In liberalism feminism, prostitution is conceived of in the contractrarian sense of being a private business transaction. The liberal contends that a woman is free to enter into contracts. Liberal feminist believe that personal “rights” should predominate over concerns for the social good. The liberal feminist wants to free women from oppressive gender roles.
Marxism
Marxist feminism arises out of the doctrines of Karl Marx, whose theory is centered less on the material aspects of life than on the more broadly defined social one. Prostitution is a form of labor and therefore has been specifically noted as falling under the designation of a corruption of wage labor. Marx asserted that prostitution is only a specific expression of the general prostitution of the laborer. Prostitutes may feel that they are free, but looking at the larger economic picture in Marxist terms, they are in reality oppressed workers reinforcing an exploitative capitalistic scheme.
Classical Marxism conceives the bourgeois mainly as founded on the unremitting basis of capitalism: private gain. The rhetoric of commodities pervades the family, as women, lacking access to the public sphere, are forced to link themselves to men for financial reasons. Accordingly, sex within capitalist marriage is viewed as a form of prostitution. Only the destruction of the capitalist system and the establishment of communism can redeem sexuality by providing the requisite conditions of economic and social equality.
Prostitution reinforces the capitalist system because men are forced to move to cities, where their wages are not sufficient to support a wife. Whereas in rural areas they had been able to rely on the free domestic and sexual services of their wives, they obliged to pay for these services in urban settings. Prostitutes fulfill a specific role in the capitalist state by limiting discontent.
Radical Feminism
Radical feminist see the persistence of prostitution as both an indicator and cause of the subordinate state women. “Prostitution is an inherently gendered practice in which women are constructed as the sexual servants of men, and the buying of sexual service is defined as a benefit for men. The sexual characteristics of women have occasioned and justified their subordination to men throughout history, modern prostitution seems to some not just continuous with this ideological oppression, but to be its perfection.
Since no rational person would willingly be consumed as a sexual object, it is supposed, the existence of prostitution necessarily depends on the role social inequality plays in ensuring that the socially more powerful have access to sexual objects of their choice. Prostitution is necessarily a form of exploitation.
Radical feminist criticisms of the institution of prostitution is the role it plays in defining women as sexual objects, available to many who desires them. One other most obvious fact about prostitution in our society, yet perhaps the hardest to take into account, is the degree to which prostitution and prostitutes attract our interest, and serve as a stimulus for talk, jokes, stories, gazes, in short, as a source of our common titillation. The stereotypes that are conjured by our common consciousness provide images not just of prostitutes but also of women more generally. Radical feminist suggest that sex act itself, between a male client and a female prostitute, amounts to a public proclamation of male dominance over women.
For the radical feminist, prostitution is a manifestation and consequence of the oppression of all women in “patriarchal” society, a social system which gives men power to control women’s bodies for their own interests. Centuries ago, some feminists saw marriage as a form of prostitution. Radical feminism focuses on men as oppressors, yet say little about the possibility of the woman being an oppressor of other women or men. Radical feminist do not view prostitution as a harmless private transaction. However they believe that it reinforces and perpetuates the objectification, subordination and exploitation of women.
The Radical feminist views are thoughtful but not always delineated sufficiently to support a credible theory that prostitution degrades all women. In a social sense they seem to see degradation as existing over a broad spectrum of society in which everything that they do, from opening doors for women to sexual assault which reinforces their view of men as “dominating.”
Radical feminist would like to eliminate prostitution in all its form. They hold a certain belief about prostitution they tend to be mechanical in their analysis of prostitution, separating the moral and spiritual forces of relationship s from the temporal forces. In doing so they present an incomplete view of relationship between men and men and women, as well the intricate relationship between prostitutes and their client.
In conclusion, each of these approaches are very different but similar in a certain sense it is important to recognize that the forms that prostitution take and consequently, the condition of prostitutes, would vary widely in different parts of the world, and therefore would require attention to their specific aspects. Although we tend to have this close-mindedness to the situation, we need to see that prostitutes are people also. We need to understand that they deserve the same basic human rights that we do. Just because their profession is controversial does not mean that they should be treated with less respect. Prostitutes, for the most part, do not choose to spend the rest of their lives doing this, nor do they choose that this is what they want to be when they grow up. It is a trap that many women fall into and find it very hard to get out of, once you are in.
Katina Smith
Topics in Feminist Philosophy 403-01/20
February 21, 2004