Australian studies in law, crime and justice

A strategy for radical integration

Published in:
Working girls : prostitutes, their life and social control / Roberta Perkins
ISBN 0 642 15877 0
Canberra : Australian Institute of Criminology, 1991
(Australian studies in law, crime and justice series)

I love life, the rain, and the wind.
I love the music of Bach, Vivaldi and Jean-Roger Caussimon,
And of Brel, Brassens, and Greco.
I love children, my children.
Through their movements I discover life.
I love my home;
It gives me pleasure to cook for my friends.
I love being at home and reading for an entire evening.
I love the movies, the theatre.
I love the warmth of my friends;
I love to give gifts.
I love to be nice like that for fun.
I love my man.
Am I not, then, a woman like you?
Oh, excuse me,
I am a prostitute. (cited in Connexions 1984, p. 4)

This poem, written by Barbara, one of the French women who occupied the church in Lyons in 1975, expresses what many prostitutes across the world feel about their own situation. It not only reflects the sentiments of women commenting in this work, but evinces its thesis. In a reverse perspective, some feminists have reflected upon themselves in the same manner (as indeed have many, if not most, women). Radical feminist Susan Brownmiller explains:

I am white, and middle class and ambitious, and I have no trouble identifying with either the call girl or the street hustler, and I can explain in one sentence: I've been working to support myself in this city (New York) for 15 years and I've had more offers to sell my body than I have had to be an executive (Brownmiller 1973, p. 74).

Brownmiller at one stage actually found herself facing the reality of entering prostitution as a strategy for survival:

There was a time when I was an unemployed actress, and working to support myself as a waitress and a file clerk. The disparity between my reality situation and my ambition for a better life was so great that I gave serious consideration to the social pressure to do a little hustling (Brownmiller 1973, p. 74).

Once again we are faced with the prime motivation for women becoming prostitutes. A whim, a piece of luck, a bit of extra money may be all that separates the prostitute from the non-prostitute. But, just how many women, in spite of a superficial identification, try to understand the prostitute as a person as well as a whore? When feminist literary scholar and philosopher Kate Millet decided to write on prostitution she undertook "the long and difficult process of finding women who could teach [me]". But Millet, was no detached analyst- for "I am a woman, so there are more personal motives behind my interest in prostitution." She found that subconscious niche in every woman's mind identifying her with "whore" that I had alluded to throughout this work:

A woman does not really need all that much imagination to have some insight into the prostitute's experience. I found a recess in my mind, a "closet" I call it, which, probably like most of us, I had dimly perceived yet hesitated to approach, a fantasy mesmerising me for half a lifetime, the 15 or 20 years since adolescence... I think many of us, maybe all of us, are really selling and not knowing we're doing it. The question ties then in who among us could stand, or will have to stand, on Broadway tonight (Millet 197 1, pp. 78 & 80).

With such insights by leading feminists why then hasn't mainstream feminism embraced prostitutes into their fold? Why such ambivalence, with some feminists, as we have seen in the previous Section, taking a part as colleagues of prostitutes in their movement for decriminalisation and rights of equality as whores, while others are openly hostile to them? One English feminist was so outraged at the thought of being a prostitute that she wrote in a fit of disgust: "I would rather clean out stinking lavatories seven days a week than let strangers violate my body." (Stott 1978). In a meeting of feminists I attended some years ago, one woman, a nurse, during a discussion on STD prevention among prostitutes, blurted out: "I'm not going to clean out cunts for men!"

