Archive for the 'Sex work' Category

“He Might Rape”: the myth of male weakness and the convenient exploitation of low expectations

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on January 18, 2010
in Myth of Male Weakness and Sex work
. 45 Comments

The indispensable Figleaf (not necessarily a work-safe site for all) has a terrific commentary up today on the recent study, reported in the Guardian, on men who visit prostitutes.

Fig quotes one of the more troubling passages of the Julie Bindel piece:

One of the most interesting findings was that many believed men would “need” to rape if they could not pay for sex on demand. One told me, “Sometimes you might rape someone: you can go to a prostitute instead.” Another put it like this: “A desperate man who wants sex so bad, he needs sex to be relieved. He might rape.” I concluded from this that it’s not feminists such as Andrea Dworkin and myself who are responsible for the idea that all men are potential rapists – it’s sometimes men themselves.

It’s not hard to see that this belief — part of what I refer to as the myth of male weakness — serves a particularly important self-justifying function. “I need to have sex with prostitutes”, the line goes, “or I might rape.” We see something similar in arguments about pornography, in which men (often husbands or boyfriends) explain that the use of erotica “prevents cheating”. Call it the “You should be bloody grateful that this is all I’m doing” narrative.

Many women who are uncomfortable with their male partners’ porn use (or visits to strip clubs, etc.) tell themselves (and concerned friends) that they’re grateful that their guys “don’t do anything worse.” Perhaps there are some who genuinely believe what the men in the Guardian study claim to believe: that prostitution provides a necessary sexual outlet for fellas whose supposedly insatiable needs cannot be met in any other way. This is the soft bigotry of low expectations writ large, with the twist that the most painful consequences affect those who hold these assumptions — rather than those about whom the expectations are held.

It’s worth noting that the two men quoted in the Bindel piece use the second and third person to describe what “you” or “a desperate man” might do. Perhaps this is a way of claiming cover under the myth of male weakness without risking the sobriquet of a potential rapist. On the other hand, perhaps these lads don’t use the first person because in their hearts, they know it isn’t true. The “prostitution is necessary because otherwise men would rape” thesis is useful enough to be repeated; it is hoped that wives and girlfriends will believe it, and thus co-sign men’s hiring of sex workers as the lesser of two evils. But because these guys know well enough that in their own experience, lust is not a catalyst for rape (anger is, but that’s a different story), they are unwilling to use the first person singular or plural. They want the myth of male weakness to work because it serves their agenda; they know that in their own lives, the myth is oversold. This is cynical, yes, but devastatingly effective.

Until we dismantle the narrative of uncontrollable male sexual desire we cannot build a just and safe world for all.

Bonding through revulsion and desire: a note on homosociality and strip clubs

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on December 01, 2009
in Desire and objectification, Homosociality, Sex work, Sexual harassment and Youth
. 24 Comments

A reader named Sarah recently wrote in about a conversation she had with her husband about strip clubs:

My husband today mentioned the time he took his younger brother to a strip club when the brother turned 21. I laughed a bit, and said, “wow! i never heard that story before!” A few more teasing words were said between the 3 of us, and Imentioned that if he ever took our (still non-existent) son to a strip club i’d be furious. I assumed no more needed to be said, as the whole idea of it was so ludicrous and that my husband wouldn’t do something so creepy and so anti-women with a son of ours.

My husband shocked me by saying that yes, he would take our kid to a strip club and he doesn’t see why it would matter to me if “our son is getting married, and we all go to a titty bar for the bachelor party. it’s not like i’d encourage him to cheat!” I was left sputtering and a little disturbed, and totally unsure on how to proceed with this conversation as my husband is a man who’s always respected women and agreed on these matters. (or I obviously wouldn’t have married him!)

