Chapter Five
Prostitution and Feminist Theory
Notes from the Sociological Underground

Consider the following situation: A feminist sociologist has just completed her Ph.D. thesis, an insightful and well-documented ethnography of prostitution. The work is based on participant observation, an approach richly developed in urban sociology of the Chicago School as well as cultural anthropology a la Franz Boas. In terms of locale, the study contains an interesting comparative dimension, having been conducted both in the Netherlands and in New York City. However, participation for the dissertation research took place only in Amsterdam, where prostitution has for some time been decriminalized: this was done to avoid the methodological complication of engaging in activity illegal in the American context. There, the sociologist was supported by a Dutch fellowship and donated whatever small moneys she earned to an international organization dedicated to the rights and health care of prostitutes. At her New York site, the study was conducted equally intensively. Here, though, time was spent hanging out with sex workers, observing and sharing in a majority of activities exclusive of waged labor. The sociologist was already somewhat acquainted with the sex industry in New York; as a college freshman, she had worked part-time as a topless dancer in Manhattan in order to earn money for her education.

It may not surprise a skeptical reader to learn that the described study doesn't, to my knowledge, exist. But what if it did? And what if this feminist scholar was about to present her findings at an American Sociological Association annual meeting as part of a committed effort

to find a good teaching and research-oriented academic job, preferably at a well-respected college or university? Would she face more obstacles than anyone else—if so, why would she? Should she? Clearly there are many precedents of sociologists being respected, or at least not shunned, as a result of choosing to engage in various forms of participant observation of groups belittled by mainstream society (recent examples include Judith Rollins, who worked herself as a domestic to better perceive the experiences of this group of workers; Terry Williams, studying "cocaine kids" and users of crack; Martin Jankowski, living with gangs, who were familiar from his own youthful experience; and Loic Wacquant, entering the ring to deepen his understanding of boxers).^[1] Such researchers may sometimes even be seen, and experience the feeling of being perceived, as "cool," kind of hip, possessors of special ties to worlds most of us do not similarly know or that we are inclined to avoid. In such cases, to its credit, sociology has the potential for conferring legitimacy upon chronicles and chroniclers of the illegitimate and illegitimized. On the other hand, why is it so difficult to imagine this hypothetical feminist sociologist of prostitution encountering analogous recognition? It seems much more likely that she would meet with discouragement, repeated jokes,^[2] humiliation, discrimination overt or covert—if she wasn't too hesitant to come forward at all; if she ever even conducted the study, for she might fear being perceived as a martyr or a freak or she might heed advisers' cautions about potential harm to her professional career.

The skeptic might also protest that research on prostitution is not comparable to studying people who enter gangs, or work as domestics or boxers. For a sociologist to participate in prostitution, I can hear someone arguing, means doing something that is illegal , something potentially destructive to and of the body. I anticipated the first objection by having the hypothetical researcher limit her participation to a liberal and legal setting. As for the second point, the same concerns could extend to the cited researcher on gangs who finds himself engaged in dangerous fights as part of his study, or the student of boxing who perhaps is punched to the point of severe physical injury. Would their methodologies be seen as similarly problematic, maybe verging on the masochistic, or viewed more positively as part of a process of simultaneous self/ other exploration and therefore as cause for fascination? To this, a critic might again counter, still, prostitution is different: it involves added dangers for women, danger of rape and other forms of attack specifi-

cally affected by gender. However, one can imagine other kinds of participant observation, also exposing women to ongoing danger and the possibility of assault by men, that would probably not produce the same disapproving objections as prostitution: undercover police or government work, say; or work done with violent felons on parole or probation; a cross-class study of batterers; or, returning to gangs, women studying or living with mostly male members of organized urban groups who have been known to gang rape. Such proposals might well evoke appropriate concern—but stigmatization? Likely not.

But perhaps the point is made even more vividly if we construe the feminist as having decided not to study prostitution after all. Imagine that she decides not to leave the United States; noticing that research on the following topics is also needed, she debated with her advisers about making her doctoral thesis either (a) a participant observation of topless dancers (going back to her earlier experience so as to treat it sociologically) or (b) a participant observation of women who appear in pornographic films. She eventually chose to do a study of women who posed for pornographic magazines. In these cases, nothing illegal will have transpired. Yet when the time came for job hunting at the ASA convention, would the outcome be so different than if she had elected to study prostitution? If fear of social and sociological disapproval would again be so enormous as to render these other studies possibly undoable as well, then whatever is occurring likely involves more than just issues of law, "method," or safety. There must be something about openly participating in studies of sex —especially (though not exclusively) if the study is conducted by a woman, especially (though not exclusively) if the study is about sex for sale, that is, plain, blatantly commercial sex—which situates prostitution along a wider continuum of activities that produce awkward and loaded reactions, in and outside of sociology, in other women as well as in men.

Something must be going on because, all in all, relatively little serious study has been done on the subject of American prostitution—including (and most surprisingly) in the area of feminist theory. This is particularly striking when one thinks of the immensity of current interest in women's studies, and the sheer number of sociology, anthropology, and criminology departments scattered across the United States. I suspect that the relative paucity of consideration is neither accidental nor insignificant. On the contrary, prostitution (and its study) ventures into waters that we unconsciously find threatening: it remains marginal and

comparatively untheorized precisely because something about it is so central and meaningful. To analyze prostitution unavoidably raises both the ongoing specter of gendered oppression in patriarchal societies and our often schizophrenic—partly acknowledged, partly tabooed—passions about sex: the combination evokes highly conflicted and disconcerting reactions. The resulting ambivalence may be so strong that it has affected even sociologists, feminists, and feminist sociologists—groups that one would expect to be open and sympathetic toward the subject for reasons at least intellectual, if not also political. But whatever motivating factors may be operative, I propose that our failure to take prostitution seriously, as a practice extraordinarily common across as well as over the history of male-dominated societies, impoverishes the abilities of both feminist theory and sociology to understand sexual, psychic, and socioeconomic phenomena in all their complexity.

Before we turn to how and why prostitution poses important problems for feminist theory, the issue of ambivalence deserves further exploration.

Documenting Ambivalence: An Academic Overview

Has the study of prostitution really been so conflictual as I claim? Looking more closely at the content of existing writings provides one form of response. Based on a literature review conducted for this chapter, I classified books and articles on prostitution in the United States as generally falling into one of the following four categories. ,^[3]

Historical Studies

In this area can be placed outstanding works about English prostitution and Victorian society (by Judith Walkowitz), a number of books on prostitution and the progressive reform era in America (by Ruth Rosen, Anne Butler, and Barbara Hobson), and Alain Corbin's study of prostitution in France after 1850. ,^[4] I refer to the British and French studies because of their influence on American scholarship (Rosen, for example, in her study of American prostitutes in the early twentieth century draws heavily on Walkowitz's work on Victorian England). If we were to exclude them, though, we are left with a quite small number of specifically American historical accounts.

