Loose Women, Lecherous Men (33 page)

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Authors: Linda Lemoncheck

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Page 131
tion are successful because they proffer real women for sale. Andrea Dworkin notes with some irony that sexual arousal by a fetishized object is usually considered abnormal, but arousal from the objectification of a woman is not.
81
There is no irony here, however, if we locate the source of the arousal in the fact that this is a
woman
being reduced to the status of object, a woman in dialectical relation to her objectification. Dworkin says as much when she states that "[t]he object is allowed to desire if she desires to be an object; to be formed; especially to be used." Dworkin also tells the story of game hunters who rape and abuse a Girl Scout resembling the women depicted in their pornography. On seeing her, they shout, "There's a live one!"
82
Men who become aroused by having sex with especially sick or filthy prostitutes may become excited, at least in part, because they are associating themselves with a
person
whom they regard as defiled, abject, degenerate, someone who has fallen from grace and who can thus represent the ultimate corruption of the subject. For this reason I disagree with those who would describe sex objectification in terms of "regarding women's bodies, functions or sexual parts as sexual stimuli independently of their connection to a human person."
83
Indeed, if the objectification of a woman is erotic, it is because she is
reducible from
the status of woman to that of object.
Part of a standard pornographic fantasy is the overcoming of a woman's will to resist. She is ultimately subdued, but only after we see her as someone who has a will to be overcome. As Nancy Hartsock points out, "Without the boundary to violate, the thrill of transgression would disappear." She argues that by distancing themselves from an embodiedness of sensuality and feeling that can only remind them of their own mortality, men distance themselves from the embodiedness of woman by attempting to control her will. Robert Stoller has suggested that men need aggression for their sexual excitement, which expresses revenge for an infantile powerlessness in the face of an all-powerful mother. She is recognized as a fearsome subject defining others in terms of her subjectivity. Lynne Segal sees porn as a means for men to revenge themselves on a castrating mother; yet since the revenge remains in the realm of fantasy, men succeed without fear of reprisal, disapproval, or humiliation from a "real" woman. Eva Kittay describes the dialectic between subject and object in pornography when she remarks that women are depicted simultaneously as menacing and inferior, needing to be conquered and having been conquered. Since woman is perceived as menacing, power must be exerted over her; since she is regarded as inferior, power can be exerted with impunity.
84
An interesting irony of this type of objectification is that men who become dependent on pornography or the use of prostitutes/dominatrixes for their arousal have themselves become objects of a sort, controlled by the sex worker's subjective will to arouse. Anne McClintock describes dominatrixes who take out their aggressions on male clients, feel good about being in control, know just how far to push their "punishment," and keep male "slaves" as real domestics; yet by feeling indispensable to men whose special needs are both acknowledged and fulfilled, the dominatrix's subjectivity restrains and reconstitutes the objectification of her clients. At the same time, McClintock does not believe that a dominatrix's complex psychology of sexual power easily translates into women's political liberation or social power.
85
Harry Brod contends that in depriving women of their sexual subjectivity, a dehumanizing heterosexual partner deprives himself of any meaningful human interaction, turning
 