I’m no fan of strip clubs for a host of reasons. But Sarah’s email isn’t really about strip clubs — it’s about the problem of homosociality, a topic I’ve written about many times before. (Homosociality is the notion that for American men in particular, the approval of other males is of paramount concern, even more sought after than validation from women.) One of the most odious features of homosociality is the way in which it employs women’s bodies as devices for bonding men together. For example, many women are perplexed (as well as infuriated) by the habit young (and not-so-young) men have of cat-calling female pedestrians from passing cars. “Why do they slow down and whistle at me, making those comments?” a young woman asks; “Do they really think I’m going to get in the car with them?” The answer, of course, is that the fellas in the car are far less interested in the woman they’re harassing than in bonding with each other. They demonstrate their heterosexual bona fides to each other, and in the process of humiliating women on the street, forge a closer homosocial relationship. (It’s more than anecdotal to point out that groups of men, having just harassed a woman sexually, will high-five each other; one of the most devastating depictions of this comes in the rape scene from “Boys Don’t Cry”.)

Going to a strip club, of course, isn’t necessarily analogous to participating in a gang rape. But fathers and older brothers have been taking their sons and younger brothers to “titty bars” and brothels for a long time; in parts of Latin America, the practice is particularly common. The stated purpose may be an “initation into manhood” for a teen boy, or a bacchanalian farewell to bachelorhood for a man about to be wed. But there’s invariably more to it than that. Wives and girlfriends, not unreasonably, suspect that the motive is sexual: fathers and brothers may claim to be doing it as a favor for a son or a sibling, but in reality they’re just looking for an opportunity for “justified infidelity” of one kind or another. That may be true, but there’s a deeper and more common reason: a longing for homosocial intimacy.

Going to a baseball game is the paradigmatic “father-son” bonding activity. But for many men, sporting events are less effective than strip clubs as homosocial strategies. Women haven’t been excluded as spectator from ball parks for generations; very few wives and mothers actively disapprove of sports. (They may find watching sports dull, but that’s hardly the same.) Men in our society, as countless scholars of gender have pointed out, are socialized to find particular delight and meaning in activities from which women are excluded, or which most women find repugnant and objectionable. American boys prove their manhood, after all, through their rejection of their mothers’ values; to care too deeply about what mom thinks is to be a sissy, a mama’s boy. And need I point out how many American men have relationships with wives and girlfriends that closely resemble the mother-son dynamic? Mama might not object to taking little brother to the Yankees game — but she’s likely to be less pleased with a sojourn to the titty bar down the block.

The effectiveness of strip clubs as a homosocial bonding strategy is thus linked to two things: the shared sense the male patrons have that their wives and mothers disapprove of their being there, and the opportunity to establish their credentials as “red-blooded, straight American guys” by sharing the experience of objectifying women’s bodies. A single man in a strip club, nursing a beer, is seen as a vaguely pathetic — or perhaps threatening — figure; a group of men on a “stag night” in that same club are anything but. What is unacceptable in solitude is admirable and manly when done in solidarity with other males.

For men who, perhaps like Sarah’s husband, who have not yet done the vital work of learning how to establish intimate relationships with other men which do not require the objectification of women as “bonding glue”, the homosocial appeal of the strip club experience is tremendous. But women aren’t cement to hold together that which can’t otherwise be joined. Emotionally competent adult males don’t use either women’s revulsion or women’s bodies in order to establish closeness and cameraderie with each other. And men’s universal capacity to become emotionally competent — at a relatively young age — is very real. The fact that so many choose not to exercise that capacity is not evidence that they lack it.

Of getting naked, and getting naked: of truth-telling, vulnerability, sex work, and the right to a past

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on January 15, 2009
in Ex-lovers, Relationships, Sex work and Sexual ethics and transformation
. 12 Comments

After yesterday’s post in the continuing series of posts on the subject of disclosing one’s sexual past to a partner, I got an email from a woman who is a regular reader and a Facebook friend. She writes:

My question comes from your “exclusivity” post. I’m wondering, if in a similar vein, how one should go about in terms of discussing such information such as having nude photographs taken, working as an exotic dancer, etc?