Writings by and about Prostitutes

Connected with the rise of a prostitutes' rights movement in California, a 1970s development in which

the group COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics) played a leading role, several collected volumes of working women's own writings have appeared (see, in particular, Good Girls/Bad Girls: Feminists and Sex Trade Workers Face to Face [1987], Sex Work: Writings by Women in the Sex Industry [1987], and A Vindication of the Rights of Whores [1989]). ,^[5] Much of this literature aims at enabling prostitutes to describe and redefine "sex work" for themselves. Some of the included essays advocate recasting prostitution as a form of legitimate work that should not be so stigmatized; a large number of sex workers' writings argue in favor of decriminalization. Unlike the historical studies, these works of self-description have been written and published in contexts outside academia.

Studies of Outsiders' Attitudes toward Prostitutes and Prostitution

Here we find writings, usually academic articles, that treat "pros" and "cons" of prostitution from the myriad perspectives of external observers. Studies in this category testify to tremendous ambivalence toward prostitution in American society at large; unintentionally, they also provide an illuminating backdrop to the picture of stigmatization painted by sex workers themselves. This literature includes not only works debating prostitution's continued illegal status, but also the philosophical and political questioning of whether feminists in particular ought be supportive or opposed (for the latter view, see especially Kathleen Barry's well-known book, Female Sexual Slavery [1979]).^[6] Some articles take up the actual attitudes held by groups like feminists and college students;^[7] others study reaction to recent prostitutes' rights organizations within a social movements framework. Of these last, efforts to overcome stereotypical images of prostitution have been portrayed in a fairly positive light, although the feminist movement has been relatively unsuccessful in this effort; Lena Dominelli's interesting analysis of an organization named Programme for the Reform of the Law on Soliciting stresses both the contributions and limitations of this British group's actions.^[8]

Contemporary Studies of the Relationship between Prostitution and Society

This subdivision includes the work of anthropologists, sociologists, and feminist theorists (who may or may not be academics). One influential essay of socialist feminist theory, written from the perspective of structuralist anthropology, places prostitution in a much larger context. In "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of

Sex" (1975), Gayle Rubin traces the commodification of female sexuality in capitalist societies to the traditional exchanges by men of women as objects of trade.^[9] By virtue of this analysis, one is able to understand the roots not only of prostitution but of marriage, too, as two sides of a thoroughly patriarchal coin. Both prostitution and marriage originated from this trafficking—a common heritage that sharply diverges, nonetheless, as in the process madonna status is bestowed only on the married woman, while those more overtly prostituted are labeled as whores. Rubin's point is certainly very much in keeping with other well-known tracts of feminist theory. From Friedrich Engels to Simone de Beauvoir, numerous writers have tried to characterize marriage as a glorified form of prostitution, thereby hoping to remove the grounds for discriminating between the two. And, of course, Rubin's perspective is one with which radical feminists of the American second wave, from Kate Millett to Shulamith Firestone and Ti-Grace Atkinson, would concur. Nevertheless, Rubin's anthropological work and that of other feminist theorists do not constitute major studies of prostitution per se. They are highly significant in positing a particular relationship between prostitution and patriarchal societies; at the same time, however, the authors discuss prostitution itself quite abstractly, seeming to shy away from detailed examination of its actual workings and the various parties involved.

Within sociology, numerous more specific studies of prostitution have in fact been done. Charles Winick and Paul Kinsie's Lively Commerce: Prostitution in the United States (1971) has the virtue of completeness, investigating prostitution from a variety of angles and containing chapters on madams, pimps, johns, the law, the military, and international finance. Less virtuous is its tendency to use outdated terms, thereby making rather unsociological statements from an atheoretical and unwittingly masculine standpoint: for example, the question of prostitutes' possible "frigidity" is raised; and the authors also note, "Contrary to the way they are usually represented in mass media, prostitutes tend to be physically unattractive, and some have fairly flagrant defects."^[10] On the other hand, Barbara Heyl's Madam as Entrepreneur (1979) is useful in taking almost the reverse approach, trying to shed light on the institution of prostitution as a whole by focusing in depth on the life history of one prostitute.^[11]

More current sociological work on prostitution includes Eleanor Miller's Street Woman (1986), a sympathetic study of female street hustlers in Milwaukee that is influenced both by feminist criminology and

by the University of Chicago's stress on urban ethnography. Miller was especially interested in discovering how different racial backgrounds influenced recruitment into what she calls "deviant street networks." Yet, for purposes of this overview, note that Miller's focus on hustlers again differentiates Street Woman from an explicit examination of prostitution per se. Miller defines hustling as "simply 'illegal work' that underclass people often engage in . . . to make ends meet." This category, much broader than prostitution, also includes persons charged with larceny, embezzlement, or robbery. Consequently, prostitutes enter her sample not as the study's sole focus but because some women arrested for felonies—Miller's one criterion for inclusion—had also been brought in at least once on the less "serious" misdemeanor offense of soliciting.^[12]

But I think two of the best contemporary studies of prostitution on its own terms have been conducted outside the bounds of American sociology. The first, Working Women: The Subterranean World of Street Prostitution (1985), comes close to being a long-term participation study, though it did not involve any actual engagement in sex work.^[13] Ironically, the book was written not by sociologists but by a social worker and minister, Arlene Carmen and Howard Moody. Both associated with the Judson Memorial Church in New York City, they aimed to influence a general audience by describing eight years of direct work and interaction with prostitutes. Their research began after no one came out to a clinic the church initiated to meet the health care needs of prostitutes (several of whom had reported ongoing abusive treatment, including economic and sexual harassment, by Manhattan physicians). When Carmen and another woman then visited Times Square massage parlors and street corners to publicize the clinic, they discovered and began to document the immense sense of fear, intimidation, and neglect that "working women" regularly experienced.

