We have only to remember that virility was one of the special features of the savage woman…we have portraits of Red Indian and Negro beauties, whom it is difficult to recognize for women, so huge are their jaws and cheekbones, so hard and coarse their features. – Cesare Lombroso, from an explanation of why whores are subhuman
For most of history, the only people writing about prostitutes were outsiders, mostly men, and as the Christian Era wore on such writings were increasingly based in some kind of moral agenda (with a concomitant bias against whores). After the Reformation the idea of the prostitute as victim first appeared, and by the 19th century had become the dominant theme in “studies” which, though they often pretended to be “scientific” in keeping with the mania of the day, were actually nothing more than Christian anti-whore propaganda dressed up in scientific garb so as to support the dominant view that normal women were pure and asexual, and therefore any woman who was sexual had to be some sort of monster. Not that this was her fault, mind you; since all women were regarded as childlike simpletons only unenlightened brutes like the police thought of prostitutes as malefactors. “Educated” men and early feminists alike claimed that whores were just born that way, rather like mongoloids or congenital idiots, and therefore had to be protected from our own decisions and “uplifted” from the condition into which we had “fallen”.
Unfortunately for these earnest do-gooders, the vast majority of prostitutes refused to be “uplifted” into such soul-stirring and rewarding careers as domestic service or factory work, and further studies continued to reveal that though most whores came from the “degraded” lower classes, some came from solid middle-class families and should have “known better”. This was of particular concern in the United States, whose prevailing belief-system made the very idea of class unthinkable unless the individual was of one of the “degraded races” (mostly the Negroes, Jews, Italians and Irish). From such racist manure grew early 20th-century views on prostitution; though most prostitutes were merely lazy criminals of questionable ancestry, white girls of predominantly Anglo-Saxon, French or Germanic ancestry must have been forced into the trade by evil (usually dark-skinned) “pimps”. This doublethink spawned two contradictory hysterias: on the one hand there was a mad rush to enact anti-prostitution laws designed to arrest, punish and “correct” prostitutes of low birth and/or dark skin, while at the same time a moral panic arose over middle-class white girls abducted into the “white slave” trade, and a body of laws were enacted to put a halt to this nonexistent social evil.
The First World War gave Europeans something real to worry about, but the panic continued in the United States until the Great Depression served the same function. Fascism soon reared its ugly head, followed by the Cold War, so anti-prostitution hysteria slept peacefully in its grave for decades. Oh, the prohibitionist laws were still in place, police departments continued to persecute and bully women who were trying to make a living, and occasionally a moral reformer might attempt to whip up a pogrom against whores, or a maker of exploitation films would attempt to rekindle the “white slave” panic (with drug addiction as a new element in the myth), but for the most part people weren’t all that worried about prostitutes. By the 1960s early second-wave feminists were talking about decriminalization, and positive portrayals of call girls were becoming more common in movies and television (though black or poor white streetwalkers were still depicted as invariably under the control of evil pimps).
Unfortunately, this upward trend was not to last; the events of the 1960s gave rise to two major reactionary movements which eventually got in bed with one another to plot further violence against harlots. The neofeminists appeared in the 1970s, gradually took over feminism by cynically manipulating the doctrine of sisterhood, and used anti-sex panic generated by the AIDS scare to completely take over mainstream feminism by the mid-‘80s. Meanwhile, the changing face of American culture which followed the upheavals of the ‘60s (including feminism, desegregation, the sexual revolution and computerization) added fuel to the long-smoldering fire of Puritanism, causing a conflagration of religious fundamentalism to sweep the country in the 1980s. And though neofeminism and religious fundamentalism at first seemed bitter enemies, their shared hatred of sex (especially sexual freedom for women) drew them inexorably together, and by the end of the century they had joined forces against porn and prostitution (though apparently agreeing to disagree on abortion). Fundamentalists began to include neofeminist “degradation” and “victimization” rhetoric in their anti-sex screeds, and found it worked to influence soi-disant “liberal” lawmakers who viewed arguments based in Christian morality as radioactive. The turn of the century saw the two in a night-shrouded graveyard together, quietly digging up the corpse of “white slavery” and reanimating it to serve their prohibitionist agenda. But just as the zombies so popular in recent horror films can be recognized as the people they once were, so trafficking hysteria’s congenital racism is still visible under the gangrene and grave dirt.