It’s a good question, and there are a couple of different queries buried within it. First of all, the issue of nude photos has changed enormously since the advent of the digital camera and the internet. Back in “my day”, it was difficult to get naked amateur pictures developed; many developers would simply throw away any film (including the negatives) that they judged obscene. I recall that a number of my friends, valuing their privacy, took Polaroids as a result of this longing for discretion and a permanent reminder of either nakedness or a specific sexual encounter. Today, with film more or less a thing of the past, it’s much easier to take — and more ominously, easier to send — naked photos of oneself. A couple of years ago, one of my youth group “kids”, then aged 16, took a topless photo of herself standing in front of her bathroom mirror, and e-mailed it to a boy she “thought” was her boyfriend. He shared the picture with friends, and the miracle of technology meant that half her school saw the photo. (At the time that one of my co-volunteers and I counseled her, we never realized that in some jurisdictions, this teen could have been charged with sending child pornography. She was, thankfully, never in legal trouble, but her humiliation endured.)

I don’t know what percentage of young people today take naked pictures of themselves and their friends with digital cameras. I imagine quite a few do, and that promises to delete the photos are as unreliable as similar promises about burning love letters were in the past. One waits for, oh, about 2025, when a Supreme Court nominee is forced to withdraw his or her name from consideration after nude pictures and a salacious college Myspace profile are uncovered by zealous journalists. And then, by 2045 or so, the ubiquity of these pictures and the cyber-indiscretions of the once-young will be so commonplace that this sort of thing will not be a disqualifier for high office. So, bottom line, I don’t think that the existence of amateur naked photos is going to remain a serious issue for years to come. What was once shocking will very quickly become banal, as is the way of most things.

That said, I don’t think my reader was writing about the topless photos one takes of oneself in the mirror with the trusty Canon SuperShot. She’s writing, I suspect, about whether to tell a new partner about one’s past experience of getting paid to pose nude, or to strip for money, or to do other things that would fall into the broad category of “sex work.” And that’s a much trickier question. Continue reading ‘Of getting naked, and getting naked: of truth-telling, vulnerability, sex work, and the right to a past’

Pornography, empathy, and the misuse of the disease model: some further thoughts on a way forward

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on October 06, 2008
in Addiction and mental illness, Porn, Sex work, Sexual ethics and transformation and Sexuality
. 90 Comments

I’m easing back into blogging this week. I have a bad cold, my first in months, probably contracted over the course of various recent travels. My wife and I spent Rosh Hashanah with the Kabbalah Centre International in Dallas, Texas last week; on Friday we flew up to Northern California for a weekend at our family’s country place in the hills northeast of San Jose. We went, in the damp and the bluster of an early autumn storm, to the Cal-Arizona State Homecoming game in Berkeley on Saturday afternoon. And our plane finally landed at Burbank Airport at 10:30 last night. I’m a bit groggy, but hoping to feel better as the week goes on.

And the emails! Folks, if you’ve emailed me recently, please be patient. I’m more than a little swamped. (Seven — count ‘em, seven — with questions about older men/younger women relationships in the last week alone. Flattering but overwhelming.)

The discussion thread below my post on “rethinking a virulent anti-porn/sex work stance” is approaching 200 comments, and is still quite active (and, all things considered, reasonably civil.) Amber Rhea put up a lengthy and thoughtful initial response at her place, and both she and Ren took issue with this remark I made in the original post:

I am keenly aware that porn can play a part in reducing our ability to connect with each other as full and complete creatures of light. Porn, it still seems to me, is the enemy of empathy.

That deserves some more explanation.

Empathy, of course, is the ability to not only imagine what an other person might be feeling(sympathy), but actually to understand what an other person understands, feels, and experiences. Contemporary English often confuses empathy and sympathy to the point that even many scholars seem to disagree as to the precise boundary that separates one concept from another — a point driven home to me in a few minutes of googling about this morning! Here’s one possible definition, from an article for physicians:

The origin of the word empathy dates back to the 1880s, when German psychologist Theodore Lipps coined the term “einfuhlung” (literally, “in-feeling”) to describe the emotional appreciation of another’s feelings. Empathy has further been described as the process of understanding a person’s subjective experience by vicariously sharing that experience while maintaining an observant stance. Empathy is a balanced curiosity leading to a deeper understanding of another human being; stated another way, empathy is the capacity to understand another person’s experience from within that person’s frame of reference.