In the early stages of the modern feminist movement activists invited discourses between them and their "erring, embarrassing sisters" in sex work. Gail Sheehy describes one such meeting in her typical cavalier style:

The very first conference between feminists and prostitutes in Manhattan degenerated into a brawl. The two-day meeting in January 1972 was run by middle-class panellists in combat boots who wanted to save their sisters of the musk-oiled flesh. Surprise: a few white-collar call girls turned up to speak for themselves. They were not only articulate but also in total disagreement with their would-be saviours, whereupon the liberated panellists brushed them off as uppity. The feminists were determined to come up with a clear cut position on the issue... [call girl] "I'm really tired of all of you talking about the degraded prostitute. You cannot sit here and make decrees about 50,000 to 75,000 prostituting women. At least you have to know the different types "... (another call girl) "You have to realise you're frightened of us. Because it's your husbands, your bosses, your radical-hip boyfriends who come to see us"... (yet another call girl) "I exposed my tender ass to come here today." A radical feminist observed that her sisters took a risk starting the whole women's movement three years ago. Swock! Prostitute slugged feminist. Drubble. The feminist broke into sobs. The conference went to pieces on the spot... [call girl] "So fuck off, feminists, and don't call us, we'll call you." (Sheehy 1973, pp. 1979).

Sheehy summarised the situation: "Working girls are feminists in very basic, competitive, American capitalist terms." One call girl put it even more succinctly:

They're trying to butt into everything, grab the publicity and wreck our business. How many of them can make $ 1000 a week lying down? (Sheehy 1973, p. 200).

It's not as simple as that, and nor do attitudes such as these do much towards resolving differences between the antagonists. As recently as 1985 the battle lines were still drawn when Margaret Prescod met Philadelphia Assistant District Attorney and outspoken feminist, Pamela Cushing, in a public discussion sponsored by Pennsylvania University's Law School Women's Law Group. The only things missing were the army fatigues and the fisticuffs. Prescod pointed to blatant racism and sexism in the state's dealings with prostitution and demanded decriminalisation as the only way to resolve this situation. Cushing replied with an all out assault on sex work:

Prostitution is something we want to keep illegal. We do not want to say that men can control women's bodies. Keeping the laws the way they are is helping women. I feel as a feminist that prostitution should be kept illegal... so that it will be hard for women to go this route... I think there are other ways of making money-I don't think taking the easy way, going out and selling your body, is the answer (The Philadelphia Tribune, 29 May 1985-, The Daily Pennsylvanian, 27 May 1985).

Her response angered prostitutes because she failed to understand the true nature of prostitution, where men do not "control women's bodies" in the contractual interaction, and for most prostitutes it is not "taking the easy way", which is demeaning both to sex workers and to women in general. Cushing, in fact, sounds less like a feminist in this last statement, and more like the patriarchal state, which after all she represents as district attorney. Also in this sense, Cushing's insistence that the laws should he maintained on the pretext that it stops women entering prostitution neither prevents them doing so, nor spares any thought for the women already involved. In the frame of mind of patriarchal Christianity, they are the most punished.

The Second World Whores Congress broached the question of feminism. Belgian feminists expressed surprise at the hostility shown by prostitutes towards the feminist movement: they shouldn't have been, with attitudes such as self-defined feminists like Cushing aired in open forums. In line with the cherished values of the modern women's movement the ICPR at the Congress proclaimed that the prostitutes have the same rights as all other women in a right to "financial initiative and financial gain", to receive "due respect and compensation in... occupation", to an "alliance between all women", to "determine their own sexual behaviour", and to have "relational choice (with) recourse against violence within any personal or work setting." The session on feminism at the Congress concluded with an appeal from ICPR that "urges existing feminist groups to invite whore-identified women into their leading ranks and to integrate a prostitution consciousness in their analyses and strategies." (Pheterson 1989, p. 197)

The crux of this final statement is a recognition that the prostitutes movement is doomed without wider support and that prostitution is a woman's issue to be resolved within a discriminating society, and not just an issue to be dismissed within the context of patriarchal social control.