What is most extraordinary about this account is its lack of any judgmental tone and the sincere effort it demonstrates to avoid treating prostitutes as demeaned "objects" of study. Disclaiming any pretense to objectivity, Carmen and Moody instead are purposely "partisan and 'empathetic' to those 'working women' whose lives are made more miserable by their being forced into the illicit subculture of criminal activity."^[14] Simultaneously, the authors attempt to dispel popular myths they see as fueling antiprostitute prejudices, such as the notion of contact with prostitutes spreading venereal disease more rapidly than sex outside prostitution. They cite Winick and Kinsie's statement that VD

attributable to prostitutes accounted for only 3 to 5 percent of total occurrence, and another study's finding that 25 percent of high school teenagers tested positive for the disease compared to less than 5 percent of prostitutes.^[15] Updating these 1970s figures to reflect their own experience, the authors go on to report that not one of the twenty patients who gradually did begin to visit the health clinic designated especially for prostitutes showed evidence of VD. In contrast, out of a similar number of clients who used the church's regular clinic, infections regularly appeared. Carmen and Moody were told that "almost all working women used rubbers with every customer, no matter what sexual act was performed, and their faith that it protects them against VD was borne out. . . . Thus the myth about prostitutes as carriers of venereal disease was the first we were able to lay to rest."^[16]

Backstreets: Prostitution, Money, and Love (1986) shares Working Women 's admirable preference for investigation over judgment.^[17] Written by two Norwegian criminologists and now available in translation, Backstreets is the finest work focusing on prostitution alone that I discovered among the specifically academic writings in this category. However, it hardly counts toward exemplifying a good study of U.S. prostitution. (We should note that numerous other anthropological studies of prostitution have, and are, being conducted outside the United States) Cecilie Hoigard and Liv Finstad, who followed twenty-six prostitutes in Oslo, Norway, open Backstreets with in-depth material about the day-to-day routines of their Scandinavian interviewees' lives. These beginning ethnographic observations, and the detailed description that follows, are skillfully linked to the book's conclusions rather than to any preconceived notions that the authors themselves might have held.

Like Carmen and Moody, Hoigard and Finstad are supportive of prostitutes and concerned about improving the daily conditions of working women's lives. On the other hand, unlike the authors of Working Women , they are opposed to decriminalizing prostitution and pessimistic about the possibility that it might be reformed into a profession that need not be intrinsically alienating. From their findings, Hoigard and Finstad conclude that prostitution is inseparable from sexism, from a patriarchal context of control that precludes women's access to real economic powers and choice. Each of their interviewees cited money as a primary motivation for starting to turn tricks; the women also recounted having to develop psychological defense mechanisms to avoid the alienated feelings that their labor indeed provoked.

Perhaps even more impressive than its well-argued case for opposing prostitution while supporting prostitutes is the relative complexity of the book's methodological approach. Backstreets treats prostitution as tied to the political and sexual economy of "mainstream" society, enmeshed in it most obviously by the frequency of its use. Its authors construct the practice of prostitution multidimensionally, carefully considering the perspectives and characteristics of customers as well as pimps. Hoigard and Finstad thereby touch on an issue relevant to all studies of prostitution, though not expressly taken up in most. Unlike Backstreets , many works on this subject suffer from the tendency to erroneously equate studies of prostitutes with studies of prostitution . Consider the works discussed above: The Madam as Entrepreneur, Street Woman , or even the highly "empathetic" Working Women .^[18] As their titles indicate, the latter works have studied not prostitution but prostitutes, at present an overwhelmingly female workforce that services an overwhelmingly male clientele. (Male prostitutes, by most accounts a minority of all prostitutes, also work for predominantly male customers.)

But for a given study to focus mainly on female prostitutes—the male customers managing to vanish as though by magic from the social and sociological picture—runs the risk of reproducing, in print, the same gender bias that surrounds the treatment of prostitution in practice. Prostitution as far as I know is a unique offense in that it is systematic practice to arrest, blame, and hold responsible only one of two parties who have undoubtedly committed this "crime." Although the john's activity is illegal as well, only the prostitute is arrested and penalized—through fines, varying periods of incarceration, or both—in the overwhelming majority of cases. This remarkable fact is true in the United States as well as in other countries where prostitution is illegal. Yet, clearly, prostitution is only possible if defined relationally, as an interaction that takes place between two parties.^[19] The sexual demands (and economic resources) of a primarily male clientele could even be said to be more important to the system than prostitutes entering this profession on the side of supply: men's desire precedes, and functions as a necessary condition for sustaining, prostitution's existence. Moreover, numerous historical and anthropological accounts (recall Rubin's argument) depict prostitution as originating coercively, in social groups already patriarchally organized: it was probably not initially women's idea.

From this analysis, one might conclude that accurate studies of prostitution should be designed to focus at least 5o percent of the researcher's attention on men. Similarly, to be complete, literature in this area should not be limited to writings about prostitution and prostitutes, but should also encompass studies that exclusively investigate this male customer and his traits. Interestingly, I could not find one such study, an omission particularly revealing in a time of growing interest in the subfield of "men's studies" by those wishing better to understand the totality of gendered subordination.^[20] Nor does it seem sufficiently plausible to attribute this literary solely to methodological difficulties connected with trying to contact male informants. One-on-one interviews that ensured men's anonymity could conceivably produce snowball samples for a sufficiently determined researcher; at minimum, it would not be difficult for books to routinely include sections that acknowledged this difficulty, reflecting on how it might be overcome. And, in some cases, the pitfall has already been overcome: The Lively Commerce and Backstreets demonstrate that it must be possible to study customers, since they are exceptions to the rule that male clients are entirely absent from studies of prostitution.

The rarity of attention to male clients suggests instead a quiet symmetry between attitudes toward prostitution in society at large and attitudes that inform the starting point of most sociological research. This observation brings us back to issues of conscious or unconscious bias. Several points now emerge in response to the initial question of whether the scarcity or distribution of the extant literature implies deeply embedded and ambivalent attitudes toward prostitution.

First, numerically, there are simply not that many studies of prostitution in the United States. Second, these four categories in a survey of the field—historical studies, writings by prostitutes themselves, studies of attitudes toward prostitution, and contemporary studies of the relationship between prostitution and society—attest to a distinct separation between studies undertaken by and those undertaken about prostitutes or prostitution. A distance seems to be maintained between subject and object so that often those who study prostitution holistically do so from afar—historical projects, studies undertaken outside the United States, or works by feminists dealing with crucial but abstract theoretical matters. On the other hand, works about prostitutes have been written either by sex workers themselves or by academics who conduct attitudinal surveys and analyze prostitutes' self-organizing from the relatively removed perspective of a social movement. Where sociologists

have undertaken ethnographic research (which has occurred with prostitution in numerous instances), a wider picture may be eschewed in favor of a narrower focus on prostitutes. Additionally, the benefits of participant observation—whether that entails participation in waged sex work or simply intensive observation of other women's work—are seldom brought to bear.

This divorce of subject and object is both symptomatic and reproducing of sociological ambivalence: it results in a self-fulfilling circularity. For a crucial advantage inhering to participant study of the kind already undertaken in sociology with persons who sell drugs, or enter gangs, or work as domestics or boxers is that it makes us see the world from the vantage point of supposed "others." Ideally, our perceptual habit of seeing other women and men as entirely separable from ourselves is broken down, altered, inverted, or subverted. In studies of sex workers, even those that are sympathetic or empathetic, these boundaries are rarely broken down; on the contrary, a sense of otherness is maintained and perpetuated.