I like that last bit, and it’s relevant to the experience that I think a great many men have with heterosexual pornography. One of the valid criticisms that gets thrown at Robert Jensen is that as a man writing about men’s use of pornography from a feminist perspective, he centers men’s experiences and reactions; his Getting Off contains relatively few women’s voices. (Given that he was writing a book about how pornography impacted men, rather than an overarching cultural critique of commercialized sexuality, this seems like a fairly reasonable editorial decision to have made. The problem, if there was one with Getting Off, seems to lie in his fairly brief and caricatured descriptions of the women who work in pornography — more certainly could have been done to hear what they were saying.) In any event, both Jensen and I come to the same conclusion: almost regardless of the conditions under which pornography is produced, the impact upon the men who “consume” it regularly is often a decreased ability to connect and empathize with other human beings. Continue reading ‘Pornography, empathy, and the misuse of the disease model: some further thoughts on a way forward’

Bridging the Porn Divide: sex, feminism, empathy, and the commitment to stop pathologizing the other side

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on September 24, 2008
in Feminism, Porn and Sex work
. 210 Comments

If you ask most folks who have been blogging for a while, they’ll remember the one “break-out” post that got them noticed, or first attracted a significant number of comments and hits. For me, it was this post about pornography back in April 2004. I wrote in response to news that several major stars of the adult film industry were infected with HIV.

I wrote that post, and many subsequent posts on pornography from two over-lapping perspectives. I wrote as a pro-feminist steeped in the anti-pornography tradition of one branch of feminism; I wrote as someone who was moved by the desperately sad story of Linda Lovelace, moved by the razor-sharp incisiveness of Andrea Dworkin, challenged by the dazzling legal theory of Catherine MacKinnon. But my intellectual response to porn was mixed with my own experience of “addiction” to pornography, and a long struggle to overcome the compulsive use of sexually explicit material. Porn addiction, particularly in my youth (long before cyber-erotica became available) had done tremendous harm to me — and as a consequence, it had damaging repercussions in many of my relationships. So my feminism, my faith, and my own intense desire never ever to go back into that addiction combined to form a very strong anti-pornography stance.

It has been a long time since I’ve “used” pornography of any kind. But that doesn’t mean I’m blind to the possibility of relapse. Heterosexual married men in my position — teachers, pastors, mentors — are famous for living sexual double lives. (The examples, sadly, are too many to list.) While some fall from grace in spectacular ways –Ted Haggard — others commit “adultery” only with their computers. I know my own tendency towards workaholism and Calvinist striving; I know that that Puritanical streak can, left unchecked, feed a dark side. It’s so easy, after all, to feel heroic doing what I do: mentoring, teaching, volunteering, advising, chairing committees and giving lectures. It’s easy, too, to buy into the lie that I’ve “been so good” and I “deserve” a little “me time.” For a lot of men, including myself for many years, that “me time” involved the compulsive consumption of pornography.

I learned early that a fulfilling sex life with a partner or a spouse is not a prophylaxis against porn addiction. I’m very clear these days that it isn’t my wife’s job to keep me sufficiently sexually sated that I don’t stray, even in my mind. It’s my job. And staying faithful in body and mind involves many things, of which willpower is actually the least important. Staying faithful to my commitments is made much easier by honoring the needs of my body as they arise. I was much more prone to use porn when I was hungry, angry, lonely, or tired; I have become much better (thank God) at recognizing my triggers. I listen to the needs of my body, and I don’t suppress them. That doesn’t mean I indulge every imperious demand! It means I do take the naps I need; it means I do get the (very non-sexual) professional massages that release the tension and the ache in my flesh. It’s when I bottle everything up, I know, that I am at risk of “acting out.”