The problem for feminists coming to grips with prostitution derives from the early feminist theories. Although there exists no thorough feminist analysis of prostitution based on participation, observational and empirical data, many of the major ideologists of the women's movement have attempted to understand the prostitute's role in relation to patriarchal sex relations and capitalist economic relations. One of the earliest was Emma Goldman, the turn of the century American feminist anarchist whose criticisms of patriarchy focuses on the sexual objectification of women. At one time she even tried prostitution herself to raise money for the revolution. The following statements come from her classic paper, The Traffic in Women:

Prostitution has been, and is, a widespread evil, yet mankind goes on its business, perfectly indifferent to the sufferings and distress of the victims of prostitution... What is really the cause of the trade in women?... Exploitation, of course; the merciless Moloch of capitalism that fattens on underpaid labor, thus driving thousands of women and girls into prostitution (Goldman 1973, pp. 309- 1 0).

Goldman was especially critical of female moralists and other women, citing Havelock Ellis' defence of prostitutes in a comparison with married women:

The prostitute never signs away the right over her own person (as married women do), she retains her freedom and personal rights, nor is she always compelled to submit to man's embrace (Goldman 1973, p. 315).

Goldman finishes with a note that might find support among more prostitutes today than feminists:

We must rise above our foolish notions of "better than thou", and learn to recognise in the prostitute a product of social conditions. Such a realisation will sweep away the attitude of hypocrisy, and insure a greater understanding and more humane treatment. As to a thorough eradication of prostitution, nothing can accomplish that save a complete transvaluation of all accepted values-especially the moral ones-coupled with the abolition of industrial slavery (Goldman 1973, p. 317).

Significantly, the year this article was first published, 1910, also witnessed the passage of the Mann Act through the Congress of the United States, the Federal statute which heralded a string of state legislation over the next ten years criminalising the activities of prostitutes to the present day.

Simone de Beauvoir, often held as the founding "mother" of the modern feminist movement, emerged from a background of existential philosophy and literature (as one of the most important scholars of existentialism), rather than radical politics. In her milestone work, The Second Sex, first published in 1949, she made this searing condemnation of the social oppression of prostitutes:

Common prostitution is a miserable occupation in which woman, exploited sexually and economically, subjected arbitrarily to the police, to a humiliating medical supervision, to the caprices of the customers, and doomed to infection and disease, to misery, is truly abased to the level of a thing (de Beauvoir 1979, p. 578).

De Beauvoir also wrote this at a time of legal change, when the French Government decided to end brothel licensing and introduce legislation that virtually criminalises prostitutes. It might appear that her damnation of prostitution supports a legal persecution of those women who persist in commercial sex, for even the hetairas are perceived by her to be both victims and collaborators in the sexual objectification of women by men. However, in a footnoted explanation, de Beauvoir obviously does not believe that the laws in the present system are the answer:

Evidently the situation cannot be changed by negative and hypocritical measures. Two conditions are necessary if prostitution is to disappear: all women must be assured a decent living: and custom must put no obstacles in the way of freedom in love. Prostitution will be suppressed only when the needs to which it responds are suppressed (de Beauvoir 1979, p. 578).

In other words, an end of patriarchy will mean an end to commercial sex, along with, according to de Beauvoir, the institution of marriage, monogamy and the confinement of women to domesticity. Free love is now upon us, at least in its incipient evolution, and much fewer women are confined to a domestic life as most young married women continue in the workforce, but prostitution continues as an essential social institution (though the signs of decline or change are beginning to appear).

For Kate Millet prostitution is a by-product of the nexus between women's economic position and their sexual relation to men:

The prostitute's role is an exaggeration of patriarchal economic conditions where the majority of females are driven to live through some exchange of sexuality for support. The degradation in which the prostitute is held and holds herself, the punitive attitude society adopts toward her, are but reflections of a culture whose general attitudes toward sexuality are negative and which attaches great penalties to a promiscuity in women it does not think to punish in men (Millet 1979, p. 123).

Millet first wrote these words in 1969, at a time when female promiscuity was much more unacceptable than it is today. At the moment the only female promiscuity that receives general disapproval is prostitution. Is the legal punishment of prostitution the only form of penalisation for female sinfulness left, or is this more a reaction by patriarchy to maintain legal control over some women in the face of declining male economic power in the domestic sphere? The situation as Millet saw it two decades ago is much more subtle and convoluted now.

