MACHO ALERT: women and world system

>Second - and that makes me even more furious - it is simply >not true
that these women "are forced into prostitution by >very simple means",
meaning that all of them are presumably >victims of `women-trade'. They
are NOT: in Amsterdam >women are not `forced' into prostitution - it's a
job: they >simply become prostitutes since they can't find any other job
and/or >need to make >very much money very quickly.

Dismissing  women's exploitation in the name of denouncing moral panic
of conservatives is a libertarian baggage in your rhetoric.  You don't
need to go to that extreme saying that women are not forced into
prostitution. It is empirically not true if you look at the actual
situation women prostitutes in *other* parts of the world such as South
Asia ("illegal confinement, debt bondage, torture, forced labor, etc").
Unlike other workers, prostitutes are not allowed to negotiate the
terms  of sex, so they are highly vulnerable to injuries, diseases and
many kinds of coercive treatment. The likelihood of such treatment
increases with women's class& racial background. In Turkey, for example,
Russian prostitutes are treated much worse than Turkish prostitutes.
Instead of comdeming the capitalist patriarchal system --sex industry--
trafficking women or forcing them into circumstances of prostitution,
people morally condemn women for *choosing*  the occupation. This being
the case, it is the governments & ruling classes of advanced capitalist
countries that generally resort to moral panic rhetoric to suggest that
prostitution is just a normal occupation women *consent* to--hence the
existence of sexist laws to punish them. Women prostitutes may have good
conditions in Amsterdam (which I highly doubt so considering the
class&racial biases of your government, be it liberal or conservative,
in the treatment of women *general*, not only prostitutes), but things
are quite different in the rest of the world.

***http://ews.ewha.ac.kr/ews/m7acws/9722.htm

Alison M. Jaggar

  ***Libertarian feminists sound extremely parochial when their analysis
is applied to a global context. They largely ignore the enormous and
rapidly growing international and worldwide traffic in women--and
girls--for prostitution, including sex tourism, and forced marriage. The
1995 Human Rights Watch Global Report on Women's Human Rights focuses on
the
well-documented traffic in women from Burma to Thailand, Nepal to India,
and Bangladesh to Pakistan, although these are certainly not the only
countries involved in such traffic. The report finds that this traffic
relies on slavery-like practices, illegal confinement, forced labor,
debt-bondage, and torture. Such traffic is forbidden, of course, by
national laws, as well as by many international conventions since the
Convention on the Suppression of Traffic in Persons and the Exploitation
of the Prostitution of Others first denounced trafficking in persons in
1949. Despite these bans and treaties, Human Rights Watch has found that
many state parties fail to protect women and girls from coerced
trafficking and forced prostitution or fail to prosecute vigorously
those who commit such abuse(Human Rights Watch, 1995: 199).

Many police officers and other local government officials facilitate and
profit from the trade in women and girls: for a price, they ignore
abuses that occur in their jurisdictions; protect the traffickers,
brothel owners, pimps, clients and buyers from arrest; and serve as
enforcers, drivers and recruiters. If a woman is taken across national
borders, immigration officials frequently aid and abet her
passage(Human Rights Watch, 1995: 196).

Prostitutes in these coercive situations have little access to medical
care and are extremely vulnerable to injury and disease. They are
especially likely to suffer from sexually transmitted diseases(STDs),
including HIV infection, because they are not allowed to negotiate the
terms of sex. The AIDS pandemic has actually encouraged forced
prostitution in countries such as Thailand and India, where clients fear
of infection has led traffickers to recruit younger women and girls,
sometimes as young as ten, from remote areas perceived to be unaffected
by AIDS. Human Rights Watch found that of the nineteen Burmese women and
girls they interviewed who had been tested for HIV, fourteen  were found
to be positive(Human Rights Watch, 1995: 225). If prostitutes are not
infected directly by clients, they may be infected through the needles
used to give them contraceptive injections.

The libertarian feminist analysis is inadequate even if its range of
applicability is restricted to sex work in the West. Just as it ignores
the situations of many prostitutes in Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia, and
Latin America, so it also ignores the situations of many prostitutes,
often illegal immigrants, who are held in slave-like conditions in many
large cities across North America. It similarly dismisses the voices of
many Western prostitutes, such as the voices of women in WHISPER(Women

Harmed in Systems of Prostitution Engaged in Revolt), a North American
grass-roots movement that is both local and national but not
international. Like prostitutes' rights organizations, WHISPER is a
first-person movement based on women's experience in prostitution but it
relies on a radical feminist analysis which portrays prostitution
entirely as sexual exploitation and aims at getting women out of "the
life"(Bell, 1995: 123-4). WHISPER "recognizes all commodification of
women's bodies for sexual exchange as
violations of human dignity and therefore of human rights"(Bell, 1995:
125). It insists that prostitution is "a system of violence against
women," sothat all prostitutes are battered women.

      Consideration of such situations reveals the limits of libertarian

      feminist analysis. It is true that the North American based
      International Committee on Prostitutes Rights(ICPR) explicitly
      recognizes that Western prostitution is shaped by the
interconnections
      among racism, capitalism, and patriarchy so that in the United
States,
      for instance, "of the 10 to 20 percent of prostitutes who are
street
      workers, 40 percent are women of color; 55 percent of women
arrested
are women of color; and 85 percent of prostitutes in jail are women of
      color"(Bell, 1995: 111). The ICPR also recognizes that
"Prostitution
      exists, at  least in part, because of the subordination of women
in most
societies."
      But, as Bell notes, the libertarian feminist discourse of
prostitutes'
      rights is inherently incapable of addressing the social structures

      shaping Western prostitution, which produce its characteristic
gender,
      class and race inequalities(Bell, 1995: 111). Within the
libertarian
      framework, the market is the only means for prostitutes to achieve

      economic and sexual self-determination.

--
Mine Aysen Doyran
Ph.D Student
Department of Political Science
SUNY at Albany
Nelson A. Rockefeller College
135 Western Ave.; Milne 102
Albany, NY 12222



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