> > Volunteer prostitution exists; it is otherwise known as heterosexual
> > marriage.
> >
> I've been married
>twice, heterosexually, and neither of my wives were coerced into anything.
>Up yours for calling them whores.
dude. she said _voluntary_ prostitution, not coerced.
At 11:03 AM 5/7/2005, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
><http://www.motherjones.com/news/qa/2005/01/parenti.html>, 26 Jan.
>2005). Prostitution that depends on vastly unequal international
>relations of military and economic powers is more likely to become an
>explosive political issue than prostitution based on garden-variety
>inequality between men and women of the same class and nation or between
>men of higher and lower social classes or strata.
>--
In Asia, it costs a sailor $10 for a "short-time" girl -- 1/2 hr on a futon in a backroom or upstairs. The girl got half, the house got the rest. Usually, the half hour is preceded by, as Mike Ballard said, a bit of a courtship ritual. In some countries, you have to be approved by the woman who runs the house and/or the girl can complain to the woman who runs the house who will 86 the guy.
That means he has to be nice, respectful, not more physical than the girl wants --and sometimes she wants to keep her options open, to leave you for another guy she'd prefer--not overly drunk. If you don't pass muster, you're out. The courtship ritual gives the girl an opp. to make commissions on the drinks you buy yourself and the drinks you are expected to buy her. You have to buy those drinks to get her to approve of you. In some houses, of course, all of this is formality and it's rare that anyone is turned away.
This practice of making sailors, etc. buy the girl a drink (playing on some sense that this isn't _really_ what's going on, paying for it) was so common that there's a t-shirt sailors can buy when they get off the ship: "I love you, no shit. Buy your own fucking drink."
The t-shirt is a play on the most common line you'll hear as a girl approaches a sailor in a bar:, "Sailor, I love you, no shit. Buy me drink?"
Let's say, for an 8 hr. day, a girl does short times and make $50 ($5/half hour, 10 'short times' in an 8 hr. shift) Is that the equivalent of a high class call girl's salary here? What could she make in a factory? (Would a sailor do better to buy Nikes and pirated software, than pay someone $5 for half hour of their time?
What if a sailor thinks, Hell, she's making better money doing this, getting paid under the table, than she could make in a factory. (Yes, I'm harkening back to the discussion of Enrenreich's work on maids: would it be better for the girl to do something else than to be hired as your own personal wage slave for half an hour?)
Of course, there's the long-time, where you can hire someone for anywhere from half a day to a weekend to an entire month of leave. What do you suppose is going on there -- wanting to be with the same woman for an entire month? It's not that they keep her captive somewhere, fucking her brains out. They take her out on the town, go shopping, etc. etc. To her, it's like Pretty Woman. Sometimes more comes of it. Sometimes more doesn't. Sometimes the sailor wants more and she says no. She has the opportunity to get engaged, get married and she says no. (Irma, my neighbor when I used to live in the sticks, married such a man and came to the states. Moving from prostitution to marriage. But, she said, a lot of women there chose NOT to marry and go to the states. They stayed behind and continued to live the life they led. Maybe they liked it? Dunno? Or , maybe it was comfortable and moving to the states very scary. Dunno.)
What's the difference between a sailor buying someone for a month of companioniship while on leave and getting engaged to her and sending her money. Sending her money, in this particular instance, because he didn't want her to work as a prostitute any more.
And she did anyway. Despite his love for her, despite an engagement ring, weekly letters, phone calls whenever possible, learning her language, taking her family out to show your seriousness. She continued hooking -- even though she didn't need the money and more anc could support herself, her two kids, and her family on the money he sent. And, had they married as he wanted, she'd have even more money.
I'm not making a judgement on what she did. Just pointing out that, hmmmm, it's complicated! And, Wojtek would probably point out that, like the fellah who joins the Marines, she had a choice. Living in the provinces was a respectable life. Probably about the same as working in a junkyard and living in a trailer in the u.s. It was what they knew. But going to the city to become prostitutes was a way for them to enjoy a life they might not otherwise enjoy and send money home to their families, so they could have something better.
As Mike said, in the service, there's often no choice. Under those conditions, it also isn't only the case that men only want to view them as disposable pieces of meat. They fall in love. They often spend more than they have to because they want this to be something more than "short-time" fucking. They take them to dinner, go dancing with them, get to know them. Etc.
Not denying that there are all kinds of horrible things that go on. Is it Korea where families in the provinces send their daughters to the cities to become hookers?
At 09:32 AM 5/7/2005, Carrol Cox wrote:
>Question: Leaving aside private opinions on sex work, why is it
>necessary for people on a (primarily) political list to announce out
>loud their negative judgments of it?
Well, someone like Alison Jagger would say that you can see in the various positions, contending views of human nature (I think human _being_ is a better word choice) and political practice. She goes on the show, rather convincingly I think, that whether you articulate it or not, the two are deeply intertwined.
As I recall, I got into a tussle on the marxism-list with a guy who said that he and his group were debating whether to organize sex workers. He argued that sex work was reproductive labor and, thus, sex workers shouldn't be the primary focus of marxist unionizing efforts. He backed that up with reference to Marx's writing on the topic. I got in his face with a feminist critique of that position. What exactly IS the difference between a hummer and an apple pie? An apple pie used to be the domain of the wife, who made fresh baked goods with her own sweet hands to soothe the troubled soul of the hubby who spent his days in the agonistic, dehumanizing sphere of the market and the political forum. Haven in a heartless world.
A host of jobs, on this view, should be considered reproductive labor--bakers, teachers, nurses, health care aids, housekeepers, hospice workers, dry cleaners, therapists. I wanted to know the difference. What's the difference between producing a fabulous apple pie and producing a fabulous hummer?
No one here has articulated it in quite that way, but they probably do agree with Justin's attempt to fairly outline their position: a sense that _some_ things should simply not be the object of market exchange -- like health care. But their argument is not quite the same argument as Justin would make re: health care.
I don't know who has claimed that sex work is liberatory. Justin said that the class analysis of Hustler was brilliant, revealing the liberatory strivings that underpinned Hustler's approach to porn.
kelley
"We live under the Confederacy. We're a podunk bunch of swaggering pious hicks."
--Bruce Sterling