Susan Brownmiller, somewhat later, in her analysis of rape, perceived prostitution in a continuum with male sexual power over women in general:

My horror at the idea of legalised prostitution is not that it doesn't work as a rape deterrent, but that it institutionalises the concept that it is man's monetary right, if not his divine right, to gain access to the female body, and that sex is a female service that should not be denied the civilised male. Perpetuation of the concept that the "powerful male impulse" must be satisfied with immediacy by a cooperative class of women, set aside and expressly licensed for the purpose, is part and parcel of the mass psychology of rape. Indeed, until the day is reached when prostitution is totally eliminated (a millennium that will not arrive until men, who create the demand and not the women who supply it, are fully prosecuted under the law), the false perception of sexual access as an adjunct of male power and privilege will continue to fuel the rapist mentality (Brownmiller 1975, p. 392).

Brownmiller wrote within the tradition of radical feminism, the most virulent force in the women's movement, which sees men as "enemy" and political or social radicalism as the only means of overthrowing male hegemony. Brownmiller's powerful consciousness-raising reaction to prostitution within a framework of a sexual power analysis has a dependence on solving the situation by using the same legal tactics against men that as legislators they use against prostitutes. This seems like a negative approach to a situation that requires wholesale social consciousness-raising changes from both sexes. Though a superficial treatment of prostitution in a different theoretical direction to the economic frameworks of earlier feminist writers, Brownmiller's analysis of sex work is the only one initiated in the radical tradition.

A major thrust of Brownmiller's historical analysis of rape was the concept that a woman is property, exchanged in the male marriage market and possessed by her father or her husband (or their respective kinsmen in some societies). Thus, a man is expected to protect his property (his wife or daughter) against the possession of it (by rape or seduction) by other men. In wartime women are raped by the enemy in a symbolic gesture of possessing captured territory. In such an analysis, however, prostitutes (if not the property of a pimp or other male figure, as indeed most are not) are no man's (or everyman's) property, and are not perceived by the male-dominated legal-judicial system as having really been raped in cases of their sexual violation.

Shulamith Firestone, (1970), one of the earliest radical feminist theorists, does not deal with prostitution in her landmark work on biological materialism. But one might surmise the position of sex work in her overall analysis of women's fundamental oppression in "sex class" hegemony by males. It would be related to "love" in the scheme of male domination of women through ideological control; but in the climate of Firestone's post sexual-technological-social revolution prostitution might have an entirely different meaning in a context of sexual equality and liberated sexual relations regardless of age, sex, gender, sexuality, and, one might suppose, regardless of the nature of sexual exchange.

Whereas Firestone's radicalism might free the prostitute as an oppressed figure, the radical feminism of Mary Daly is likely to oppress the sex worker further. Daly (1978) sees social and cultural separation and female centredness, rather than revolution, as the solution for women in a society not just dominated by male percepts but where men are parasitical to female creativity. Thus, the prostitute would be both a prime example of male sexual despotism over female libidinous energy and a kind of fifth column in the society of women. Due to their supposed closer affiliation with clients, pimps, brothel owners and other male "parasites" than with female culture, the prostitute would not fit well into female separatism, unless, of course, she is a "redeemed whore".

But these are more extreme views. Most feminists seem caught in the dilemma of assisting prostitutes as women oppressed by the patriarchy and condemning prostitution outright as a sexist and patriarchal manipulation of sexual control of females. Feminists attached to ICPR and the prostitutes' movement coming from that direction seem content to support prostitutes in their demands for law reform and improved working conditions, which, of course, means supporting prostitution as a concept, but not as a male institution of female sex work. On the other hand, feminists attached to the ECP and US Prostitutes Collective are at the forefront of a movement to integrate sex workers with housework and female racial inequality as part of a wider feminist demand for equal wages and employment for women and for a recognition of "women's work" as "legitimate work". It is very much related to the general class struggle, which has viewed prostitution as a work option for the most economically deprived women and as an institution for the privilege of mostly middle-class men benefiting from the sex labour of working-class women. Although the division of class is no longer as clearly defined as it once was in prostitution, for Socialist feminists it remains a metaphor for the economic oppression of women driving them into prostitution.