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himself into a performance-oriented, genitally fixated sexual object. "The necessary corollary to pornography's myth of female perpetual availability is its myth of male perpetual readiness."
86
On the other hand, such a dehumanizing partner may so consume his object that he annihilates her, thereby destroying the very object that defines him as subject. Thus, says Jessica Benjamin, the man who commodifies women "must be careful never to wholly consume her as will-less object, but rather to command and consume her
will
" (Benjamin's italics). This analysis suggests that pornographic "snuff" films, depicting the purportedly real torture and murder of women, are arousing precisely because of the slow and steady annihilation of a woman's will. When the woman is dead, she has become literally nothing more than body, and the film, necrophilia excluded, is over.
87
Even drugged pornographer's models, raped and filmed while only semiconscious, are sex objects whose ability to arouse lies in a subjectivity that is being ravished or subdued. Since some of the most popular porn, unlike R-rated mainstream love scenes, enacts the sex that is depicted, Catharine MacKinnon has commented, "the speech of pornographers was once someone else's
life
."
88
The dialectic between subject and object characteristic of sex work is also recreated in the dialectic of reality and fantasy that is the sex worker's modus operandi. A stripper provides her customers with fantasies of real sex because she is a sexually enticing woman often no more than an arm's length away. Prostitutes are paid to give reality to their customer's sexual imaginings: one of the reported hazards of the job is the extent to which a customer will force his fantasies on a woman he has paid to service him. Live sex shows, purported "snuff" films, even ceiling mirrors in hotel rooms attest to the arousal of an audience by real subjects; yet much of pornography is arousing in part because of its fictional portrayal of a patriarchal "pornotopia" in which every social aspect is sexualized and in which women are depicted as unconditionally available to men.
89
Diana Russell suggests that pornography is backlash, men's fantasy solution to the reality of "uppity females"; but she also wants to make the case that such fantasy solutions inspire nonfantasy acts of abuse, humiliation, and violence against women. Catharine MacKinnon makes an even stronger claim by stating that pornography constitutes violence against women, such that "[i]t is not that life and art imitate each other; in sexuality, they
are
each other."
90
Few feminists take such an extreme view of the realism in pornography; indeed, Gayle Rubin challenges this claim by noting that (1) it conflates the
image
of violence with the
institution
of violence, and (2) 90 percent of pornographic images are not of violence but of frontal nudity, frontal or anal intercourse, or oral sex.
91
However, in either case, a fascinating dialectic between reality and fantasy in sex work emerges: if the sex work includes too much fantasy, the sex object can become a distant, inaccessible, unreal thing; too real and she will become either too mundane (the accessible, accepting wife), too judgmental (the complaining girlfriend), or too much trouble (the promiscuous and oversexed "ball breaker''). Thus, the female stripper, prostitute, and porn actress symbolize the ambivalence of sexual desire in heterosexual men, reflected in the dialectic of reality/fantasy and subject/object at the heart of sex work. When pornography is claimed to be therapeutic or cathartic, it is because the fantasies depicted in porn are regarded as allowing the viewer to work through dangerous or repressed sexual feelings that the viewer does not wish to make real.
92
 
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One of the strongest claims to a sex worker's subjectivity ironically comes from the very complaints of objectification that feminists often lodge against her: she is perceived as not only the proper sexual subordinate of men but also someone who wants, needs, even begs for whatever humiliation or abuse to which men are willing to submit her. Part of the arousal of pornography, stripping, and prostitution for many men consists in their belief that this is a woman who is enjoying herself, conveying the message (that feminists object to) that any sex goes. If women's perceived willingness and desire to be men's sexual subordinates is what legitimizes women's subordination in men's eyes, then the heterosexual male image of women as
willing
and
desiring subjects
endorses women's sex
objectification
. Thus, a dialectical relation between subject and object that recognizes the varied, complex, even contradictory range of interpretation of sexually explicit material and sex work may better represent women working in the sex industry than simply reducing sex work to the commodification and degradation of women.
Male sex workers who cater to a gay clientele can combine the dominating subjectivity of the male heterosexual stereotype and the objectification of playing a feminine sexual role that is also assumed by many gays. In gay pornographic depictions of men being sodomized, men who sodomize in return are depicted as objects of male supremacy without being its victims. However, some gay writers contend that gay porn does not always recreate the performance orientation and correlative sex objectification of heterosexual porn but is often more reciprocal, goal-less, and mutual.
93
Gay and heterosexual sex workers of color often complain that their white customers doubly dehumanize them as objects of racial and sexual subordination, especially when whites regard men of color as sexually threatening competitors. White, heterosexual, male sex workers would seem to benefit most from a culture that associates their sexual desirability with a superior masculine agency. Relatively few heterosexual men are professional "gigolos" compared to their gay or female counterparts in prostitution. The catcalls of women in clubs with male strip dancers and the voyeuristic gaze of the female viewer of pornography are no match for the objectifying gaze of a man, whose cultural ideology assumes that his sexuality, not hers, does the subordinating. Some feminists argue that it will not serve feminism to offer heterosexual women our own porn and prostitutes, since such de facto equality under current patriarchal constraints would simply legitimize men's continued subordination of women, encourage women to dehumanize men, and fool women into thinking we are successful.
94
From this perspective, male sex work does not convey or reinforce the belief that men are deserving of humiliation or abuse. On the contrary, toleration of gratuitous violence as well as the infliction of violence are a large part of the cult of macho. When such violence is depicted in gay porn, it is designed, according to some, to assure gays that they are really
men
after all. John Stoltenberg believes that all gays should be antiporn, since heterosexual pornography is an instance of sex discrimination against women, and sex discrimination encourages homophobia: gay men are regarded as participating in the degraded status of the female. In 1972, the readers of a female-oriented soft porn magazine,
Viva
, reported to Bob Guccione, publisher of
Viva
and
Penthouse
, that all of the nude male models looked gay: does this observation reflect women's difficulty in objectifying heterosexual men? Are these women underscoring the ways that sexual objectification imposes a
 
