Pimps are often her "man"-a husband or boyfriend. Significant differences exist, however, in that the prostituted woman's self is being sold, her man makes money off of the use of her body, and she may have multiple batterers as she is often assaulted by the men who buy her.
For instance, a prostituted Native woman stumbled up the steps at a non-profit in the Twin Cities. Her pimp was five steps behind her; he had just beaten her and she could barely walk. Yet he followed her and would not leave her side even as she was taken to an emergency room to be treated for her injuries. He stuck to her, his gravy train.
Another woman turns tricks through the internet. She does not have a pimp, but has a history of having been abused since childhood. She meets a trick early in the morning, before he begins his office job. After he is done with her, he pushes her out of his car after pulling out her fingernails and toenails with a pliers.
Given that prostitution is battery, and pimps and tricks are batterers, then prostituted women children are battered women and children. They are chronically beaten and sexually assaulted and they suffer similarly psychological, physical, and emotional damage as do other survivors of beatings and rapes. Like many other battered women, they may be wedded literally or figuratively to the men selling them; they may initially defend him, blame themselves, defend prostitution, say this is the choice they made despite reams of violence, grooming, and lack of viable options available to them. It's called conditioning, or being conditioned; it's the result of having been abused repeatedly, chronically, by multiple perpetrators often over many, many years. The women and children may also say they want out now (especially after trust has been established); they may say they want help immediately to leave prostitution, as do 90% of those interviewed in Melissa Farley's research. (4)
So what we have are women and children who have been and are being sexually, physically, emotionally, financially, and mentally abused. We have battered and raped women and children, who grow up to be battered and raped women (and men), if they are fortunate enough to survive. According to a Canadian study, prostituted women and girls have a mortality rate 200-times higher than non-prostituted women and girls. Prostituted women and children die in the streets, alleys, warehouses, and woods of this country. However, since they were bought and sold for rape, they become the "P" Word girls and women, thus becoming less than human, less than worthy, the "other."
Every race, age, class, gender expression, ability, education
Prostituted women and children are from every race, age, class, gender, sexual orientation, ability level, gender, education level, gender expression. Disproportionately African American and Native American, many are homeless, poor, outside the polite radar of society, while others come from upper middle class white suburban families. They are stigmatized, preyed upon, shunned, blamed, invisible as individual human beings with worth outside the fuck, highly visible as whore, undeserving of help, empathy, and dignity. Some part of them, at least, probably believes they deserve what they get, which is fucked. S/he is us, everyone of us, and s/he deserves differently.
Ten years ago Andrea Dworkin spoke at the University of Minnesota. She said that prostituted women are not treated well within the movement and she pointed out that those dirty whores may be sitting next to you in the audience. I could vouch for that, as I and many other survivors were in attendance that evening. I have been writing, organizing, and speaking against sexual violence for nearly twenty years and I am sad to say that the other talented and brave survivors who did this work have all dropped out of the movement due to the their treatment within the movement. "Out" survivors are all too often made invisible, ignored, shunned, told to keep quiet, and take a back seat to the non-survivors in the movement. (Although there are also many survivors who are not public about their involvement in prostitution.) The general ideas seem to be that the folks who have not been in prostitution know best, are most capable, more intelligent and able to politically strategize better than the survivors. Also, survivors make others uncomfortable. We may speak a truth that is difficult to hear, and we may do it in words and voices that are not white and middle class. I have seen this repeatedly and I have experienced it all too often. As an example, after a speech in Chicago a therapist who works with prostitution survivors told me she was impressed by me. Oh, I said, waiting for her explanation. I didn't know people like you could tie your own shoelaces, she responded.
I think that part of this attitude stems from racism and classism; part of it is due to a widespread fear and stigma of prostitutes; part of it is a kind of stereotyping of those poor pitiful pathetic victims. So often those doing this work have a missionary attitude toward prostituted people. Prostituted people don't need anyone to save us; we need allies who listen to us and respect us and work with us. We do not need anyone over us; we've had enough of that. So one of the challenges I would put out there for people who want to do work around this issue is to see us when you look in the mirror.
So what do we do?
We strategize-at the same table. We organize. We listen. We respect each other. We look for our similarities and our differences. We include this information in our organizations and our chosen fields. We use our talents, whatever they are, to work creatively against the spread of a prostitution culture that is occurring nationally and internationally. We find models that might work for our communities' rape crisis centers, homeless shelters, and battered women's shelters. We look to legal models such as the Swedish law that criminalizes the buying of sex, decriminalizes those used in prostitution, and provides social services for those in prostitution. (5)
Sweden has an understanding of the central role of prostitution as violence against women and children that the United States sorely lacks. "In Sweden prostitution is regarded as an aspect of male violence against women and children. It is officially acknowledged as a form of exploitation of women and children and constitutes a significant social problem... gender equality will remain unattainable so long as men buy, sell and exploit women and children by prostituting them." (6) The United States has a long way to go before women and children will be free from prostitution, but together we can change the course of this burgeoning prostitution culture and make it one of gender equity and true freedom for all.
So now, what do you think of when you think of a whore?
And now, what will you do?
*The author defines prostitution as including stripping, adult and child pornography, street prostitution, outcall, massage parlors, saunas, international trafficking, sex for survival, live sex shows, peep shows, phone sex, mail order bride services, and prostitution tourism, cult-run prostitution and pornography, and prostitution rings.
- Typically juvenile girls in prostitution are treated as criminals rather than victims. "New laws treat teen prostitutes as abuse victims," by Christina Hoag AP.
- For instance, dressing up girls and teens to look like adult women and dressing down adult women to look like girls is a common theme in pornography. Showing a baby bottle being inserted into a woman's vagina is another example.
- See article "Sister Oppressions: A Comparison of Wife Battering and Prostitution," written by Christine Stark and Carol Hodgson, in Prostitution, Trafficking, and Traumatic Stress, edited by Melissa Farley for further discussion of prostitution as battery.
- See www.prostitutionresearch.com
- Another important issue is that the trafficking of foreign women and children into Sweden is now almost non-existent.
- http://www.justicewomen.com/cj_sweden.html