Socialist feminism is an uneasy "marriage" between Marxism and the women's movement. Early feminists, like Emma Goldman, concentrated on defining prostitution as the outcome of economic exploitation of women, but the later radical feminists have been critical of Socialism as a male centred movement which considers women as incidental in the class struggle. Even more "mainstream" feminists have felt that a Socialist's view of prostitution tends to overlook the social predilections that might be as important in a woman's entrance into prostitution as her economic situation. The economic reductionist view of prostitution by Socialist feminists is a cause for a rift in feminist perspectives of sex work.

Marx gave little thought to female prostitution, although it was an important social issue in his time. He did, however, consider it as an analogy to the "general prostitution" of the wider community by the owners of private property. He explained further in a footnote comparing sexual prostitution with exploiting labour:

Prostitution is only a specific expression of the general prostitution of the labourer, and since it is a relationship in which falls not the prostitute alone, but also the one who prostitutes [her]... the capitalist, etc., also comes under this head (Marx 1978, p. 82).

Thus, as the prostitute is the "labourer", so the pimp, brothel owner, or manager is the "capitalist". It is in this light that Socialist feminism's perceptions of prostitution have arisen. Engels (1978) was more explicit (see p. 178), but even his more specific analysis of prostitution is related back to a structure of class dominance. So, while Socialist feminists can provide support to prostitutes without jeopardising their political commitments, it is done with an intention of eliminating prostitution as a source of female class oppression. Although these feminists would adamantly oppose such a suggestion, there does seem to be at least the potential for a "dangerous liaison" with moral reformists in a not too dissimilar situation which turned the 19th century feminists' intention to liberate prostitutes into state oppression of them.

Possibly one of the most sensitive of the feminist leaders to devote a lot of space to prostitutes was Kate Millet, whose insights into the lives of women she interviewed is like a mystical revelation for feminists, with its empathy, compassion, and her reaching out to touch the souls of the women with whom she explored their world of sex work. In her assessment of the prostitute known as "J" Millet feels that she is able to deal with the dilemma of condemning prostitution without condemning the prostitute:

I know what the years in sexual prostitution have cost J too, can see it in the damage in her eyes, at moments their blueness as dead as glass. It is no melodious or pietistic bullshit to see prostitution as a particular crime against humanity. Her suffering comes back when I remember our long halting talks, both her admissions and her denials, the long pained hours, her sensitive face. How much it has all hurt her; the years of silence and repression, the secrecy so deep it forbade her ever to remember for some years after. And at the time, how deeply the pain required that she utterly anaesthetise herself, passive even to the point of numbness. Now too bitter to love anyone. That's a lot to pay even for $800 a week; it's a still more terrible sum for which to hold men liable... For the prostitute, probably the ultimate oppression is the social onus with which she is cursed for accepting the agreed upon social definition of her femaleness, her sexual abjection (Millet 1971, p. 94).

There is a love and heart-felt compassion for this "sister" in pain. But I have heard very similar sentiments by genuinely sensitive Christian social workers evoking pity for women whom they perceive as suffering fatigue, anguish, de-sensitised emotions or an expression of hostility as outcomes of prostitution experiences, when they may not be: but instead might reflect the observer's own bias. To also assume one individual's negative experiences as typical of others in the same situation and to project these assumptions to a wider population is to skew data for which the early psychoanalysts have been heavily criticised by feminists, among others.

