C-Spot magazine, the Columbia University Sex magazine, founded and edited by my dear friend Jessica Tang, recently published an article I wrote regarding sex work and female empowerment. This article draws upon some of the arguments I wrote in the AnnaKissed Manifiesta. I am in disagreement with Jessica over the photograph that she chose to accompany my article:
The image that Editor Jessica Tang chose to accompany my article on sex work and female empowerment
I am unhappy with this image choice because it portrays an oppressively skinny woman, a sex worker stereotype that doesn’t reflect the reality of body diversity in the industry. It is also the unrealistic, generally unhealthy figure that women kill themselves striving to achieve, which is a source of female brainwashing and oppression. Associating this image with the article implicitly links female empowerment to corroborating with beauty tyranny.
I wrote an email to Jessica, and suggested that she instead use a photo of Sarah Jenny, a well-known and well-respected sex worker activist who is also queer and a fat-positive activist, who works for $pread Magazine, SWANK/SWOP, and speaks at national conferences regularly about sex work-related issues:
Sarah Jenny's photo, from her MySpace, without permission
I think Sarah Jenny is incredibly beautiful and I really admire her work as an activist and visual artist. She and her partner D’Luxe began Hart Collective, a DIY media workshop that teaches people whose voices are marginalized in society and mainstream media to make use of independent media and the internet to empower themselves.
I think Sarah Jenny is a wonderful example of an empowered female sex worker, and it would be beneficial to C-Spot and the Columbia sex-reading public to know about her work. However, Jessica refused to use this photo, suggesting first that I submit a photo of myself (because Sarah is “so not hot”) and when I refused to do that, she wrote:
“Though c-spot is kind of nonconventinal, I must still adhere partially to the masses” She also wrote, “If you have any other suggestions of alternative-looking beauty, please let me know – I can go for a goth, girl with crazy piercings/tattoos, girl with pink hair, etc.”
Basically, she refused to put up Sarah Jenny’s photo because she thinks Sarah Jenny is too fat for her sexy magazine. However, she would accept a so-called “alternative” model (with piercings/tattoos/pink hair, AKA completely mainstream-coopted illusions of what used to be alternative, which now are totally not alternative). And she would only do this if the model were skinny.
A publication that aims to deal intelligently with sexuality gives up its intellectual rigor and integrity when it is only concerned about “catering to the masses” – do the brilliant Ivy League masses in Morningside Heights really need a skinny zombie in a glossy mag for their blue blood masturbation? Does the photo of a truly beautiful, truly empowered woman with radical ideas and the ability to teach something, really turn them off so much? What is Columbia University about? Learning? New ideas? Or is it merely an institution built to maintain elitist social systems through bullshit certifications, and perpetuate the class hierarchy and cultural orthodoxy? C-Spot’s choice of superficial body garbage over genuine intellectual value and genuine beauty is perhaps parallel to the true social function of the University. I am angry about associating my ideas on feminism with this photo and this shallow purpose.
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On the other hand, Jessica’s image choice is oddly reflective of the sex worker’s inner battle in the body market game. Ever-appealing to the gaze of the customer, it is the dilemma of the stripper in meta expression. Her refusal to use what she thinks is a “not hot” woman in her sexy magazine is reflective of every woman’s dilemma with body image. I personally struggle with this in spite of ideological credence because as a sex worker, I have seen how appealing to a mainstream beauty paradigm is financially rewarding and thus materially empowering though ideologically disempowering. Jess is afraid that she would lose her audience by publishing a picture of a “not hot” woman in her magazine. Similarly, I struggle with the daily anxiety at every meal that I would lose clients if I don’t take care to appeal to beauty standards. So, okay. I respect her editorial authority, but I want to divorce my association from that photo choice.
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On a separate note, this is my original article for C-Spot, which was cut down to suit the printing requirements of the magazine. For anyone interested in the full arguments:
Aspasia slips off her toga. The soft light of morning breathes marble stripes down her back. She walks in smooth, decisive strides across the stone coliseum to her lover, Pericles, who kneels, ready to receive her lesson in oration.
At the peak of Golden Athens, Aspasia, the hetera, was a woman of exceptional freedom. Heterae were high-class courtesans who were independent and educated, who paid taxes, owned property, and participated in business and public life. In this way, they were more powerful than the aristocratic wives, who were considered properties of their fathers and husbands with no property of their own, and no business except for childcare and household management. While Athenian wives were prohibited from walking unescorted in the streets, Aspasia and her fellow heterae entertained the city’s leading politicians and intellectuals with philosophical debate, art, and pleasure, and were likely the most influential women in the polis.
