Right-wing Women

has constructed the social, economic, and political situation in

which the sale of some sexual or reproductive capacity is necessary

to the survival of women; and yet the selling is seen to be an act of

individual w ill—the only kind of assertion of individual will in

women that is vigorously defended as a matter of course by most of

those who pontificate on female freedom. The state denies women

a host of other possibilities, from education to jobs to equal rights

before the law to sexual self-determination in marriage; but it is

state intrusion into her selling of sex or a sex-class-specific capacity

that provokes a defense of her will, her right, her individual self—

defined strictly in terms of the will to sell what is appropriate for

females to sell.

This individual woman is a fiction—as is her w ill—since individuality is precisely what women are denied when they are defined and used as a sex class. As long as issues of female sexual and reproductive destiny are posed as if they are resolved by individuals as individuals, there is no way to confront the actual conditions that perpetuate the sexual exploitation of women. Women by

definition are condemned to a predetermined status, role, and function. In terms of prostitution, Josephine Butler, a nineteenth-century crusader against prostitution, explained the obvious

implications of its sex-based nature:

M y principle has always been to let individuals alone, not to

pursue them with any outward punishment, nor drive them

out o f any p la ce so long as they behave decently, but to attack

organized p rostitu tion , that is when a third party, activated by

the desire of making money, sets up a house in which women

are sold to m en . 12

This is the opposite of what the state does when prostitution is

illegal: the state harasses and persecutes individual prostitutes and

leaves the institutions and the powerful who profit from them

alone. It does this because it is accepted that prostitution expresses

the w ill of the prostitute, and that therefore punishing her is the

proper expression of hostility toward prostitution. It is precisely

this notion of individual responsibility (when in fact there is only a

class-determined behavior) that perpetuates prostitution and protects the profits and power of those who sell women to men. Feminists, unlike the state, go after the institutions and the powerful, not the individual women, because feminists recognize above all

that the prostitute is created by material conditions outside herself. * In the new prostitution of reproduction, which is just beginning to unfold, the third party that w ill develop the female population for sale w ill be the scientist or doctor. He is a new kind

of pimp, but he is not a new enemy of women. The formidable

institutions of scientific research institutes and medical hospitals

will be the new houses out of which women are sold to men: the

use of their wombs for money.

*This does not mean that prostitution is reinvented in every generation

only through material conditions. The colonialization o f women is both

external and internal, as Kate Millett made clear in Sexual Politics. Sexual

exploitation and abuse create in women a psychological submission to self-

denigration; in The Prostitution Papers Millett went so far as to describe this

submission as “a kind o f psychological addiction to self-denigration. ” (See

The Prostitution Papers [New York: Avon, 1973], p. 9 6 . )