Among feminist scholars, the historians have provided us with insights into past prostitution rarely found in feminist writings about present-day sex work. For instance, historians of social history like Judith Walkowitz (1980) on Victorian England, Ruth Rosen (1982) on 19th century America and Golder and Allen (1979) on Colonial Australia have demonstrated that prostitution of a century and more ago was controlled and managed by the women (usually "madams" or ex-prostitutes) themselves in brothels or they worked as freelancers on the streets without "pimps", drug-dealers or gangsters standing over them. Jess Wells, though not a historian, compiled a short historical overview, or "her story", of prostitution. One of her revelations was to show prostitutes as liberated women when other women were heavily shackled by social conventions:

Looking at prostitution as an institution leaves untold the stories of many strong, brilliant women who led the most independent lives of their eras. Escaping from marriage and the patriarchal family, prostitutes were frequently the only women allowed on the streets at any time they chose, to attend theatre and teach (Wells 1982, p. vi).

As in patriarchal Europe, so in America and early Australia. Even on the American frontier, that bastion of male machismo escapism, prostitutes (so wrote feminist historians of western social history), were often the nurses, teachers, businesspeople, even town councillors, before the advent of families, wives, and moralism on the frontier immediately relegated them to outcasts (see Goldman 1972; Jeffrey 1979; Barnhardt 1986). Feminists would have felt more comfortable with prostitutes of the past than many seem to be with those of the present; but this might be due more to a matter of distance than to any changes in prostitution.

The latest feminist attempt at defining prostitution for the women's movement was made by Carole Pateman (1988) in her analysis of the "sexual contract", which involves males dominating female bodies and lives through a tradition of prescribed cultural, social and legal transactions of power. Pateman's contract theory is in fact a variation of Daly's analysis of patriarchy's cultural and ideological hegemony of femaleness. She establishes her position on prostitution thus:

Within the structure of the institution of prostitution, 11 prostitutes" are subject to "clients", just as "wives" are subordinate to "husbands" within the structure of marriage (Pateman 1988, p. 194).

She therefore falls in line with the very earliest feminist debates on patriarchal hegemony, and she takes issue with the historical views of Wells and the feminist social historians. She justifies criticisms of prostitution as a focus on a problem about men rather than the women who are involved in it:

To argue that there is something wrong with prostitution does not necessarily imply any adverse judgment on the women who engage in the work. When socialists criticise capitalism and the employment contract they do not do so because they are contemptuous of workers, but because they are the workers' champions (Pateman 1988, p. 193).

This is an appropriate enough analogy, but is it fully understood by feminists in general? For example, Socialists demonstrate their disgust for capitalism by putting their entire political weight behind the trade union movement. Feminists express their distaste for prostitution, but, apart from a handful of individuals, there is no attempt by women's liberationists mobilising en masse to support the prostitutes' movement. In any case, Pateman herself moves away from the relationship to capitalist structures by using analogous comparisons with "classic" capitalist wage labour, where a worker is employed in the production industry and has no involvement with the consumer of the commodity he/she has produced. In prostitution, according to Pateman (1988), the central contractual dynamic is between customer (consumer) and prostitute (worker), while an employment contract between the prostitute and the brothel owner is peripheral. Indeed, as she points out, many prostitutes are "small scale private entrepreneurs".

If it is difficult comparing prostitution to the production industry, it is less so with a service industry such as hairdressing or massage (indeed, the masseuse often crosses the boundary of prostitution by masturbating clients. Does she become a prostitute on those occasions?). Some hairdressers and masseuses operate their own small businesses, but most, like most prostitutes, work for a boss. There is a contract for service labour between the customer and the hairdresser/masseuse which involves personal taste, bodily contact and an interaction between worker and consumer. The owner of the salon or massage clinic is in a relation to the consumer similar to the large scale owner of the means of production, but the Worker has an intimacy with the consumer that more closely resembles the prostitute's relationship with her clients.

Another of Pateman's analogies is the professional sportsperson whose body is an essential component of his/her contract with the team manager. But, in fact, the sportsperson has less rights with his/her body than the prostitute, because the former has a contractual obligation to compete with his/her body on every occasion demanded by the team manager, whereas in prostitution most prostitutes can refuse a customer or work with their bodies for any number of reasons and at any time.

