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with the Asian guy, Molly's relationship with her clients is very even. The relationship with Lucy, the employer, is the exploitative one. In stripping and to an extent in pornography, and in prostitution, women often feel an enormous sense of power. This isn't to say that women aren't victimized. Obviously, there are as many kinds of prostitution as there are women or kinds of jobs. And it's so class divided. The problem is that all kinds of prostitution get lumped together in one massive moral judgment.
I'm sure many people would have a hard time seeing how prostitutes have power over their tricks. I don't see it myself.
Within middle-class prostitution, particularly, there is a lot of control on the part of the women, because on some levels it's men who become vulnerable by walking into a brothel, a place where women are basically calling the shots. The woman is the one who decides when to go into the bedroom, when to begin the session, how much time to give, when to talk, when to not talkof course, she's following cues, trying to read the guy very carefullywhen to pull out the condom, when to put it on, how much more talk to have. Within a half-hour session, there's maybe ten to fifteen minutes of sex at most, and there's a powerful sense of men's vulnerability during the entire time.
One of the reasons I think there's such a sense of power is that the women see how vulnerable the male sex organ is. Men need an affirmation of their masculinity, need to feel they're still in full working order, or whatever. And that's such a vulnerable thing. An erection can happen or not happen. Actual prostitution is so much a woman coaxing it to work or controlling it or making sex into an experience that somehow is professionally complete. If a man goes to a prostitute, he knows he's going to get satisfaction on some levelwhatever that means. Whereas, if he picks up a woman any other place, he may spend a fortune, not knowing what the outcome will be or how he's going to respond if sex does happen. In prostitution, the notion of a complete sex act is some-what guaranteed. I think a lot of the reason men get so attached to prostitutesattached on some levelis because there's an understanding and appreciation of that professional service.
In the movies, prostitutes in every class of prostitutionworking-class prostitution, middle-class prostitutionare made to pay for having been prostitutes. How they pay is determined by how much they did it for the money, how much they did it for the thrill, where they started in the first place, whether they had daddy problems.
You're talking about conventional films . . .
Yes. Conventional films, and some women's films. Marlene Gorris's
[1987] is an instance: women working in a house get assaulted and beaten up and slashed.
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In reality, while there are thousands of women prostitutes, doing a job where they seem very vulnerable, relatively little happens to them. The women who do prostitution don't do it because they were abused children who now need the affection of all these different men or something like that. And they're not just people with drug problems. In most cases, prostitutes are people who, at a certain point in their lives, choose not to take another economic alternative, one which is debilitating in its own way, but less remunerative.
In this culture one hears constantly about the sacrifice you have to make for doing prostitution. I've been attacked by everyone: by feminists who say, 'You're soft-peddling prostitution; prostitution is
' and by spiritual women who say you can't have all these sexual encounters without doing damage to your soul. But nobody criticizes the forty-hour workweek. Nobody criticizes the fact that for the most part people are trained into positive thinking about jobs that don't make use of half their talents. There are bad things about prostitution, but they're not the ones you see in the movies. It's not that the women get diseases or anything like that. Women who work in a brothel are probably safer from AIDS than anyone else, because they always use condoms. Street prostitution is different because it's tied up with heroin, and there are a lot of other factors. But the point is that the kinds of women
is about are very healthy. And they're not busted by the police, and they don't get hurt.
What
the bad things?
There's the difficulty with relationships. Either you're lying about being a prostitute or you're not lying. Both have consequences. It's really hard for some women to do prostitution and have a boyfriend. If he accepts it, he becomes like a pimp. If he doesn't, then there's a battle every time. So, one bad thing is a bit of schizophrenia. A lot of the women have double names and double identities. But schizophrenia happens in other work, too; it's just never talked about. 'Normal' work is usually romanticized or ignored.
There's also a lot of damage if a woman does prostitution too long. She ends up buying into a fake world and, finally, has no alternative for that work and ages within it. The only alternative then is to become a madam or to work within the business in some other way, as a phone operator or something like that.
I can't stress enough how important it was for me to see how unsexual it is for women to be doing prostitution. Very few of them have any sexual response, and that can lead to problems. There was this one woman who was in a session and came out doubled over. People thought that somebody had hurt her. She called her gynecologist; it turned out that her resistance to feeling anything sexual during her sessions created a spasm in her body.
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The idea that prostitution is unsexual for these women is hard for people to believe. What strikes me is that people who would morally judge sex without feeling during prostitution don't judge the same act in other circumstances: for example, a woman decides to give her husband a quick fuck because otherwise he's going to be pushing up against her all night, not letting her sleep; she's not into it, but it's quicker and easier to get him off, to get it over with, than to be continually dealing with it. How many times does that happen in this culture? And there