Don’t expect any of the trafficking fanatics to admit it; in fact many of them take conscious or unconscious steps to hide it. The neofeminists have converted the racism into sexism, so that rather than being about “inferior races” victimizing helpless WASPs it’s about “oppressive” men victimizing helpless women. And though mainstream trafficking fetishists are careful to insist that “it happens all over the world,” it should be obvious to even the most obtuse that trafficking mythology has grown along with prejudice against “illegal aliens”, especially those from Latin America, Eastern Europe, Africa and East Asia. “Traffickers” are nearly always cast as ethnic, usually tied to foreign organized crime cartels, and a disproportionate number of those women “investigated” as “trafficking victims” are themselves foreign. As Laura Agustín has repeatedly written, a great deal of the widespread belief in “trafficking” derives from the racist assumption that people (especially women) from developing countries aren’t clever enough or sophisticated enough to plan a migration to a more economically robust country, to seek out those who can assist them in circumventing measures designed to keep them out, and to decide on a means of work which supports them while keeping them below the radar of immigration authorities.
Because overt racism is uncomfortable to many modern people the desire to keep foreigners out is often cloaked in paternalistic concern for their welfare, but because of the admixture of neofeminism with the “white slavery” mythology men who cross borders in an unorthodox fashion are generally represented as lawbreaking “illegal aliens” or “human traffickers”, while women are more often cast as passive victims (hence the repeated claims that the vast majority of “trafficked persons” are women and children). Laws based in this dogma often prosecute the husbands or boyfriends of prostitutes as “pimps” or “human traffickers” and dismiss any denial from the woman as the product of “brainwashing”; in other cases, laws designed ostensibly to “protect victims of trafficking” are worded in such a way as to “rescue” underage white prostitutes while criminalizing underage nonwhite ones. But in every case, anti-trafficking laws are really about separating people into two groups (whether by race, by sex or by national origin) and denying them both freedom by casting the one as competent (and therefore liable to criminal charges) and the other as incompetent (and therefore in need of “rescue” for their own good). The distinctions allow governments and their supporters to pretend they exercise some form of objective moral discernment, but they are ultimately immaterial to the prostitute; whether she is incarcerated, institutionalized or deported, she is not allowed to live her life in peace, and whether she is criminalized, demonized or infantilized her judgment and right to adult agency are entirely disregarded.
Thanks, Maggie, I so much enjoy reading your blog.
This is not the only form of sex hysteria. If a man urinates in public, even in deep shadows at night, if he’s arrested, it’s a sex crime. If convicted he is labeled a sex offender. This is a horrible stima to carry; the place where sex offenders live is public knowledge.
Let’s say the guy is drunk and urinates during the daytime with all other kinds of people. He was African-American, as were all the women and most of the men. Nobody was offended, at least not enough to call the cops. I thought it funny, given his previous outlandish behavior. This episode led me to believe that African American women are much more tolerant of aberrant male behavior.
In Russia, even as late as the reigh aof Catherine the Great, peasants drank beer in pubs. The beer was served in a vat. If the drinker had no money, he would gamble away his clothing. Often he passed out outside somewhere nude and nobody thought this was a sex crime.
At times I’m ashamed to live in this country.
The idea that nudity is automatically sexual is one of the most bizarre concepts of the modern world. People get nude to one degree or another to bathe, eliminate, have sex and be examined by physicians, yet it’s always interpreted as sexual rather than one of the other motivations.
“If a man urinates in public, even in deep shadows at night, if he’s arrested, it’s a sex crime.”
Actually these days a man can urinate in a well lit public restroom (easily understandable picture signs and everything) in the middle of the day and be convicted of a sex crime should a woman illegally enter the mens room while he is urinating.
Even when the “victim” never even saw his penis
I think that both the racism and sexism are manifestations of a more deeply-rooted elitism. This frequently has shades of race in it because Americans are so much wealthier than most foreigners. But in the end, it is born from the same arrogance. “People as elite as I only do these things through coercion; people inferior do it because they don’t know better. My sexual preferences are the norm of the human condition.”
I once wrote an unpublished sci-fi novella in which one of the characters was a well-educated prostitute who was in demand precisely because she was so intelligent and cultured (she compared herself to the oiran of Edo japan). When a feminist friend of mine read the story, she was angry: No educated woman would become a prostitute! I’m glad to finally find that reality backs me up on this.