Even more unlikely is Pateman's attempts at finding similarities between prostitution and surrogate motherhood in which a woman contracts to fall pregnant and give birth to a child belonging to a childless couple. In the first place, the brief period of time a prostitute has with each customer involving virtually no emotional interchange can hardly be compared to the length of time of a pregnancy in which there is an emotional involvement of at least three people: the biological mother, the genetic father and the social mother towards the unborn foetus. Secondly, there is no question of either prostitute or surrogate mother "selling" or even "hiring" her body. She is paid for a service which necessitates the use of her vagina or uterus, just as a motor mechanic is paid to do a service requiring the use of his/her hands or any other part of the body which might be necessary.

The focus of attention in Pateman's analysis is the female body and its relation to sexual (heterosexual) interaction in a social (patriarchal) sense. The problem here is that she assumes it must always be the same in this relationship, if not socio-dynamically, then at least symbolically. She notes:

When women's bodies are on sale as commodities in the capitalist market, the terms of the original contract cannot be forgotten; the law of male sex-right is publicly affirmed, and men gain public acknowledgment as women's sexual masters-that is what is wrong with prostitution (Pateman 1988, p. 208).

Whilst this may be true for such prescribed social rituals as marriage, romance and seduction, it only exists, as I have pointed out, as a figment of the patriarchal imagination in its construction of the prostitution myths. The prostitutes throughout this study have stressed over and over again how different sexual interactions in prostitution are to ordinary social sexual situations. Certainly prostitution might appear a public announcement of the "male sex-right", but the reality is a quite different dynamic. So long as prostitution remains shrouded behind a veil of patriarchal myths this reality will always appear to be more like a reflection of everyday sex relations.

Whilst patriarchal capitalism is responsible for more women being prostitutes than men, and patriarchal myths of the sexual imperative in men perpetuate the objectifying of women, female prostitution is a social situation in which women have more power over sexual interactions than in any other circumstance involving both sexes interacting. In a recent paper on women and AIDS, Kippax et al. (1988) conclude:

Sexual negotiation between men and women typically takes place between those with power and those without... Negotiation may be possible within the "permissive" discourse. Women who are confident in and of their sexuality are better able to resist their complimentary positioning. They are thus more likely to be able to maintain the essential tension of the contradictory impulses to assert the self and respect the self and respect the other (Kippax et al. 1988).

The problem with Pateman's analysis (as indeed is the problem with the writings of most feminist scholars on prostitution, with the exception of the historians, who, not unlike Mary Daly's (1978) "golden age" of matriarchy, have discovered a past of women-dominated female prostitution) is in equating prostitution's sexual interactions with those of most social situations in which women find themselves subjected to patriarchal conditions. In theory and the patriarchal imagination it is the same, but beneath the surface prostitutes are more like the ancient Roman "prostitute", in which the women were rebels of the patriarchy rather than totally subservient to it.

There are two ways women might deal with the patriarchy. One is, as suggested by Mary Daly and the separatists, to remove completely from it, or create two cultures side by side, one male-centred and the other female-centred. But, this may appear a negative approach in which a solution for sexual equality in the same society would be as remote as the sexes would be to each other. The second way is by women somehow empowering themselves in sex relations. The sexual-technological-social revolution of Firestone might seem an extreme action, and much too remote in time. A reassessment of women's position in everyday sexual interactions might be more plausible. Among the most assertive women in society are the prostitutes. If some of this assertion could be converted from commercial to social sex situations, males may discover they have less sex-rights than they are accustomed to think.

