From “Women, Lesbians and Prostitution: A Workingclass Dyke Speaks Out Against Buying Women for Sex”
Aug 1st, 2008 by admin
Some have noted that the request for help for Julia Penelope blog post only generated nine comments, whereas the thread on prostitution has generated many, many more than that. I thought I would bring the two threads together in a sense by posting an excerpt of a very fine essay entitled “Women, Lesbians and Prostitution: A Workingclass Dyke Speaks Out Against Buying Women for Sex.” This essay appears in a book edited by Julia Penelope and Susan Wolfe entitled Lesbian Culture: An Anthology. To me, this is a priceless book, an heirloom of the women’s movement. It documents times, places, years, women, events, movements from the perspective of the women who were there and made them what they were. It is a fine chronicling of women’s herstory from the 60s through the early 90s. We wouldn’t have this essay, this brilliance, this book, if it were not for Julia Penelope. I’m hoping many will consider supporting her in her many varying struggles.
From, “Women, Lesbians and Prostitution: A Workingclass Dyke Speaks Out Against Buying Women for Sex”, by Toby Summer. (Note: rough language at times, but I didn’t edit out of respect for the author.)
There are connections between lesbians and prostitutes. I know because I am one. A lesbian. An ex-prostitute. I have lived the connection. I still live daily with the results. I have been a lesbian for about thirty years. Coming out butch (transvestite actually) as a young teenager in the ’50s meant that I couldn’t finish school, couldn’t get a regular job, couldn’t rent a place to live after home became unbearable. The irony of loving women– which created a situation for me (actually created by an ageist, classist, and sexist society ) whereby the alternative to jail and the street was the street, jail and fucking men for a meal, small change, and a temporary bed– is only surpassed by the damage. Consider the fact that I learned what sexuality meant from johns and pimps before I could find out what it might mean with the girl I loved. The lesson is not erasable. My body remembers all of it. It seems that bodies learn — in the body, physically — how sex is to be felt, not just done or gone through. I submit to my readers that it was not a good thing for this girl-child, ths young lesbian, to do with her bright-fired self.
…The removing of oneself from one’s body is a strategy for immediate survival; many prostitutes acknowledge this. This numbing– whether done like other torture victims do it, or done with drugs and alcohol– is flight from that which is intolerable. Numbing mechanisms become reflex quickly. Reversing the process, later or in other circumstances, is difficult. It is my belief that such numbing in sexual assault situations sets women up for tolerating abuse, especially prostitution and sadomasochism.
Although I used this strategy as often as not, I also used a more damaging one at the same time. Today I call this second strategy the Man’s lie, but then I called it pro-sex and my choice.
The Man’s lie is still passing as truth not only from the Man but also through the lips of women, who — like I did — believe the lie. I mean, when Scarlot Harlot quotes her friend, Priscilla Alexander, as saying, “The right to be a prostitute is as important as the right not to be one. It is the right to set the terms of one’s own sexuality [my emphasis]” (Sex Work, p. 61), what I hear is that someone thinks that prostitution has something to do with women owning our own bodies — somehow — while at the same time willing the very same bodies to men who hate women, whores* and lesbians and who do not make any excuses for their hatred.
This mind-fuck is very familiar to me; I thought for the longest time that I had invented it. I double-fucked myself for years before coming face-to-face with the truth of how male supremacist sexuality got to me. Not just remembering but feeling; not just looking at all of it momentarily, but living it; not just opened up, but analyzed from a radical feminist politic for what it is and does. I have not always been a feminist, but I have always wanted to be free and female.
What I did in my mind did have something to do with freedom when I spoke the Man’s lie silently to myself about prostitution. I felt closer to freedom when I told myself that I chose what happened (even the rapes), that I felt okay about what was done to my body (even against my will), that the sex in the room had something to do with me and my sexuality…that the nausea-alienation-bruises-humiliation-STDs-poverty-abortion all were somehow fixable with what amounts to a … positive attitude.
Oppressed people develop a sixth sense with which we anticipate the next move of our enemy in order to try to be successfully out of the way or in the most acceptable pose. [This] positive attitude served that purpose, as well as twisting my own mind; that is, the Man’s lie not only took the truth away from me, but it also served the Man by allowing him to point to me and say, “See. She loves it. She chose it. She’s even a lesbian…they all want it. Women are whores by nature.”