Thus we come to a third point, one not terribly surprising given the previous two. A related manifestation of ambivalence is that within sociology as a discipline, research on prostitutes and prostitution routinely falls under the rubric of "deviance" or "criminology." In a particular department, books and articles on the topic—if covered at all—are more likely to be assigned in classes with titles like "Deviant Behavior and Social Control" rather than "Urban Sociology," "Intro," or courses devoted to gender, race, or class inequality. I admit to this tendency myself: my unthinking, immediate impulse would be to place texts about prostitution on a "Gender and Deviance" syllabus rather than make them part of a "Social Problems" bibliography. At the same time, books about drug dealers and crack users, gangs and boxers (to use those examples already selected) find their way with greater ease into a fuller range of course offerings. Furthermore, prostitution may even be treated as deviant within deviance itself, that is, within the interrelated subfields of deviance and criminology. For instance, at the American Society of Criminology conference held in New Orleans in November 1992, I found only two panels on prostitutes or prostitution out of a total of more than two hundred sessions. And, within the literature referred to above, Eleanor Miller, while generally nonjudgmental in Street Woman about her informants, nonetheless makes numerous and now quite debatable references to a female "underclass" later recruited into "deviant networks."

By now, we have a suggestive case for the existence of sociological ambivalence toward prostitution as a subject, as an object of study. But why this ambivalence—how else can it be explained?

Ambivalent Attitudes: The Feminist and the Prostitue

As we have seen, few sociological studies of prostitutes in the United States have been done that rely on any type of participant observation, and none that marries the academic and the prostitute in the same person. (See this chapter's afterword, however, regarding changes now taking place that affect this conclusion.) But since we are making a foray into feminist and social theory (by design as well as necessity), returning to our hypothetical scenario may help discern what underlies the absence we have noted in the actual literature. Our imagined Ph.D. student either actually engaged in sex work (in Amsterdam) or only hung out with sex workers (in New York City); let's assume for a while that her participant observation research did not include waged labor. The sociologist has decided to confine herself to the restricted U.S. example, both to avoid illegality and out of concern for her own safety. Now, her work is similar to the intensive research done by Carmen and Moody, except that she has decided to include a more stratified range of women in the study (from "working women" to highly paid call girls). Given this added detail, what conditions might have prevented her in theory from undertaking even this delimited—though still unusual—project in fact?

One issue has already been mentioned: namely, the factor of reception. Fear of disdain or ridicule in a professional context, of being in effect contaminated by the deviance ascribed to the prostitutes themselves,^[21] might have inhibited the study even before its inception, in a field that remains male-dominated at its uppermost echelons. But our hypothetical sociologist might also have worried about the work's reception among other women, raising a second significant question as to whether—given that I have further presumed "her" to be both female and feminist^[22] —she ever would have found the topic compelling. Say she did overcome the concerns already mentioned about physical danger; perhaps she is willing to take risks (as women have certainly shown themselves in other forms of field work), or she has prior experience with sex work. And say she is willing to confront, and try to overcome, the likely problems of reception. Still, even then, as a feminist, she may

not feel that research in this area is particularly worthwhile or socially useful. Here we have a new possible source of ambivalence: that is, feminists' own internally divided attitudes about prostitutes and prostitution. Laurie Shrage's article "Should Feminists Oppose Prostitution?" (1989) exemplifies one pole along a continuum of feminist thought on this subject and is therefore worth quoting at length. Shrage notes that "most feminists find the prostitute's work morally and politically objectionable. In their view women who provide sexual services for a fee submit to sexual domination by men, and suffer degradation by being treated as sexual commodities." She continues:

Our society's tolerance for commercially available sex, legal or not, implies general acceptance of principles which perpetuate women's social subordination. Moreover . . . the actions of the prostitute and her clients imply that they accept a set of values and beliefs which assign women to marginal social roles in all our cultural institutions, including marriage and waged employment. Just as an Uncle Tom exploits noxious beliefs about blacks for personal gain, and implies through his actions that blacks can benefit from a system of white supremacy, the prostitute and her clients imply that women can profit economically from patriarchy . Though we should not blame the workers in the sex industry for the social degradation they suffer, as theorists and critics of our society, we should question the existence of such businesses and the social principles implicit in our tolerance for them.^[23]

While on one level Shrage does not wish to "blame the workers in the sex industry," on another, her analogy invoking "an Uncle Tom" belies her own stated goal. Clearly, to some extent, Shrage does hold women who become prostitutes personally responsible. Not only do they themselves profit from patriarchy, but they "imply" that others can as well: thus they are ideologically complicit. She clearly believes that prostitutes collude with patriarchy in a way inimical for feminists and feminism.

Certainly Shrage's view represents only one feminist position, and not necessarily the predominant view within feminism as a whole. Other feminists, as demonstrated by the contributors to Gail Pheterson's already-mentioned collection, A Vindication of the Rights of Whores , have come to reject "antiprostitution" stances that treat prostitutes as either actively antifeminist or by definition not feminist. And at the other pole of the feminist continuum on this issue, many favor decriminalizing prostitution and according greater legitimacy to "sex work," a more neutral social construction. Nonetheless, the attitudes expressed in Shrage's essay are influential and noteworthy, for they are

enmeshed with other ongoing "sexuality debates" that have split feminist theory and the feminist movement since the 1970s (particularly its radical feminist branch). A feminist's belief that prostitutes' work is "morally and politically objectionable" is probably connected with her belief that pornography should be legally restricted (as Catharine MacKinnon has proposed),^[24] or that sadomasochistic sex should be condemned. On the other hand, feminists opposed to censorship and censure hold these positions to be themselves antiquated and antisexual, potentially repressive rather than automatically liberating in their ramifications for women. Since these debates continue to provoke controversy (sharing prostitution's own propensity to invoke simultaneous connotations of both sexism and sex), it would hardly be surprising if many feminists ended up feeling ambivalent—or even hostile—toward prostitutes. One likely result would be to shy away from research into prostitution, avoidance winning out among the contradictory feminist reactions—disapproval, tolerance, indifference—to the topic.