Reality not only backs you up, in an historical sense it trumps you; for much of history prostitutes were the only women who were educated, and in some times and places the two were conflated (e.g. in Renaissance Italy upper-class women considered education a mark of commonness).
The column I’m planning for July 31st examines the effect this ridiculous 19th-century “whores are stupid” prejudice has had on revisionist history regarding famous courtesans, using the example of Aspasia.
What was that movie? I think it was Dangerous Beauty.
The wives wanted to know why their husbands went to her, and she found it easier to deep throat a bannaba then explain it wasnt alawys just about sex.
The thing I always find so amazing is how so many people are so fucking invested in their victim mentality for things which never happened to them, which rarely happen to anyone anymore, and how, I guess the word is desperate to make things that bad again in some pyrrhic attempt to justify how they’ve wasted their entire lives.
Yes, it was Dangerous Beauty. 🙂
I don’t think the desire to justify how they “wasted their entire lives” is the reason anti-prostitution activists try to convince others that all prostitutes are victims. I believe the real reason is that they do not want men to cheat on their wives or girlfriends with prostitutes, or go to a prostitute INSTEAD of going through the dating process. They will not accept the reality of human sexuality no matter how hard it hits them in the head.
The “whores are stupid” prejudice is as bad as the 1 that says the women who choose to practice “free love” are literally stupid also. BOTH are horrible, arrogant and wrong. I’ve had some of my stereotypical thinking about whores broken here (stuff that was in my mind when I came here. Yes, I’ve been guilty in life at times of stereotypical thinking. But, I also hold to my own standard of if even 1 person breaks a stereotype that’s a good enough standard of proof for me) and I’m hoping my sharing about practicing my own form of “free love” for a lot of years (and still having the option to practice it again at any time if I want to) has gotten through to people also as the “free love” people (like whores) are seen as “write-offs”, “no good at all”, “sluts with loose (or NO) morals”, etc. by too many in society.
…denying them both freedom by casting the one as competent (and therefore liable to criminal charges) and the other as incompetent (and therefore in need of “rescue” for their own good).
Both classifications are of course BS, but the second is scarier to me, because if I break a criminal law, the punishment is for a certain amount of time in jail (with possible fine), after which I’m free. But to be declared incompetent, though it sounds better (no crime), can lead to incarceration for life in a mental hospital.
Thanks for continuing to hammer away at the myths and lies.
Speaking of hammering away at myths and lies, here’s Village Voice’s newest debunking article, which went live late last night.
Wow! A tiny voice of sanity. Very heartening.
Donna Hughes used racism against Asians and undocumented immigrants in order to recriminalize indoor prostitution in Rhode Island. Not that she would admit it.
Yeah, I pointed that out in my June 10th column. I wonder if she even recognizes it in herself.
I’ll quote directly the evidence of racism being used by Ms. Hughes here, which you provided a link to in that article, for everyone’s benefit:
“One 53-year-old Korean woman who needed a translator to speak said she worked as a “receptionist.” She said she had never seen any women coerced into prostitution. But at the end of her testimony she revealed that she had previously been arrested for being a pimp.”
“Another Korean woman came forward and said she did “it” for depressed, shy guys who needed stress relief. She implicated construction workers, judges and lawyers. She proudly exclaimed that she does “it” to make money.”
Gosh, is it really necessary to mention the nationality of the women presenting themselves? Well, yes, if you are trying to whip up racism to get your way. Her contempt for supposed “victims” in need of help is quite evident.
One niggling point:
Neofeminists and religious fundamentalists don’t both agree that sex is evil.
Fundamentalists, yes; neofeminists just dislike women having voluntary and enthusiastic sex with *men*. They dislike Maleness and therefore don’t view women who want to have sex with men as proper members of the sisterhood.
They’re against normal heterosexual sex. Hence the fact that more than 50% of neofeminist commentary and literature is, in fact, about gay and homosexual issues – not about women vis-a-vis men at all, except where they oppose men having much to do with women.
Fundamentalists aren’t against all sex, either; just non-procreative extramarital sex.