“Hetaerae or ‘companions,’ moved around most freely of all, even more than the married wives of the citizens….The hetaerae not only constituted the elite of the prostitutes; many also considered them the leaders among all women. It was said about the Athens of the fifth century B.C. that one saw no women other than hetaerae and auletrides. Women and girls from prosperous homes lived in obscure seclusion; the cheap prostitutes were stowed out of sight. Hetaerae and auletrides, [song-dance-girls,] dominated the streets, attended theatrical performances, and joined public processions. Indeed, some of them even made their marks in politics.”
Aspasia, in particular, was noted for her philosophical learning and oratory skills. She is portrayed as a trainer of politicians in the writings of Plutach, Plato, Aristophanes, Aeschines Socraticus, Cicero, Antisthenes, and Xenophon, among others. Plutarch wrote that Aspasia’s house was a center of intellectual activity, which attracted the most influential thinkers of the time. Some scholars, including Charles Kahn of the University of Pennsylvania, believe that the character Diotima from Plato’s Symposium was in fact modeled after Aspasia, and that she may have written many of Pericles’ great speeches.
Towards the end of her life, after the death of Pericles, Aspasia endured slander, jealousy, and legal punishment from embittered Athenians. She was accused of sorcery and blamed for corrupting politics and causing the downfall of Athens. Like other powerful women throughout history, Aspasia was socially ostracized as a witch and a slut. Her intellectual and sexual power was perceived as inherently evil, a threat to society that must be kept under control. Although Aspasia enjoyed great freedom and social recognition under the protection of a favorable state that rewarded her strengths and contributions, when that state, and her lover, the leading statesman, collapsed under political and economic stress, Aspasia lost everything she had to the fearful hand of a society that had long envied and hated her, and was eager to make of her a scapegoat on whose shoulders to place the blame of all of society’s failures.
So how powerful was Aspasia, really? Compared to other Athenian women, were the heterae really as liberated as Aspasia seemed, or did public opinion severely limit their liberties and happiness, and keep them living in shame and fear? Aspasia’s freedom perched precariously on the shoulders of her lover. Thus, neither the heterae nor the Athenian wives held direct power; these women, as an underclass, played different roles and enjoyed different freedoms according to the terms of their relationship with men. In different societies, with different norms and values with regard to sexuality and domesticity, women could enjoy different levels of freedom and power through their relationships with men; yet until they are allowed direct influence, independent of men, women’s liberty is precarious and restricted, and the power of the wife is inversely proportional to the power of the whore.
In our present day society, where women are increasingly taking on leadership roles in public life, are we finally attaining a state of greater independence and truer freedom? Or is our position equally reliant on fickle tides of sexual and reproductive values? As some women begin the trendy “migration back to the home,” exhausted from the double shift in the workplace and the family; and as it is becoming more and more acceptable for successful career women to abandon the tenure track to become full time mothers and housewives, are we as a society in danger of reversing the advances of the second wave feminist movement? Recently cracked glass ceilings for women in the public sphere have not translated to equal distribution of responsibility between wives and husbands in the home; thus, modern women have had to shoulder the burden of double responsibilities that had previously been segregated by gender. Until changes in power dynamics and gender roles take place in both the private and the public sphere; until men are able and expected to be equally responsible in sexuality and the family as women in business and public institutions, the unfair stress placed on women to maintain their unequal equality makes true freedom and power precarious and restricted.
In “The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State,” Engels theorized that monogamy evolved as an economic institution, the purpose of which has always been to enable men to pass their property onto progeny. He wrote that the restriction of women to one sexual partner was necessary only so that men can be guaranteed that heirs were descendants of their own blood. “The modern individual family is based on the open or disguised enslavement of woman,” Engels wrote. Since monogamy was a social mechanism for property inheritance, only the monogamy of women was required. Men may stray from the rules.