This strategic lie attempted to turn my degradation into something else, something more human, something that was not force or coercion. Poverty and oppression against women and lesbians certainly qualify as force and coercion, even if the barrel of the gun is behind the curtain of sex. What was accomplished with this lie was not a changed reality but merely a renaming of reality for something other than what it was. Reality didn’t change until I changed it, personally, for me; I got a different “job.” I wasn’t successful the first or second times. Even after I got out, I took my …positive attitude with me when I went. What it didn’t explain was why I’d rather work in a hot commercial laundry for $1.00 an hour than fuck another man. The Man’s lie should have been exposed at that point but it wasn’t. I hid behind the fact that I was a lesbian; that is, I told myself that I just didn’t want to fuck men. There was no understanding that there was something wrong with what happened to me as a woman. That lie stayed with me coiled like a viper for many years, waiting.
The lies that I’ve lived with, trying to make prostitution into anything other than what it is, are why I’m writing this paper; I did not want to do this paper. I hate every minute that I have been forced to spend on it. Like every fuck. Confronting how I’ve been hurt is the hardest thing that I’ve had to do in my life. A hard life, if I may say so. It is humiliating to acknowledge victimization. It is really quite simple: if you lose, you don’t win. One cannot be hurt and not be a victim to the perpetrator, and to all those who come after to watch the show. To avoid further abuse by the sexual practice of humiliation, I claimed the intolerable as my own, because being a victim was and still is intolerable. What I am doing in this paper is the intolerable. I want you to know that. I’m doing it because I can’t stand … the pretense of regard towards women bought. Buying a human is not regard. It is another lie. Prostitution is not freedom; not just another job. It is the abuse of women. It is sexual slavery. Period.
I want to say one thing about “healing”. For me it is a fact that so-called healing is an empty and desperate gesture towards that which we do not have: freedom to be equal, creative and as safe as men are safe. I know that some damage is permanent; that is one of the reasons to stop what happens to women. Among other damages, what has outraged me the most deeply is the damage done to my sexuality; it is the one thing that I had thought that I had saved out of that disgusting abuse. Somehow. I despair of any hope to undo this damage.
…Dominance and submission is the basic dynamic of sexuality; regard for an equal is not sexy. Hierarchy is sexy. Power is sexy. Vulnerability is sexy. Humiliation is a sexual practice. It is humiliating to be a second class citizen; that’s why men keep women second class. Men as a class devised male supremacy because men…find it exciting to use force and coercion. This dynamic is best expressed through prostitution; ruling class men buying women to feel their power manifested. Workingclass men, middle class men, men of all races and ages, disabled men anad gay men are also to be counted as johns when I start counting. Name your category and I’ll tell you what he looked like. It is felt in bodies as sexual, this expression of power…
…The analysis exhibited in the “business-as-usual” presentation of prostitution is one that does not in any way challenge the harm of prostitution itself. If workingclass people had no analysis of capitalism, then what we would have is what this element of organized prostitution has: no structural challenge to the status quo. Men must have this sexual access to women and children (Why?). Fringe benefits like worker’s compensation, demands for no more arrests, or somehow resisting torture and murder are okay as far as they go, but they do not challenge the system of male supremacy of which prostitution is the ultimate systematic expression. Trying to make an inhumane system more humane with reformatory adjustments is like spitting in the ocean: I’m not against it, but it doesn’t do much.
Finally I want to say — as an ex-prostitute, a workingclass woman, a radical labor organizer — I have to wonder if the women who are using the language of organized labor are seriously trying to make common cause with working people. I wonder this because of the contempt that is frequently experessed for other women who work at low-paying, low status jobs every day, who do it all their lives, who frequently challenge their wages, hours and working conditions. For example, in Sex Work, Scarlot Harlot says, “Ex-prostitutes are out of touch with the true glories of the trade. Plus, they were never very good at it.” In Sex Work Aline says, “I much preferred exhibiting myself, flirting, showing off my body than working at some shit-job cleaning someone else’s toilet for poverty level income.” … Prostitutes, ex-prostitutes, and “feminists,” cannot succeed in making common cause by ridiculing other women who are struggling to get by without fucking men.
*The word whore is an insult to all women,commonly, like the word dyke. When I use it here, I do not mean it in that way, although I am not attempting to reclaim it as dyke has been reclaimed by some lesbians. I use it because I want my readers to occasionally feel the feeling asociated with it. I also think that no one has the right to use the word whore unless that person has been one of us. And then, only carefully.
This post tells how you can support Julia Penelope, who edited the book in which the essay excerpted above appears.