There’s at least a few fundamentalist Christian preachers who are CONSTANTLY speaking against the popular lie that they and all their Christian fundamentalist listeners hate sex and only think sex should be practiced in marriage to have kids. Hating sex and puttling limits on your own sexual activity because of your religious beliefs are 2 different things. Putting limits on your sexual activity doesn’t automatically mean you hate sex. It also doesn’t automatically mean you’re literally out there ordering around those who have less conservative sex lives than you do. Are there fundamentalists who do order people around? YES. Unfortunately, there always have been. But, this is constantly exaggerated by many in society and it gets very tiring. The 1’s who don’t order others around barely get talked about. The fact that they get talked about at all is GREAT as things could be worse than they are in this area (overall it’s bad enough, unfortunately). If people choose to have sex only in marriage, that’s their business just as the choice to not have sex only in marriage is the business of those who choose that way also. They shouldn’t be constantly downed for it just as the 1’s who choose not to do this. I’m proof that a Christian fundamentalist (I consider myself 1. I also don’t go by this mentality that a Christian fundamentalist is ONLY defined by even 1 dictionary in the whole world. A lot of the time these definitions of fundamentalism are just another excuse for stereotyping in the most negative way possible a whole group of people) can follow their beliefs about sex and NOT hate sex at the same time. I’m not alone in this. My life in the past several years has been way more conservative sexually on purpose and 1 of the reasons is my religious beliefs. 1 thing I love about the arrangement that Sailor Barsoom and I have is that we DON’T HAVE to act on it. We wouldn’t have it any other way. This doesn’t mean I “hate” my past years of sexual wildness, etc. I learned a TON from those experiences. I’ve also learned a TON from not being wild for over 8 years now. Many of us Christians who consider ourselves fundamentalists are very tired of the preachers out there who are saying to literally order others around, all sex is evil, etc., and speak against it any chance we get. We’re also not happy with these preachers constantly teaching OTHER lies (they lie about many other things besides sex) and many are working for reform. Even if all you have time for is to expose these lying preachers by telling others about them that’s still working for reform. Unfortunately, from day 1 Christianity has been inflitrated by the fake, lying preachers, priests, etc. This was predicted by Jesus, St. Paul, etc. The need for reform has never let up. I say give credit where it’s due (not done nearly enough by many in society) and keep working for reform. Thanks for listening.
Not for nothing Laura, but saint Paul said women are to remain silent in matters of religion, and Jesus prommised a crownd of people that a number of them would still be alive when the world ended.
Longest recorded living human is just over a hunndred years, so even assuming that some of the women in the crowd were pregnant and those kids lived to be nearly 120 yrs old the world, according to the word of god(or the son of god depending on if you dont belive in the Trinity) should have ended around 150AD
I might not have three sides, but that doesn’t mean I’m not a triangle.
Um, yes it does.
@MikeS and Maggie,
The only prostitute I’ve ever known personally was, if not highly schooled, extremely well-read and intelligent; she was a very engaging speaker and quick-witted, sharper than most women I’ve met. Calling her disadvantaged or stupid is absurd. If anything, she was a sharp-minded businesswoman who had artistic sensibilities and loved to read and learn. She was also young, only 23, so I suspect her learning will continue even when she’s not in the same work.
She said her friends were largely university-educated and chose to do what they did for the insanely better money they made and the social freedom. They were hardly disadvantaged. Some were; she didn’t have much to do with them.
I suspect it’s like divisions in other lines of work. Some retail clerks are from good families and are educated; many are not,
This reminds me of von Däniken’s stuff about every impressive thing built in ancient times by non-whites was really done by space aliens.
Or Thor Heyerdahl‘s idea that every idea non-whites had was acquired by diffusion from white cultures.
I think Heyerdahl gets a bum rap. He suggested that Chinese and Middle Eastern peoples influenced those who would later become Scandinavians, that South Americans were embarking on voyages of discovery to rival the Vikings before the Viking dared get out of the sight of land, that Egyptians were crossing the Atlantic earlier than that, and that the Polynesians (influenced by South Americans and Asians and {perhaps indirectly through the South Americans} by Egyptians) made the Vikings look like land lubbers, again before discovery of Vinland and such. He stated on many occasions that the problem with modern scholarship on such subjects is a clinging to what he called “the dogmatic medieval view of history printed by us in Europe in which we describe our own ancestors as the discoverers of the rest of the world.”
As cool as all of this sounds, DNA studies have shown that he got at least some of it wrong. The sweet potato got to Polynesia somehow, though, and perhaps it was Polynesians in South America instead of South Americans in Polynesia. Some mysteries are yet unsolved.