Thus, an empirically observable gap between subject and object in studies of prostitution is in theory comprehensible indeed. For a good argument can be made that prostitutes are the most isolated and stigmatized of any group of women within patriarchal societies. Not only are they demeaned by society as a whole, sometimes particularly by police, johns, and pimps, but even feminists—an appellation that generally connotes concern for overcoming the oppression of all women—waver about the legitimacy of prostitutes' status within and beyond the politics of feminism. One sign of the thoroughness of her marginalization is that of all women, it is the prostitute who can be expected to have the most difficulty bringing well-founded charges of rape, domestic violence, or sexual harassment.^[25] Because she is the "vamp" personified, the prototypical opposite of the virgin,^[26] victim-blaming myths about women's consent to rape and other forms of sexual assault are so easy to apply that many prosecutors are dismissive—literally and figuratively—of her charges. Given the difficulties that any woman faces in rape cases,^[27] particularly those involving date rape, how much more trouble will a prostitute encounter in making anyone believe, or become concerned about, her alleged attack? How can she hope for any recourse against sexual harassment she may experience on the job, when even the possibility itself may sound self-contradictory to sexist "common sense," as though patently inapplicable to anyone in the prostitute's profession(s)? Evidently, not many people are interested in taking up her cause, or coming to her defense, even at a time when increasing

awareness about violence against women has surfaced within the media and cultural discourse more generally. Even a feminist would be hard-pressed to recall any organized or well-publicized feminist demonstrations, for instance, on behalf of a prostitute who has been raped or otherwise assaulted.

We should keep in mind, though, that prostitutes are not the only group of women toward whom feminists have manifested divided loyalties. Lesbians, of course, have also suffered from the biases of other women, not just the power of the state: one could cite Adrienne Rich's well-known objection to the invisibility of lesbian existence even within major feminist texts in "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence" (1980),^[28] or point to the early history of the National Organization for Women (NOW) in New York City, marked by a fierce dispute over whether or not to support lesbian rights. On the other hand, feminists across a wide range of theoretical leanings—from liberal to radical, Marxist to socialist, psychoanalytically oriented to postmodernist—agree that state-sponsored discrimination against lesbians should itself be outlawed. Most would concur that virtually by definition, any non- or postpatriarchal society would have to oppose antigay practices and beliefs: it is hoped not that lesbianism might "wither away" with a patriarchal state but, on the contrary, that it will be freed from shackles that have previously repressed its free expression. For Rich's contention is now well-accepted within feminist theory generally: she argued that preventing women from loving one another is a central feature of social controls exerted in male-dominated societies like our own.

However, as Shrage's remarks demonstrate, no such theoretical consensus can be presumed about the hoped-for fate of prostitutes and prostitution in some idyllic postpatriarchal society of the future. Quite the opposite is true: the question of what most feminists believe the future of prostitution should be—whether it ought to be somehow reformed or encouraged to wither away over time-is a much more complex and hotly debated question. To be sure, the contrast between the two issues is to some extent false. Sex workers' own writings, as well as the ethnographic studies cited, document that women often belong to both groups—stigmatized both as prostitutes and lesbians, at risk of being subjected to violence in one or both categories. Nevertheless, since the distinction does apply to many women's actual experience, and is often perceived and maintained by outsiders, it has some analytic utility.

That feminists are much more ambivalent about prostitutes' than gay

persons' rights also seems to have affected support for social movements centered on these respective issues. Ronald Weitzer has compared the relative success of the gay and abortion rights movements with the less effective prostitute rights movements in gaining national attention during the 1970s and 1980s. He concludes that resource mobilization theories, which hold "ideological and moral factors as secondary to material and organizational variables," best explain the latter organizations' weakness and relatively lower profiles.^[29] But in separating "ideological" from "material" factors somewhat artificially, Weitzer may understate the importance of a divided feminist movement in explaining the absence of interrelated support for prostitutes' rights groups. Unlike the gay liberation or women's movements, the cause of prostitutes' "liberation" is not firmly approved of, nor theoretically justified, in many feminists' minds. It does not fit as readily, therefore, into a characteristically liberal and American framework of "rights." Thus, lack of ideological support by feminists may have played a larger role than allowed both in Weitzer's study and in our subject at hand—that is, why prostitution also has not gained much attention as a legitimate focus of gender-oriented research in American social science.

Feminists, then, are extremely split on the subject of prostitution as object of study. This is a factor that, when combined with other factors, may have contributed to the paucity of research in this area. However, the question remains as to what position does make most sense for feminist sociologists in general—and our hypothetical sociologist in particular—to adopt toward prostitutes and prostitution. Are there obvious points on which feminist theory of most types could agree? Can the splits detected between subject and object, feminists and prostitutes, be overcome—and, if so, how?

Toward A Sociological Feminist Theory of Prostitutes and Prostitution

If we step back to an overview of the relationship of prostitutes and prostitution to feminism as a whole, an even more basic split comes quickly to mind: the so-called good woman/bad woman or madonna/whore dichotomy, so frequently observed to characterize patriarchal societies that it has become a truism of feminist perspectives. Although resting on a fairly simple concept, the distinction is nonetheless central to exploring the social construction of prostitutes and prostitution, as perceived both by other women and by men as a dominant group.

Various ideas have been proposed about why a good woman/bad woman divide recurs wherever different gender privileges are also systematic. Whether one believes it arises from the character of men's sexual fantasies en masse (a notion that itself demands further explanation) or prefers Engels's interpretation vis-à-vis the origins of private property, the fact remains that labeling women as madonnas or whores exerts controlling pressure on all women. Whether the split is intentional or not, it creates a "nice girl" persona (the mother, the wife, the girlfriend) perpetually shadowed by the specter of the "bad" (the prostitute, the mistress, the "other woman"). A sense of security and attractiveness may chronically elude the nice girls, who know that there are always women construed as more sexualized, "sexier," toward whom men can and do turn with regularity. Simultaneously, they know that moving beyond or testing the borders of that role (even, perhaps, by becoming assertively feminist) may bring recrimination or slur, symbolic of the withdrawal of male approval. A rebellious woman may not be seen as femininely gendered at all: she becomes a "dyke," a lesbian, off the chart of heterosexuality altogether; or, within straight boundaries, a "tramp," a "slut," a "whore." The prostitute, then, is the heterosexual bad girl epitomized. Interestingly enough, almost every patriarchal culture uses terms of opprobrium like "whore," putain , or puta not only literally but figuratively to chastise women's disapproved-of behavior, sexual and otherwise.

On the other hand, the woman in the position of this putain , the mistress, the "other," is well aware of her double, too. She senses that any power derived through sexiness is borne only at the price of other types of powerlessness, that is, her own insecurity compared with the relatively desexualized but socially acceptable mother, wife, or girlfriend. A woman who is a sex worker, say, may be ashamed or afraid to acknowledge her occupation in legitimated public contexts (our ASA example being just one possible case in point); thereby her behavior has been affected and to some degree controlled. Like the nice girl who is her opposite, she can feel intimidated because of the existence of an other side. Thus, as Naomi Wolf has suggested about beauty standards keeping all women in a state of self-doubt (see also chapter 4, above),^[30] so separating madonnas from whores perpetuates a chasm among women as wide and sure as any that splits workers from one another under capitalistic conditions, or prevents members of an oppressed racial minority from uniting around a mutual cause. It deflects attention from those aspects of gender-based subordination that are commonly

experienced onto only those that are different for these two groups of women.

