Prostitution, paternal incest and standpoints.
hello,
i've been working in France within a community health
ngo with and for
prostitutes that has a non-abolitionist and
non-regulationist feminist
policy (Cabiria, Lyon, France), and at the same time I
worked
voluntarily on the issue of paternal incest against
children in a
context of parental separation (Mères en Lutte, Lyon,
France). Both
were
grassroots type of political work.
Working on both these issues, male violence against
children and women
within the domestic sphere, and male sexual
appropriation of women
within the public sphere, at the same time was
particular. The networks
of feminists with whom I've had the chance to
collaborate reflected the
strong opposition in France and elsewhere on the issue
of prostitution.
Those feminists with whom I collaborated on the issue
of prostitution
were non-abolitionist, and those feminists with whom I
worked on the
issue of paternal incest were often abolitionist, both
often being
radical feminists. So I often felt split, divided
between these
networks
that were both political and personal. The tension
that arose out of
this, made me develop the following way of trying to
relate some
issues.
The analyses used by the non-abolitionist feminists
were in particular
those written by Gail Pheterson and Paola Tabet, who
stressed
communality between women (across the whore-madonna
divide) and a
sexual-economic continuum between women (across the
prostitution-marriage divide).
Today, the very conflicting discussions in the media
on the Islamic
veil
and prostitution appear to me as very parallel because
I feel them to
be
similar ways of hyper-visibilising in a totally
de-contextualised way a
form of male domination (far away from 'us') and
under-visibilising far
much violent and structural forms of male domination
(close to 'us').
I have the feeling that there is a projection going on
of forms of male
domination on super-subordinate groups of women
(class/race/continent),
and that that projection allows and fosters the denial
of the
continuation (in classic or (post)modernised ways) of
far much violent
and structural male domination close to 'us'.
E.g. on the issue of paternal incest in a context of
parental
separation, the situation is that bad in France that
women are fleeing
France, hiding somewhere to protect their children
because the
socio-judicial actors do not want to consider the
structural presence
of
white, upper-class, straight male sexual violence
against children
(projecting it far away unto paedophilia networks of
male strangers
molesting children, or unto lower-class, non-white or
gay males). The
situation is that problematic that even the UN (!) has
done research on
the French situation and had published a report to
draw attention to
French authorities' complacency towards these forms of
male domestic
and
public violence.
http://www.unhchr.ch/Huridocda/Huridoca.nsf/0/2565919a3556a17ec1256cd400
553d08?Opendocument
Several investigations show that pro-paedocriminal
networks influence
French socio-judicial policy, until the ministry of
interior. So-called
experts are given a lot of space and power to diffuse
pseudo-theories
on
'parental alienation', 'false memory syndromes',
'false allegations'
which have been developed and spread by people holding
explicit
pro-paedocriminal views as Richard Gardner and Ralph
Underwager. And
this situation goes on and on. As far as I know, not
one major French
newspaper or TV has seriously presented the report by
the UN, the
several reports by feminist ngo's and the testimonies
of those women
and
children who tried to flee and are often caught, their
children placed
in institutions or 'given' to their raping fathers,
and these women are
then sentenced to conditional or effective prison
sentences for
defamatory accusations, international kidnapping,
non-respect of
paternal visiting/custody rights, etc...
At the same time, media are giving a lot of space to
denounce - in a
totally de-contextualised way - male domination
against women in
non-white, 'lower' class social groups (Islamic veil,
collective rapes,
sexist discourses), and male domination against women
of 'lower' class,
non-white social groups (prostitution). Each time, it
is mainly women
who're paying the price of these practices
(prostitutes being harassed,
arrested, expelled, and abused; Islamic young women
being expelled from
schools, and facing sexist, racist and classist
violence). Both
prostitutes and Islamic women are systematically hyper
stigmatised as
over-oppressed victims incapable of independent
thought and action.
Behind the woman reclaiming her right to openly
express her attachment
to Islam in an oppressive racist, classist, Christian
society, there
should always be the hyper-macho, extremist Islamic
man controlling her
thought, feeling and actions; behind the woman trying
to live in a
sexist, classist and racist society by selling sexual
services there
should always be the hyper-macho, foreign, trafficking
pimp...
And to come back to prostitution and paternal incest,
what I slowly
begin to notice is that no continuity at all is
explicited by the media
across the private-public divide. Prostitution is
being thought of as a
form of male sexual appropriation that exists *only*
in the public
sphere, and male rape of children as sth that *mainly*
concerns the
non-domestic sphere. But there are elements (see
Tabet, 2001) to think
these issues differently: paternal sexual violence is
the predominant
form of male sexual violence against children, and it
thus mainly
concerns the domestic sphere, while the heterosexual
practice of
prostitution - defined as structurally imposed paid
sex work by women
for men, where work = a service one does for someone
else, sex work = a
sexual service one does for someone else, paid sex
work = a sexual
service one does for someone else against financial
retribution - also
and probably mainly exists within the domestic sphere.