I am overwhelmed by this post, for though much of my life was different from Julia Penelope - I deeply moved by how much I can connect with this piece of writing.
I feel bad that I had not heard of Julia Penelope before, maybe it is because I am English. I really wish I wasn’t so poor, coz I would love to help her.
I feel that being prostituted has deeply affected my sexuality. Although I think I am a lesbian, I really don’t know, because I still get a deadness when having sex . So I choose to be celibate.
Prostitution affects sexuality on so many levels.
I find it hard not to “perform” or fake to please my partner. The reason I choose to be celibate, is because I found I still did that even with women I thought I loved.
I need to not to be numb to claim my lesbianism.
One of the reason, I find claiming my sexuality very hard, is coz many of my abusers use that they decided I was a lesbian.
For example, my stepdad wanted me to be a lesbian, for in his sick mind that meant he was the only man that really owned me. He decided to “teach” me how to be a lesbian by eating me out on a regular basis.
I write this coz this drove me away from my instincts to be a lesbian. I think his attitude was a major factor for me becoming a prostitute. I wanted to f-k as many men as possible, just to show he had not made a lesbian.
It is hard to a proud lesbian, with that hate in your head.
I love what Julia Penelope said about “healing”. I know I cannot be fully well, when prostitution is “business as usual”. I think reforming prostitution is just a shifting of chairs on the Titanic.
I want prostitution to be abolished, not made to appear clean and “safe”.
Rebecca, Toby Summer wrote this essay; Julia Penelope included it in her book. I will try to send you the entire essay; I know you will so relate to what Summer says, especially about her relationships with women.
Pardon my intensity and my french, but so many men are such sick fucks. I’d like half an hour with your stepfather. I am so so sorry.
Much love,
Heart
Thanks so much, I misread the post, sorry.
I wanted to say that I have found posts so powerful recently. I want to thank for helping me to defrost and release my deep grief.
I want to quote from this post, for has affected so deep.
“The removal of oneself from one’s body is a strategy for immediate survival: many prostitutes acknowledges this. This survival - whether done like other torture victims do it, or done with drugs or alcohol - is flight from that which is intolerable. Numbing mechanisms become reflex quickly. Reversing the process, later or in other circumstances, is difficult. It is my belief that such numbing in sexual assaults situations sets women up for tolerating abuse, especially prostitution and sadomaschism.”
That paragraph has given my grief permission to exist.
The true crime of prostitution is that it murder the essence of the woman or girl. The longer you are prostituted, the more likely there will be extreme violence and degradation.
Being numb is the only way to still sane. Often being numb is the only thing that keeps you alive. But being numb also means you tolerate acts of violence that are completely unacceptable and are often life-threatening.
I find the after-effects of surviving prostitution really hard, coz it involves defrosting from almost a lifetime of being dead inside. It is very hard to understand how to live, when everything seems new and I often find hard to understand the rules of a non-violent environment.
I sorry to write so much, but your recent posts doing very profound for me. Big hugs, Rebecca. P.S. It has inspires me to write a post, expressing my grief.
Heart,
I remember reading this article when it was first printed in either Lesbian Ethics or Sinister Wisdom. It just seared into my brain.
Some Dykes just seem to have to know everything about the p., or at least way, way, way too much. Knowledge bought at such a terrible cost.
Rebecca, I am honored every time you comment here and am so grateful that you do! You never have to apologize! I know I’ve said it before, but nobody tells it like you do, nobody says it like you can. Your voice is powerful and whatever any of us can do to support you, it’s a privilege.
Without suggesting that I can ever know your experiences, speaking with the deepest respect, I am very familiar with this thaw you are talking about and I have also experienced how painful it is to begin to feel things again, to remember things, to come to moments of insight that are so extremely painful because you are putting things together now, leaving the disconnection behind, letting yourself come alive again. For me it was a two steps forward, three steps back process and still is, for that matter, this recognizing all that really happened to me, looking it square in the eye without making excuses for the perps or blaming myself, letting myself experience the rage, shock, grieving, sometimes for a long time. Letting myself face the horrible losses I have experienced without attempting to buffer the experiences with religious platitudes like “it was god’s will” or other kinds of platitudes, “it all turned out for the best because ______,” without self-medicating in any way, just finally finding the courage, each step of the way, to face it. It wasn’t God’s will. It did not turn out for the best. That it has made me stronger and more compassionate and the woman I am today doesn’t change the horror or the wrongness or the injustice of it. It wasn’t karma. It wasn’t fate. It wasn’t in the cards. It wasn’t “the breaks.” I wasn’t just in the wrong place at the wrong time. It wasn’t because of some weakness in me, some deficit of personality or spirit or character. The brutalities I suffered because I was born a female person, because I grew up a girl and a woman, were just that: unjust, terrorrizing, violent, life-altering brutalities. The coming alive again is something I didn’t know whether I’d survive, but I have survived it, I am surviving it and am finding this new phase of my journey to be the most liberating and empowering of my entire life, this letting go of every shred of excuse I ever made for everybody, letting go of thinking poorly of myself, and especially coming into a deeper and deeper understanding of the importance of every girl’s, every woman’s life.