Page 134
sexual submission associated with gay men but not heterosexual men? Are gay men simply more willing, or more qualified, to pose nude in front of a camera? Porn actors who want to go mainstream often cannot get nonpornographic work, because their value remains fixed on penile erection and ejaculation. (One male porn star has come to be known by porn producers as "The Hose.") This suggests that a restrictive commodification of sexuality in the sex industry is not an exclusively female domain.
95
Social context, normative perspective, and the psychoanalytic dynamics of power and powerlessness all play key roles in the interpretation of sexually explicit material and sex work. Highly controversial Robert Mapplethorpe photographs of nude women and men have been denounced as reducing African American men to nothing more than penises and praised as explorations into the historical invisibility of the black male nude in European aesthetics.
96
Is s/m sex work an objectifying endorsement of degradation or a self-defining parody of the battle between the sexes? Is a woman stripping a humiliation of the female body or a celebration of it? Is a depiction of a grimace from anal intercourse a depiction of pleasure or pain? Is a prostitute's posh apartment after years of poverty a symbol of the corruption of capitalism or a triumph over adversity? Instead of silencing alternative voices whose interpretations give meaning and value to the diversity of sex work, I have proposed that we regard sex work as a dialectic between subject and object, one that appreciates the sex industry's variety, complexity, contradiction, and ambiguity. In doing so we adopt the "view from somewhere different," which encourages the recognition and promotion of alternative points of view.
Feminists' objections to the coerciveness and abuse that exist in much of the sex industry are well justified. Many prostitutes endure rapes and beatings from pimps and customers without legal or economic recourse. Margo St. James reports that at least 20 percent of the violence against prostitutes is inflicted by the police. Pornographer's models and actresses report being drugged and raped by photographers and coerced into sex on film that they do not wish to perform. Feminists point out that the business of pornography alone is a multi-billion-dollar industry that feeds into, as well as profits from, an institutionalized ideology that devalues women's sexual subjectivity and self-determination in deference to the sexual needs of men. Herein lies the dehumanization and the degradation in treating a woman as a sex
object
.
97
My point, however, is that sex work is not merely about treating a woman as an object nor merely about dehumanizing her. Sex work is a complex dialectic between subject and object in which a woman's dehumanization is successful precisely because she is perceived as a person whose will, seductiveness, and power is properly subordinate to men. From a feminist perspective that condemns sex work, since women are defined largely in sexual terms, a woman who sells her sexuality makes herself into a commodity; but from a sex radical feminist perspective, women provide a commercial service when they sell sex, thus opening the door for sex workers as sexual subjects to determine the terms and conditions of their work.
When a woman becomes a sex worker because her society affords her little in the way of alternatives for supporting herself, her sexuality becomes both the means to her survival and her power, often the only resource that gives her some sense of con-

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