One peep into the back pages of the Village Voice reveals a New York City sexual economy that is almost exclusively catered towards men’s appetites. While taxis blaze by with flashy advertisements for Gentlemen’s Clubs, it is difficult to locate a single sexual entertainment venue for straight women. Ads that feature male sex workers target gay male clients; and gay female clients are sometimes not even permitted to enter unescorted to a fancy Gentleman’s Club. Whereas casual sexual drive in men is encouraged and even admired, women are subject to a Madonna/Whore lose-lose dualism of critical judgment: you’re a “slut” if you “put out,” and a “prude” or “bitch” if you don’t. Good girls marry the choice men, and bad girls are paid by those same men to provide extra-marital entertainment. Both suffer from objectification.
The achievement of true gender parity requires a revolution of gender roles in both the private and the public spheres. This means that the sexual and domestic double standards between women and men need to be exposed and eliminated. Traditional notions of marriage, childcare, sexual propriety, and domestic responsibility, which are inherently sexist, need to be changed. The moral judgments that hold promiscuous women in contempt and isolation while holding promiscuous men in heroic awe need to be debunked and dismantled for true equality to be established. Until the questions of sexuality and marriage are fully acknowledged and addressed, women’s freedom and power will always be precariously perched upon their relationships to men. Until the objectifying binary of Madonna and whore is debunked, until women are no longer rewarded or punished for their chastity or sexual liberty, and are given the media to take back the male gaze and express their own subjectivities, until gender roles are eliminated from the family, and the Virgins/Wives/Mothers stop witch-hunting Whores/Wallflowers/Lesbians, and everyone claims their full independent humanity – until then, women will continue to be defined by their relationships to men.
The human rights question of true equality among humankind lies at a crucial standstill until the woman question is addressed. The feminist question lies at a crucial crux and conflict until the whore question is addressed. Women are more than half of the species, yet our “woman’s issues” of family and sexuality, are continually marginalized as trivial and unimportant to the “greater social injustice questions” of economics and public politics. Our domestic and caretaker labor, and our sexual object status, is taken for granted as a natural part of the economy; it is the foundation of the economy, yet it is not accounted for in national measurements of GDP, nor compensated fairly to allow for personal choice. The isolated nuclear family that is based on the myth of monogamy requires critical examination, for it is falling apart in modern society, and women, who have a far greater incidence for seeking psychological help with regard to stressful family problems, are the primary bearers of the sufferings of marriage.
Whores who work in a range of greatly differing conditions, from the elite and glamorized London call girl, to the “cheap prostitute kept out of site” in Athens, to the trafficked child in Bankok, and the hipster rent boys in Williamsburg – the current media explosion on sex work gives these hidden people the opportunity to play an important role in forcing society to confront the Madonna/Whore question, the Wallflower/Wife question, the Princess/Working Girl question, and the Nuclear Marriage/Alternative Sexualities question, which are fundamental questions that society must face in order to further human equality and freedom. These questions carry with them such radical and dangerous implications that they are ignored right under our noses and ironically dismissed as trivial or pertaining only to special minority groups, when in fact they are the most important questions for social life and human freedom, affecting every human being.
Some feminists in the second and third waves oppose pornography and the sexual objectification of women. Yet they do not see women’s labor in the family as enforced through marriage by institutions of government, religion, and culture, as being even greater sources of objectification for women. By taking on the voice of the virgin and mother, who is too chaste or too “good” to tolerate sexual objectification, in order to denounce the whore and porn star, who they mistakenly believe to have no agency in their labor, these “radical” feminists are in fact bolstering the patriarchy, which subsists on unquestioned “morals” of honorable femininity.
Furthermore, the restriction and definition of women’s sexuality to male utility permeates our society and is not limited to the pages of a “men’s interest” magazine. The sex worker who participates in a sexual economy not of her own creation should not be blamed for doing what she or he deems is necessary to take advantage of an inherently unjust social/sexual dynamic to gain real economic power for her or himself. Consensual sex, whether paid or unpaid, should not be persecuted; rather, society should direct its resources and energies on eliminating nonconsensual sex, on punishing all the sexual assaulters and rapists that go free every day while prostitutes and johns who commit victimless crimes sit in jail.
Powerful women throughout history, such as Cleopatra, Aspasia, and the Empress CiXi of China, have used seduction and the sexual manipulation of men to achieve their ends, making the best use of a sexist system. The feminine power lies in conscientious agency in understanding and resisting gender injustice, whether this is done in compliance with or subversion of patriarchal notions of female propriety.
Aspasia at Columbia: I know you exist, and hide in self-protection. You are in bed with a great Pericles. Ivy columns endorse your voice among the powerful and the intellectual. Speak for yourself.