Courtship and marriage are traditional means of patriarchal sexual control of women, but with assertive female sex roles these may change for the benefit of women, or disappear altogether in a climate of free sex initiated by both sexes without a prescribed power base. Empowerment in (hetero)sexual interactions has been a key objective for women in the feminist movement's radical aims for removing restrictions on sexual behaviour in the socialisation of females, within a stream of consciousness from Simone de Beauvoir (1979) to Kate Millet (1979), and from Shulamith Firestone (1970) through to Carole Pateman's (1988) critique of "sexual contract". Prostitutes with a feminist consciousness would be invaluable here in the frontline of these sexual politics, even though ultimately such a sexual utopia may spell the end to prostitution. But the concept of marketing sex within a mercantile and materialist society is likely to continue, although in a very different form to its present structure, with, perhaps youth as a commodity and a choice for either sex to sell or buy as the circumstance suggests.

Sexual and economic self-determination for women as major objectives for feminists are partially achieved by most prostitutes in their response to a patriarchal sexual mode manoeuvred to their economic advantage. What requires to be refined here is a feminist revaluation of prostitution as a female control base. With the sex industry back in the hands of a prostitute management, with sex workers continuing to command the terms of individual sexual interactions, and with a feminist consciousness on prostitution expanded to general sex relations, the struggle against male objectification of the passive female body might make some headway. Of course, it may mean the decline of prostitution as it exists today, but with sexual and economic equality in society not many prostitutes are likely to object.

Feminists have long done battle with legislation, for example, in their demands for abortion, reform of the rape laws, equal opportunity in the workplace, childcare, and refraining the family laws. Feminist scholarship has alerted us to the fact of the "whore" stigma as a social control mechanism for oppressing all women. With most women it is used to re-direct them back into patriarchal sexual authority, while with prostitutes it is used to keep them suppressed. The decriminalisation of the prostitution legislation, therefore, would immediately free prostitutes from the shackles of unjust laws, but it would also be a positive step in removing a punitive threat to all women, especially those who aspire to freedom of sexual choice. Without its legal manifest the "whore" stigma would lose its potency, especially with an empowerment of females in sexual interactions as perceived among the key objectives of feminists.

The above outline of aims and achievements for both feminists and prostitutes will only be truly effective in a co-operative effort. It is time to bury old prejudices and rethink the position of prostitutes and their objectives in the light of fresh evidence such as found in this and other recent studies, and incorporate these in the overall political objectives for women. Rather than view prostitutes as passive, misguided participants in the patriarchy's sexual control of women, feminists will find it more profitable to see them as radical traditionalists inside a patriarchal structure turning the situation to their sexual, social and economic advantage. There is no need to elaborate on the dangers of division within the ranks of revolutionary politics. If feminist prostitutes are continually pushed aside by mainstream feminism they may eventually develop radical theories likely to wedge deeply into the rank and file of the women's movement, causing feminists to either align themselves with sexual liberationists or with puritanical reactionaries. Beware the fate of the Victorian feminists' response to 19th century prostitution.

Feminists need to recognise prostitutes' identification as workers in the capitalist structure, and not deny this in efforts to understand sex work in patriarchal structures, because it is work related experiences which are essential in the prostitute's bid for control over their industry. Any focus on the sexuality aspect in sex work feeds fuel to conservative bases in the Church and the state. A Church-state-feminist consortium would eventually crush the prostitutes' movement and demonstrate to women generally that sexuality is one area in feminist politics that is least in need of reform, when, in fact it has been the inter-sex relation most ideologically and politically applied by the patriarchy to oppress women, through the legal punishment of prostitutes and the social confinement of other women.

For mutual effectiveness prostitutes and feminists need to address co-operatively the following issues:

• Defuse the "whore" stigma by decriminalisation and a general female identification with prostitutes.
• Encourage sexual assertion such as practised by prostitutes (at work) for all women as a means of acquiring sexual empowerment.
• Assist prostitutes in gaining control over their industry by identifying their needs with the needs of other workers in the capitalist system.
• Develop feminist theories that recognise prostitutes' management of their clients, their economic independence (as opposed to an interdependence on patriarchal capitalism and sex-rights, to which all women are in some way committed), and their political potential as assertive women.

• Next section: Conclusion
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