It is possible
to
analyse several heterosexual practices structurally
imposed by men upon
women as constituting un-paid, un-negotiated,
un-explicited sexual
services (see Tabet) done by women for men. The items
that can be
analysed as such are concrete sexual practices within
straight couples
(see Tabet, 2001) (women conceding 'doing' sex for
men, not for
themselves, to prevent male violence, to maintain a
feeling of love and
esteem, to obtain material 'benefits' from men, to
please men,...). A
concrete example e.g. is the issue of 'faking orgasm'
which I think has
been analysed as a quite generalised practice by women
within
hetero-sex
and which reflects the asymmetry of heterosexual
practices.
And if one takes on step back, then I think one can
defend as a
hypothesis that what the structurally common cause is
of the general
media and societal treatment of these issues of
prostitution and
paternal incest is the male-stream
rejection/silencing/repression of
radical feminist and radical lesbian critical analyses
of the
heterosexual system men impose upon women. Because
these radical
analyses of heterosexuality as a political system are
nearly always
rendered un-hear-able, while they have since long
analysed and
denounced
the ways the heterosexual system is a key element of
men's oppression
of
women.
And when one considers this, then it seems to me that
the relation
between abolitionist and non-abolitionist feminism can
be thought
differently, and instead of an unbridgeable gap, be
considered as
different ways of problematising heterosexual
practices starting from
several feminist standpoints along the axes of power
of class, race,
sexuality, continent, ... .
This is how I try to manage the current divide between
abolitionist and
non-abolitionist feminism and feminists, and it
probably plays a role
that it is important for me, personally, to try and
live this divide in
a positive and anti-masculinist way. A way that tries
to start from and
systematically incorporate my male, white, straight,
upper class,
western oppressive standpoint when re-deploying the
political theories
and practises consciously developed by members of
oppressed social
groups starting from their standpoints. A way that I
would not call
feminist, as I'm intimately convinced that my
standpoint continues to
be
a structural epistemological and political handicap -
as analysed by
materialist feminist standpoint theory (Nancy
Hartsock) - making
probable the reproduction of oppressive thoughts and
practices,
motivated by the defence of my political oppressive
standpoint and it's
privileges.
The feminist analyses to which I'm accountable are in
particular:
Delphy, Christine (1998). Lennemi principal. I.
Economie politique du
patriarcat. Paris: Syllepse.
Delphy, Christine (2001). Lennemi principal. II.
Penser le genre.
Paris: Syllepse.
Guillaumin, Colette (1992). Sexe, race et pratique du
pouvoir. Lidée
de
nature. Paris: Côté-Femmes.
Hartsock, Nancy (1998). The feminist standpoint
revisited & other
essays. Westview: Oxford.
Mathieu, Nicole-Claude (1991). Lanatomie politique.
Catégories et
idéologies du sexe. Paris: Côté-Femmes.
Pheterson, Gail (2001), Le prisme de la prostitution,
Paris :
L'Harmattan.
TABET Paola (1987), Du don au tarif. Les relation
sexuelles impliquant
une compensation, in Les Temps Modernes, n°490, pp.
1-53.
TABET Paola (1991), Les dents de la prostituée:
échange, négociation,
choix dans les rapports économico-sexuels, in
Marie-Claude HURTIG,
Michèle KAIL et Hélène ROUCH (dir.): Sexe et genre. De
la hiérarchie
entre les sexes, Paris, Ed. CNRS, pp. 227-244.
Tabet, Paola (1998). La construction sociale de
linégalité des sexes.
Des outils et des corps. Paris: LHarmattan.
Tabet, Paola (2001), "La grande arnaque.
L'expropriation de la
sexualité
des femmes", in Actuel Marx, n° 30, pp. 131-152
Wittig, Monique (2001). La Pensée Straight. Paris:
Balland.
merci, I'd be very happy to benefit from feedbacks,
léo
=======================
Quote in Tabet, 2001:
"The girl doesn't say anything... because... you know;
it's a boy's
role
to talk about that sort of things... [...] It's
supposed to be the
girl's place to just endure, sort of, the boy asks and
asks and asks
and
then the girls just gives up in the end and says all
right, then. That
expected like. [...] Yeah, she finally says yes and
then it's all
happy,
everything, the boy's really happy and he goes really
happy. And she's
depressed the next day, that's what it's supposed to
be like" (Holland
and Ramazanoglu et al.(1998), The male in the head.
Young people,
heterosexuality and power, London, The Tufnell Press,
p. 91)
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