Additionally, it is intriguing to ponder whether the logic of this good woman/bad woman split illuminates why only prostitutes are habitually arrested for prostitution, as mentioned earlier. Look at the problem from a slightly altered vantage point now—from the standpoint of men as unequal possessors of power. If prostitution were to be decriminalized across the United States, then prostitutes would escape the bad girl's outlaw(ed) status to some degree. However, there might be disadvantages to this change. Perhaps the seductive appeals of the forbidden, part of the bad girl's sexiness to and for her mostly male desirers, would diminish with legalization. Yet there is no particular reason why bad girls can't be re-created, or maintained, even if prostitution is decriminalized. But a second disadvantage is less easily dispelled. Since decriminalization openly admits that men wish prostitution to exist, the efficacy of bifurcating women into bad girls and good might be compromised. If bad girls were no longer clearly recognizable (and sanctionable), what advantages would those enjoy who conform and are good? In fact, the historical studies of Walkowitz and Rosen suggest that not only men but mothers, wives, and girlfriends also would likely protest such a change. During eras of Victorian and Progressive reform, organizations dedicated to curbing and prohibiting prostitution were often led by "nice" women; more recently, as documented by Carmen and Moody, sex workers around Times Square perceived women demonstrators from Women Against Pornography (WAP) as anachronistic, as if somehow earlier reformers had managed to be born again in their midst.^[31]

Viewing the opposite position through patriarchal lenses shows it to be just as problematic, however. If prostitution were to remain illegal across the United States, unchanged except that both prostitutes and johns were arrested consistently whenever the crime occurred, then prostitution's popularity would be apparent anyway. Here, though, the benefits of power are what risk being compromised: if new laws were vigorously enforced, resultant arrests of men would likely be so widespread (across class and race) that decriminalization might well rapidly ensue for this reason alone.^[32]Therefore, an outcome predictable from the good woman/bad woman dichotomy of feminist theory is exactly what exists: prostitution continues to be illegal, but, for the most part, only prostitutes are charged with criminal activity.^[33] In this way, the procedural status quo in criminal justice protects a fundamentally sexist

division with which it is connected. It is declared in public land to, and sometimes by, nice women) that prostitutes are bad, offenders: at the same time, the fact that prostitution is a practice equally involving both parties is obscured, because it is punished for only one sex while permitted to the other. A decidedly contradictory set of attitudes thus underlies the institution as presently structured. Prostitution is desired by men but, under gender-biased conditions, no responsibility is taken for desiring it.

Of course, prostitution is not everywhere illegal, nor does it manifest itself in the same way uniformly. As already stated, it has been decriminalized in the Netherlands; in the United States, in 1923 Nevada became the only state with a legalization statute, still on the books although it restricts prostitution to brothels and permits it only in counties with population under 400,000. Still, it seems fair to say that these are exceptions to the usual rule throughout the United States and many other societies, in which attitudes toward sexuality often display a schizophrenic character. In general, the practice of arresting only prostitutes, and the good woman/bad woman split that practice expresses and maintains with almost perverse accuracy, is ensconced within a system insecure and divisive for women as a whole . Therefore, it is not only prostitutes but all women who are affected. From the perspective of the good woman who may be suspiciously or ambivalently disposed toward her other, however, a collective oppressiveness may be difficult to intuit.

But this analysis does not sufficiently clarify the issue of how feminists themselves should view prostitutes and prostitution. If anything, an argument for the intrinsically alienating character of institutionalized prostitution may appear to have been reinforced, in accord with Shrage's theoretical essay or Hoigard and Finstad's empirically based conclusions. So far, prostitution emerges as an oppressive phenomenon much more in need of uprooting than reform. Dissected a little more carefully, though, prostitution can be seen to contain two potentially separable elements. It comprises (a) a set of desires, beliefs, and practices that, under patriarchy, have been gender-biased, extremely discriminatory to and of women, and (b) an exchange relationship in which sex is offered for sale—prostitution's sex-economic dimension. These two dimensions can be disentangled, at least in theory. For while feminists would obviously insist that the gender-skewed aspects of prostitution must change in any postpatriarchal situation, it is less clear that sex for sale is itself necessarily problematic. Are sex-economic ex-

changes indicative only of past and continuing patriarchal relations, or do they also correlate with capitalism or the much-heralded tendencies of contemporary postmodern cultures? Could we conceive of a revisited prostitution (whether called by that name or another) which was not by definition sexist?

Of course, quite massive changes would have to take place for the pervasiveness of bias within prostitution, as we now know it, to dissolve. As sex workers have themselves suggested, one goal would be for prostitution to become a kind of sex therapy, professionalized and no longer stigmatized. But the larger social, economic, and cultural context in which prostitution occurs would have to alter, too, for its sexist character to disintegrate: this would require not just decriminalization and the provision of safe employment conditions, but a greater equality in the numbers of male and female sex workers; customers would also need to be both sexes, so that the term "john" would become as obsolete as "policeman" or "fireman"; heterosexuality could not be privileged as a matter of course; ideally, a range of ages and body types would be able to be employed. Not exactly a small proposal.

Perhaps the requisite changes would be so radical that, were they to occur, the outcome would no longer be recognizable as prostitution. Since underlying attitudes about sex and the general position of women would have had to alter concurrently, perhaps a freer society would result, one in which sex-economic exchanges were no longer sought. However, what if they were still desired by some, which is at least a strong likelihood? Then the interesting question arises as to whether a reconstructed context of sex for sale ought be problematic from a specifically feminist standpoint. For many, maybe most, there is good reason to hope that evolution away from the gendered troubles of patriarchy will lead to new mergings of bodily and emotional experience, blendings of intimate tenderness with lust. But isn't it possible that others (and, again, we should assume that women as well as men could be among their number) might wish to retain the separation, whether occasionally or on a more ongoing basis, out of a truer sense of choice rather than compulsion? If so, is this necessarily objectionable? If objectionable, why? And why for all persons? Perhaps such objections themselves mask biased assumptions not particularly liberating for women, especially in our imagined future when current symbiotic connections between sex and sexism are slowly to begin breaking down.