But writing about pornography from the perspective of a recovering addict is problematic. Most saliently, it leads me — as it obviously did in that 2004 post — to be dismissive of those whose experience with pornography was radically different from my own. I’m not talking about the Larry Flynts of the world, mind you; I have little time for them. I’m talking about feminist voices, in the blogosphere and elsewhere, voices of women who work or have worked in the sex industry. Like so many folks, I’ve been more willing to hear the stories that match up with my pre-existing world view. I confess I’ve given more credence to those who spoke of the sex industry in negative terms (exploitation and abuse and addiction) than to those who talked about genuinely enjoying the work they were doing.

What I am most guilty of is pathologizing those whose experiences do not match my world view. I am not alone in this; many of my fellow anti-porn feminists do the same. We of all people, who ought to know better, still regularly suggest that women who work in the sex industry (or merely those who enjoy watching porn) are — take your pick — “deceiving themselves”, “working through childhood abuse issues”, “filled with a self-loathing they cannot acknowledge.” Sometimes, we infantilize female sex workers, suggesting that they are in desperate need of “rescue” by we the enlightened, the middle-class, and the sexually vanilla. Continue reading ‘Bridging the Porn Divide: sex, feminism, empathy, and the commitment to stop pathologizing the other side’

Paying for pleasure: some preliminary thoughts — with links — on sex work, pleasure, and touch

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 07, 2008
in Sex work and WAM 2008
. 42 Comments

The struggle over sex workers and their rights has been much on my mind since the WAM conference ended just over a week ago. As I wrote in this post, I went to Audacia Ray’s presentation on representations of sex work and sex workers in the media. As a Christian feminist deeply troubled by sex work, I came largely to find a way to alter my vocabulary: I wanted a way to speak about sex work and sex workers that was less paternalistic and stigmatizing. But I found many of my assumptions being challenged by Audacia and others in the workshop, including my fellow blogger Amber Rhea.

The model to which I am still attached is one that sees the act of paying for sex to be fundamentally at odds with feminist ideals. This is more grounded in intuition about the unique nature of sex itself than it is in an actual consistency. After all, my wife and I employ women to clean our home. We make sure we pay them above the prevailing wage, we make sure that they have comfortable conditions, we avoid agencies and deal with contractors directly. But we have no trouble renting, if you will, a woman’s hands to scrub our toilets. We also are fortunate enough to be able to afford visits to the spa once in a while. I have no trouble these days paying a woman to massage my shoulders and back, though it took me a while to get accustomed to being touched by a stranger.

The line between sex work and massage is a clear one, except it isn’t: in both cases, a consumer pays for physical pleasure that is delivered via the body of a working person. I don’t have a problem renting the hands, muscles, and elbows of a skilled masseuse: the idea of renting the vagina of a woman seems an utterly different thing. I’m troubled by surrogacy, as I don’t like “renting wombs”, but I’m willing to hire women to clean chinchilla cages and rub out my knots. Feel-good slogans like “Women’s bodies are not for rent” run into a whole host of problems and exceptions.

Even when I lack the power to describe it, I think sex is qualitatively different from all other activities. My acculturation leads me to maintain that there is something unique about the power of sex, particularly intercourse, to bind two people together emotionally. But is that really true? Or is just my heterosexist cultural programming that has taught me this? When I think about it, I’ve had intercourse that was lousy and distant. On the other hand, I had a massage a couple of years ago where the masseur who was rubbing me seemed to be pouring love into me. I felt hot light coming in wherever his hands were, and I wanted him to keep close to me forever. I didn’t know his last name, but, for sixty minutes, I loved him because I felt that for that precious hour, he loved me. I’ve had sex that was a hell of a lot less intimate! He was $150 an hour, this fellow, and worth every penny. Bottom line: learning to be massaged has taught me that radical physical intimacy is not always sexual, just as my colorful past taught me that sex is not always intimate. And radical physical intimacy that you pay for can be really, really good.

There’s an implication for sex work in all this.

I recommend this post that Amber linked to: Reaching the Media, Sex Workers Against Rape posted by Jill Brennemann at the work-safe “Bound, Not Gagged.” It’s got me thinking.