I sense this might be what you are experiencing too and I know the pain and agony and rage of it even though my experiences are so different. I’m just glad we have one another for support. Healing in our bodies, in our sexuality, in our emotions, may elude us, but telling our stories, resting with our experiences and seeing ourselves as the warriors we are, because we really are, is what will ultimately free us.
I just wish we had something similar to the old CR groups because women need these groups for community and support.
Mary, that word is perfect about this essay, “searing”.
Deep respect,
Heart
Rebecca, I don’t know if this helps or not but coincidentally whilst researching male sexuality I happened once again to ‘dip’ into The Idea of Prostitution by Sheila Jeffreys. Jeffreys writes that ‘numbing is a survival strategy (as we all know) for women involved in prostitution but its effects do not suddenly ‘wear off’ when a woman leaves prostitution. Also, Rebecca as you so rightly say, ’one aspect of numbing is that women in prostitution tolerate certain male acts of sexual torture such as sado maschochism and multiple rapes. This doesn’t mean women in prostitution ‘enjoy’ such callous acts of male cruelty what it means is the women because they have shut down they accept the unacceptable. But those who claim prostitution is a ‘choice and/or empowering to women’ claim this is proof of women liking and enjoying having male sexual violence inflicted on them. Nothing is further from the truth.
Also, it is a fact that women in prostitution do experience immense damage to their sexuality and many, very many find it very hard to be able to engage in any sexual activity which they want, desire or know to be safe and that their bodies will be treated with respect. The cause of this damage is the Johns who have deliberately and callously imposed their masturbatory acts on the women. Jeffreys too, writes about this issue and she provides first-hand evidence from women who have exited prostitution. It is similar for women who have experienced male sexual violence inflicted on them when they were children. Many women discover their bodies have internalised the acts these male rapists demanded and their bodies continue to perform almost as though their bodies do not belong to them.
Such are the results of male sexual violence when it is inflicted on women and girls.
Heart is right - the CR raising groups were very powerful and they enabled women to disclose and discover what they were feeling and experiencing was not because the women were ‘mad, dysfunctional or it was their fault, rather the causes were due to men’s callous indifference and belief in their right of sexual access to women and girls, together with the belief women and girls are just men’s playthings to be used/abused and then discarded.
It is hard speaking out especially when women do they are immediately disbelieved and told they are ‘mad, fantasing or simply man-haters.’ But we must continue to speak out and we must continue to listen to women’s first-hand experiences of male sexual and physical violence committed against them. Refusing to be silent ensures that such crimes do not remain even more hidden than they already are.
Thanks everyone for your support, this is quite terrifying for my mind and body is facing the reality of my life. One brilliant commenter on my blog called this - “surviving survival”.
Heart, thanks so much for supporting me on my journey.
The pain of choosing life, and choosing to look at the male violence is terrible. To be honest I am very scared.
But I know I am strong, I know I have no choice but to tell my truth.
I say my truth of the sex trade, because I know the majority of girls and women are in similiar or much worse conditions that I lived through.
Maybe I survived so I could use my voice to show the harms and horrors of the sex trade.
Jennifer, it very hard to know that male violence can make me terrified to have an intimate relationship. I so would want to have a relationship with a woman without the fear that I would re-enact the abuses I lived through. Or that I just go dead.
I believe I am connecting my life together. I see my stepdad use porn and rape me. I see my stepdad treated me as a whore, so prostitution seems just another step to me.
I see I could not allow myself good feeling, so I run away from my lesbianism. I see how much I self-medicated with spirits, not eating and not sleeping.
I see that all that abuse me hated all women and girls - it did not matter if they labelled stepdad, friend or john.
I see all and it is bloody painful. But, I do believe it will free me in the long run.
She uses such powerful simple language to tell this story.
Anyway. I, who can probably only can have one thought in my mind at a time, note this one thing.