On another level, as we continue to seek a feminist synthesis, we need not rest a case on the intricacies of futuristic speculation: sex for

sale has a much more concrete meaning now. As virtually all the referenced writings of and about prostitutes reiterate (past and present), most women initially undertake sex work for money . Shrage's point about ideological collusion is out of touch with the reality that for many women, becoming a prostitute is similar to becoming a drug dealer or a gang member: the decision is often quite rationally, in the sense of economically, motivated. Though most sociological studies of teenage illicit activity have focused differentially on young men, prostitutes also exemplify Merton's innovator category as much or little as do such other, traditionally masculine, strategies for "getting paid."^[34] As noted, few well-known recent studies have focused on prostitutes and the specific characteristics of their lives in the United States. But we do know that high-level drug dealing opportunities or gang membership will scarcely be offered to women.^[35] Rather, what Pierre Bourdieu has called "bodily capital"—or, better, sexual capital, the latter term describing the gendered sex worker's case more exactly—may be the major, or only, resource available to a particular person who is female. She may be supporting a child, boyfriend, or other family members. Or she may have been poor most of her life and long to feel a greater sense of control over the conditions and circumstances surrounding her; she may yearn to buy "nice" things—a car, clothes, whatever. A given individual may realize that sex work can easily yield better and quicker money than is otherwise available. In this respect, she is acting much like the youths Williams depicted in Cocaine Kids , who also seek more lucrative and controllable employment than is available at minimum wage fast-food and unskilled jobs.

Similarly, in contrast with a low-paying clerical job, for example, some women describe a sense of adventure, excitement, and most of all power in turning tricks. For some sex workers, narcissistic enjoyment can spring from seeing desire in someone's eyes, knowing the dependency admitted by this attentiveness (however transient and fleeting), making him pay and in fact "getting paid"; gratification can arise from a sense of controlling the interaction as well as from giving him, and at moments oneself, pleasure. And Hoigard and Finstad record these women expressing feelings of superiority that are comparable to those reported by Rollins in her study of women domestics, Between Women . The structural standpoint of the subordinate often makes possible a more accurate, holistic comprehension of a dominant/subordinate, employer/employee relationship than does the position of the apparent superordinate. Like the domestic worker who consciously feigns behav-

iors desired by her employer, so sex workers interviewed in Backstreets were often the only ones aware they were faking pleasure.^[36] As Hoigard and Finstad recount, johns often seemed quite foolish, aroused and persuaded by moans, groans, and ritualized statements that they (ironically) paid to hear. They may not have had a clue about what was actually taking place in the individual woman's mind and body. The sex worker, though, has the advantage of a fuller insight into both their positions, the power of secretly knowing that what to him appeared authentic may have been to her actually ridiculous and revolting.

None of this should be a cause for extreme romanticizing, on the one hand, or scandal, on the other. Prostitutes' experiences, situations, and circumstances differ greatly over the gamut of this highly class-stratified occupation. Some women work in conditions that are overtly oppressive and leave little room for exerting control; they may be exposed to dangerous conditions on and off the streets, subjected to the arbitrary power of boyfriends and pimps, cops as well as customers. For others, the job may be relatively "cushier," their lives closer to being independently entrepreneurial, with greater potential for sometimes being interesting, varied, or enjoyable.

But wherever a particular working woman exists along such a continuum, one analytic point is applicable across the board. To negatively judge any prostitute who undertakes sex work, sex for sale, is exactly as foolish as it would (or would not) be to hastily condemn young males like Terry Williams's cocaine kids, or members of gangs studied by Martin Jankowski or Mercer Sullivan, for their techniques of survival.^[37] And this would be foolish indeed. It is as silly to compare the prostitute to an "Uncle Tom," and to blame her Uncle Tomming for reinforcing a patriarchal system, as to accuse other underground economic workers of collusive capitalism. In each of the cases, rather, many persons have turned to illegal opportunity structures—the turns themselves shaped by and permeated with gender—to get from American society (at once patriarchal and capitalistic) some of the legitimacy, recognition, and attentiveness it failed to actually provide. Similarly, all can be interpreted as rebellions against blocked life chances correctly "penetrated," or comprehended, a term and action related to what Paul Willis calls "resistance" in his study of British working-class "lads," Learning to Labour (1977).^[38] Even if the final result is generally "accommodation"—people ending up reabsorbed or sometimes beaten down inside social structures essentially unchallenged by their stratagems—it seems senseless to criticize such logical defensive reactions.

Oddly enough, though, I suspect it may be easier for many sociologists to relate to the drug dealer's or gang member's predicament than to the prostitute's. For one thing, as we have seen, he has been studied more regularly than she, with greater respect tending to be accorded both him and his professional observer; works based on ethnographic and participant methods have come closer to overcoming subject/object divides for him than for her. Then, again, there is that matter of sex. Even if sociologists are just as liberally disposed toward understanding the prostitute's sex-economic exchanges as the gang member's more well-known and distinctly economic ones, the former is doubly vulnerable simply because she sells her body and arouses sexual and sexist reactions. Moreover, as the prostitute invokes the good woman/bad woman split by her relationship to sexual capital (a patriarchal social fact tending to set her apart from, and pit her against, other women), specifically feminist identification with her may be that much more difficult to achieve. Like the nice woman, the sociological feminist may react in ways mixed with, and structured by, ambivalence.

Yet, it strikes me as most suspect of all to blame prostitutes—how-ever subtly or unconsciously—for a system of patriarchal prostitution that is clearly not of their or our creation. The reasons for this being so problematic are multidimensional. First, in terms of feminist theory, to be ambivalent or antagonistic toward the alleged other, the bad woman, plays right into the deeply embedded assumptions that split women from one another. Gendered powerlessness and insecurity are thereby reproduced. Second, in terms of class, to somehow differentiate sex-economic from other economic strategies for finding work is again prejudicial toward the prostitute. It holds her responsible for one form of sale-of-self when most of us transact other such sales on a routine basis: like "whore," the phrase "to prostitute oneself" is also used figuratively in everyday parlance but with a negative connotation, as if something out of the ordinary had occurred. Moreover, such bias perpetuates old and ongoing habits in the fields of deviance and criminology of building sociological generalizations mostly on young males' class experiences. Third, in terms of gender, can we really criticize some women for taking pleasure in the power of temporarily sexy and salable bodies, unless others are faulted consistently as well? Hollywood actresses celebrated for beauty, for example, or models, singers, Madonna (her "good girl" name revealing in this context) and her followers, women who spend billions on cosmetics and surgical procedures struggling to prolong such sexiness. . .How is it possible to justify using a term like "Uncle Tom"

to describe the prostitute unless we indict them, ourselves, or both simultaneously? Unless we indict an entire system in which sex and sexism are continually conjoined?

