Make Prostitution Legal
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Make Prostitution Legal
Prostitution Theory 101
by Yvonne Abraham with Sarah McNaught
Few things have divided feminists as much as the sex industry. Theorists
who agree on a vast swath of issues -- economic equality, affirmative
action, even sexual liberation -- often find themselves bitterly opposed over
pornography and prostitution.
Most 19th-century feminists opposed prostitution and considered prostitutes
to be victims of male exploitation. But just as the suffragette and
temperance movements were bound together at the turn of the century, so
too were feminist and contemporary moral objections to prostitution.
Women, the argument went, were repositories of moral virtue, and
prostitution tainted their purity: the sale of sex was, like alcohol, both cause
and symptom of the decadence into which society had sunk.
By the 1960s and '70s, when Betty Friedan and Germaine Greer asserted
that sexual liberation was integral to women's liberation, feminists were
reluctant to oppose prostitution on moral grounds. Traditional morality, Greer
argued, had helped to repress women sexually, had made their needs
secondary to men's. That sexual subordination compounded women's
economic and political subordination.
Today, some feminists see hooking as a form of sexual slavery; others, as a
route to sexual self-determination. And in between are those who see
prostitution as a form of work that, like it or not, is here to stay.
Radical feminists such as lawyer Catharine MacKinnon and
antipornography theorist Andrea Dworkin oppose sex work in any form.
They argue that it exploits women and reinforces their status as sexual
objects, undoing many of the gains women have made over the past century.
Others detect in this attitude a strain of neo-Victorianism, a condescending
belief that prostitutes don't know what they're doing and need somebody
with more education to protect them. Some women, these dissenters point
out, actually choose the profession.
Feminists who question the antiprostitution radicals also point out that
Dworkin and MacKinnon sometimes sound eerily like their nemeses on the
religious right. Phyllis Schlafly, a rabid family-values crusader, has even
cited Dworkin in her antipornography promotional materials. This kind of
thing has not improved the radicals' image among feminists.
At the other extreme from Dworkin and MacKinnon are sex-radical
feminists like Susie Bright and Pat Califia. They argue that sex work can be
a good thing: a bold form of libera...
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