You need to read Heyerdahl more closely; he suggests that most early discoveries were by whites (he counted the Egyptians as white, which is as much of a stretch as Afrocentrist claims that they were Negro), and he suggests that the Polynesians learned their sailing techniques from a now-vanished race of bearded white mariners who explored the Pacific and colonized both Easter Island and Peru.
I recall seing a documentary here in the UK which, via mitochondrial DNA analysys, showed the branching migration of Homo Sapiens Sapiens (modern Humanity) out of the Cradle of Life in central Africa some 250,000 years ago to practically the whole world in about 75,000 years.
Of course, mDNA is directly inherited from our mothers, so it was the search for “Mitochondrial Eve”, but highly informative : genetic drift in the mDNA showed offshoots of HSS moving, at different times, into Europe, Asia, across the now-sunk russia-north america land bridge, into North and south America.
And by boat into the South Pacific and Polynesian islands.
Maggie–
You’re an interesting and highly intelligent writer, but I think the idea that prostitution should be prohibited was closely related to presumably false racist beliefs is unsupported by the preponderance of the evidence and wrong.
Not prohibition in general, Doug, just “trafficking” mythology. I’m sorry if I failed to make that clear! You might want to read some of Laura Agustin’s essays on the subject, or look back at Saturday’s column. Most prohibitionism has nothing to do with racism (though penalties are more heavily applied against black whores by racist cops and prosecutors), but the current “trafficking” mania has racist roots and is sustained by overt or covert racism.
It’s always interesting to me that human trafficking only gets talked about in regards to prostitution. Guess it needs a sex angle to get people interested. Much trafficking involves people forced into domestic work in the middle east, and factory work in Asia. Yes, men are trafficked too. Why don’t we hear about that?
It’s not as if there was a lack of prostitutes in the USA. When I was in the business, there was plenty of home grown competition.
Trafficking isn’t about prostitution. It’s about the desire of someone to get someone else to work for them really cheap,
Yes. Some people are trafficked for agricultural work. Like Kunta Kinte. Trafficking is mostly not about prostitution, and prostitution has very little to do with trafficking. As Comixchick says, there are plenty of free women happy to provide; slaves are not needed. Most slavery today, as in the past, is agricultural and now there are sweatshops. Of course there have always been sweatshops, we just haven’t always called them that.
Actually these days a man can urinate in a well lit public restroom (easily understandable picture signs and everything) in the middle of the day and be convicted of a sex crime should a woman illegally enter the mens room while he is urinating.
Even when the “victim” never even saw his penis
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Surely that can’t be true. I certainly don’t think that would be the case in the UK. It’s ridiculous!. I’ve used a men’s room on occasion when the women’s room is awash with children but if a man came in unnoticed by my partner standing guard outside – so what? Nothing scary about a penis!
http://www.parentdish.com/2010/05/11/how-your-son-could-end-up-on-the-sex-offender-list/
I have tremendous respect and admiration for Lenore Skenazy; her blog, Free-Range Kids, is about taking the bubble wrap off your kids and letting them experience life as we did rather than as prisoners of adult paranoia. I highly recommend it to all of my readers with kids.
Answering Comixchik’s questions about why we don’t hear more about other kinds of trafficking, I have a theory: guilt and compliance.
You see, when the general public and uninformed officials think trafficking=sex slavery/”prostitution”, then they can say with their head up high and nose in the air, “Well, I don’t contribute to THAT! Only those bad people over there who want to/need to pay for sex contribute to such sinful practices.” Then they can go holier-than-thou on everyone labeled “one of them”.
Acknowledging the reality of trafficking into the domestic, factory, construction, and agricultural realms puts the guilt of encouraging and accepting trafficking on EVERYONE, including them. They know damn well that the food we eat, the clothes we wear, and the maids cleaning the hotel rooms we sleep in on vacation, the cars we drive, the buildings we live in or work in, don’t always come with a spotless record. They know damn well that we don’t want to pay the higher prices that come with paying for legal labour. They know damn well that they don’t care who harvests our vegetables and grains or slaughters our meat or catches the fish, etc., just get it to our tables and for cheap, please. At some economic points the need for cheap food is understandable, especially in this climate. They need to drop the self-righteous attitude that their wants and desires and needs don’t contribute to trafficking.
So, that’s my theory. Whenever I talk about sex trafficking hysteria with someone that buys into it and after I have them mentally go through their closets and refrigerators asking where all their possessions come from, they seem to get it.
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The Hysteria Surrounding Sex Trafficking Is Rooted in Racism…