No, for all these reasons, it strikes me that a feminist approach to this topic should rigorously avoid blaming or reproaching prostitutes for how they cope within gender-skewed conditions. At the same time, and just as important, it need not therefore allow prostitution to escape forceful criticism. A synthetic stance would be best if two-pronged, at once immediately pragmatic and with some vision of the longer run. For whether or not sex for sale could be freely chosen in some foreseeable utopia, right now it is often the only option available to women for surviving a sexist present. Thus, the policy implications of observers like Carmen and Moody should be taken quite seriously when they depict how miserable many street women's lives are made by constant threats of incarceration, onerous fines, lack of medical care, and physical fear of police in addition to johns. As they suggest, decriminalization would be likely to help ameliorate these effects, these by-products of an illegality that now is blatantly discriminatory against women. A focus on faulting prostitution rather than prostitutes underlines the need for broader improvements as well, particularly guaranteed jobs and income supports for all women (including health and child care, and family allowances where applicable). Under such conditions, women would never have to become sex workers out of necessity rather than interest. And, just as Williams's research asserts the importance of designing work for inner-city youth to meet more than subsistence needs alone, so alternative jobs to sex work ought to try to provide a modicum of variety, opportunity, and control. There is a self-interested reason, moreover, for this changed feminist approach: decteasingly ambivalent attitudes toward prostitutes might redirect attention to issues about which feminists are not ambivalent at all, ones nonetheless germane to our topic. We might more profitably concentrate on altering our ongoing cultural assumptions—working toward the democratization of bodily images, for example; or increasing women's share in social ownership of wealth, including but not limited to the sex (and media) industries that provide sex work. Or we might consider how to make sex itself a less threatening and loaded aspect of life than at present, so that schizophrenic cultural attitudes toward it are not expressed at women's expense.

In the end, where does this leave the hypothetical feminist sociologist with whom we opened? If my suspicions are merited, then a newly syn-

thesized view of prostitutes and prostitution would gradually affect the context in which her work could make its debut. No longer split in our conceptions of prostitutes' legitimacy, we might find—as sociologists or feminists, as persons affected by ingrained habits of separating bad girls from good—the subject/object divide to which I refer in theory less formidable in practice. It is important to be able to perceive, and overcome, any unwitting sociological tendency to mirror common social biases like that of sex workers being treated ambivalently, at once sought as objects of desire and as subjects cursorily dismissed. For unless we can envision a scenario in which a feminist sociologist could have done that participant observation thesis if she had wanted to, without fear of ridicule or scorn, then we can be sure that sex and sexism remain firmly allied in our midst. On the other hand, if this chapter stirs respectful consideration of the project's potential validity, it will have moved a little closer toward actualizing its own possibility. Maybe she'll make that ASA presentation one of these days after all, landing a well-regarded job at UCLA, Chicago, Smith, or, closer to where she began her study, at New York University or City University.

Afterword

Since I completed the "Prostitution and Feminist Theory" in the winter of 1994, several developments have led me to write this afterword. First, immediately following the essay's publication, three colleagues with whom I am only casually acquainted asked the same question, inadvertently providing supporting "data." All three commented that the essay seemed interesting, and then each proceeded to inquire, confidentially, whether I myself had been a prostitute: otherwise, one of these colleagues speculated, why else would you be so interested in this subject matter? These comments suggest that something about sex work is distinctive, and perhaps distinctively jarring, exposing the researcher to potential vulnerability above and beyond the dangers entailed in the researched activity itself. Would an ethnographer of drugs be similarly questioned about whether he or she had been an addict (otherwise why would she or he study drug taking)? Or the student of poverty questioned as to whether he or she had personally been impoverished (because otherwise why study poverty)? Rather, the legitimacy of studying these topics closer to hand—in these examples, drugs or poverty—is taken for granted far more unthinkingly than is the significance of closely studying sex. Yet sexuality permeates a wide range of social

strata; it refers to a dimension of life with which nearly everyone engages at times, with others or alone, in act or in fantasy. And sexuality is distinctive because it evokes conscious as well as unconscious responses, involving no less the body than the mind, and our capacity to feel as well as to reason. Ironically, perhaps this capacity to break down usually split dimensions of experience is at the root of the discomfiture that results when the subject of sexuality is raised. The listener senses that he or she may not be able to contain a defensive laugh, a nervous titter, a sexualized comment that escapes his or her lips after an allusion to sex is made. Why doesn't this special trait—this ability of discussing sex to produce an immediate echo of the phenomenon itself—make sexuality worthy of study rather than likely to be demeaned? The reason may be that unless its significance is consciously accepted, the strongly visceral character of studying sex continues to produce schizophrenic reactions: on the one hand, often, titillation and attraction; on the other, a desire for control and therefore for distance.

The second development relates to the first. After the prostitution essay had been in print for close to a year, I contacted, or was contacted by, nearly ten feminist scholars around the country who study sex work in the United States. Several of these scholars are graduate students in sociology, though not all: some women are studying prostitution; one person has studied phone sex workers; still another has written about lap dancing. This development suggests that amid the vitality of feminist scholarship and interest in feminist theory, serious attention to sex work may be increasing. The more this occurs and the more that supportive networks among feminists as scholars and activists can be maintained, the less likely it becomes that sex work research can continue to be demeaned. A number of these scholars, though again not all, have engaged in participant observation research: one graduate student plans to write her dissertation as a participant observation study of exactly the supposedly "hypothetical" situation with which this essay begins and ends. Some related work has already been published. For instance, Wendy Chapkis bases her fascinating study Live Sex Acts: Women Performing Erotic Labor (1997) not only on a set of interviews with sex workers but on knowledge gained as a certified massage practitioner in California and Amsterdam; Chapkis mentions that while she only engaged in limited participant observation, she did sell sex one afternoon to women clients in Amsterdam.^[39]

Yet, along with this variation, almost all of the women I spoke with (I am not aware of a male sociologist at present who is studying sex

workers, male or female) concurred that peculiar reactions were frequently forthcoming from men in professional contexts after they heard that a particular feminist scholar was studying sex work. Some women were afraid to openly acknowledge the work they were doing; others had encountered initial discouragement at their choice of dissertation topic, and the concerns of advisers about whether graduate students would later have difficulty finding jobs. Sexual innuendos were frequently forthcoming, and several women told me that sexual advances were made on the basis of presumed connections between sex work and the scholars' own supposedly generalized desires. Thus, the sociological study of sex tends to evoke a sociological study of sociology: as is theoretically intriguing indeed, a "meta" level of analysis is created that shifts attention from sex to sexual reactions to its study.

Still, the fact remains that Chapkis is an employed professor and that women are building networks to support growing interest in studying sexuality as part of feminist and sociological theory. Whether this results in altered attitudes outside the academy as well, where political divides between sex and sexism can leave some feminists suspicious of sex workers and others suspicious of those feminists, remains to be seen. What we do know is that the lives of sex workers, as of women much more generally, encompasses far greater complexity than relative emphases placed on either considering "pleasure" or "subordination" suggests. Both sides are intimately enmeshed with one another, as Chapkis knows when she dedicates her study, one no longer hypothetical at all, to "the differences among us and the solidarity between us."^[40]