She says: I told myself that I just didn’t want to fuck men. There was no understanding that there was something wrong with what happened to me as a woman.
I have full understanding that there was something wrong with what happened to me as a girl and woman, but even so still want(ed) to fuck men.
This is also, very hard to resolve.
(I can’t get this out of italics.)
Althought this is a world that is unknown to me, it still makes me wonder how all women get numbed out in patriarchy to accept all kinds of things men do or say to women.
Living in a lesbian household, and then experiencing the hetero male dominated world, the contrast can be so striking. So it could be this numbing that causes women not to fight back at men who routinely harass out in the world.
Just a thought.
How does one build a nation and a culture? By having a country or culture of one’s own, where the oppressors are not allowed to live or share living spaces with. Because so many women are living with the enemy, they have no chance to experience what life is like when there are no enemies under your roof, and your life is your own.
It’s what the political purpose of lesbian separatism was all about, and I’ve always supported it as an organizing tool, even when it’s just women — lesbian or non-lesbian.
“…The removing of oneself from one’s body is a strategy for immediate survival; many prostitutes acknowledge this. ”
I’ve acknowledged it here: http://www.peridotash.com/?p=100
While my experience in prostitution has not been nearly as painful as those written about above, I do not generally have positive feelings about the meaning of sex work.
I think for many women who are abused by males as children will survive by becoming numb. Many prostituted women were on the receiving end of male violence before they were prostituted, many have been made numb before they become prostituted.
Although I like the idea of women-only communities, I do not think having to live with male violence prevents fighting back - it just may take a little longer.
I find that many women who see the reality of what they were living with, will often be the strongest voices in campaigning for change.
Fighting back is an option, but it rarely happens. I’ve often wondered why at least 10,000 women have not yet formed an entire town somewhere. We certainly have enough women out there who never want to ever deal with men again.
We always have to create alternatives to the malestream. That’s why we started lesbian groups in the first place. We got sick of listening to straight women talk about their husbands and boyfriends. And from that came a whole political theory, most of the women’s studies departments out there, and a huge body of literature. All of this in a very short period of time. Feminism would have been pretty tame had it not been for the input of radical lesbian separatists, and in the groups I was in where we had mixed straight and lesbian women, the separatistis were the ones who did almost all the work organizing the conferences, getting the book discussion groups going, and founding the newsletters. Straight women showed up for meetings that’s about was about it back then. That was my experience in Japan.
I am sorry to write again, but I have thinking how child sexual abuse and prostitution affects the ability to have a free sexuality.
I believe that if you live with male violence for many years, it can destroy the freedom to have a sexuality that is your own.
It is hard to know what is a natural pleasure and what is performance.
It is hard to that sex is associated with violence or porn-fuelled.
It is very hard to feel without fear when receiving pleasure in sex.
It is hard not to fake.
This is often true for many women that have exited prostitution, whether they are lesbians or hetrosexual
I want to be a lesbian that can free enough to have a sexual relationship, without all the baggage from male sexual violence.
I would like have the freedom to enjoy without going dead inside.
The freedom to be a sexual being with porn and violence following me.
I want to participate in sex not just be an expert at performing.
That is why I am using my blog and other radical feminist blogs to discover the hard road to freedom.
These stories are always the most horrific to me. As a lesbian, I feel that having sex with men is just the worst thing that can happen. The ugliness of sex with men is so horrifying and contaminating to me that it is beyond belief.
Once upon a time, the lesbian community had a special place of honor for all the women who had never ever slept with men, and had remained from the very beginning 100% lesbian in word and in deed. They were called thorough breds, and someone on the L-Word ( a dreadful show, awful!) called them Gold Stars!
And then in honor of this site, I found “heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant” by Andrea Dworkin. Somehow, I hadn’t read it. But it was published in 2002, and is essential reading on feminism. Dworkin is crystal clear in her politics, and if you have any confusion as to what radical feminism is all about, you HAVE to read this book. It’s so well written, you will be taken away by it. On page 202-204 near the end of the book, Dworkin makes a list of “the worst immoralities” and this is must reading.
Because at last, you get the very essense of what is right and wrong from a feminist perspective, and you can evaluate your own life as you read this list. I found it very helpful, and all the abused, raped and prostituted and pornified women in the book are honored. Dworkin believes that if prostituted women rose up, the patriarchy would crumble overnight. These stories will help us all remember how far we have come in feminism and what needs to still be done! Read the book EVERYONE!!!