Erotic dancers expose themselves and simulate sexual behavior. The term 'simulate' is crucial, because prostitutes allegedly differ insofar as they engage in actual sexual behavior. In order to know whether this distinction is accurate, we need to examine the definition we have of sexual behavior. We tend to publicly say that sexual behavior needs to be reciprocal and consensual. However, the popular construction of this notion tends to orient around male orgasm from the viewpoint of a masculinized consciousness. To establish this we can consider that women often fake orgasm, as the textbook reports – because if women were included in the privileged viewpoint around which our concept of sexual behavior revolves, faking orgasm would make no sense. Certainly men only do so rarely. This is because the male's physiological pleasure is central to our notion of what constitutes sexuality. This indicates to me that engaging in sexual behavior, under the rule of popular culture, does not necessarily imply reciprocal enjoyment at all. If this is so, then we've got some ethical problems on our hands. However, considering the world in which reciprocity is necessary has more value given my argument. A prostitute, who behaves as she does strictly in order to get money, does not have sex with her customers because doing so is pleasurable in-itself. Thus, if we think (as I think we should) that an agent can only be sexual when she acts out of sexual desire, then what a prostitute does, in a sense, is simulate sexual behavior. I do not think that we should consider either pornography or prostitution to be 'trafficking in bodies,' per se, if only out of my semantic desire to recover some of the body's dignity, a dignity which our culture seems to have so tirelessly worked to destroy. If we reject a Cartesian view, i.e., one which states that the mind and body are separate entities, then trafficking in 'bodies' could only be trafficking in human selves for us: we say that a person can only exist if a person is embodied. But we will help no prostitute recover to tell her that she has absolutely surrendered her selfhood in her prostitution. This does seem to be the grounds of the cultural and moral attitude toward people we call 'whores.' This is an ideology which only serves to reinforce permanently the temporary subjugation which happens when somebody sells sexual performance in exchange for money, because it makes the action a performative statement about this person's identity. This is part of the reason I have for believing that our culture overemphasizes the cruciality of sexual behavior in constructing identity. Surely sexuality is crucial to our species, but our cultural identity is something we construct after our species has already survived. It is not sexual.
Similarly to any other 'sexual transgression' which would only be encouraged by its prohibition, this is a case in which the relationship between the crime and the law is more complicated than the simple one of inferiority and superiority. In a sense the laws against prostitution depend on the act of prostitution for their efficacy. But laws regulating prostitution would as well, and given that the laws so often tend to prohibit something which is going to exist anyway, one wonders how this law could work in favor of the people which it alleges to morally correct. There are good reasons why these judgments only entrench our culture more deeply in its implicit advocacy of rape, prostitution and pornography, or explicit advocacy of rape-like, prostitution-like, and pornographic behaviors. The key issue is that it advocates sexual behavior rather than sexual action. One would only truly compromise oneself if in fact what one was doing in the simulation of sex was selling one's self. But as mentioned, if sexuality is not the crucial determining factor in our identity, it only becomes so when it is treated as such. A body, then, is required for all human performance. What is exploitative about both pornographic media and about prostitution, then, is the totalizing moral context and attitude which inevitably goes with these things – when an event's meaning is already predetermined by someone other than the participant, this event leaves the realm of action and enters the one of behavior. Action creates new meaning. We believe that behaving in a way that commercializes sex once, or as an entire livelihood, will automatically prevent one from respecting oneself, or ever being able to act. These expectations inform the opportunities available to actors in pornographic films, and prostitutes, and even rape victims – and really, any person who alienates themselves from their sexuality.
Anyone who simulates sexual behavior rather than acting, sexually or otherwise, is being controlled by this attitude. To explain the socioeconomic forces which produce such behavior in people despite the fact that it is not in their best interests, Simone De Beauvoir tells us that as long as there is poverty there will be a market for this very lucrative field. We need not wonder at the supply of sex workers which male demand creates. A glance at Time Magazine indicates this. In Time Magazine's “Time 100” list of the one hundred most influential people who lived in the last century, Marilyn Monroe was listed next to Einstein. Women, we believe, become powerful not by performing powerful actions – but by providing simulated sexual gratification to powerful men. The official cause of Marilyn Monroe's death was drug overdose and probable suicide. There is debate over whether the cause of death was murder or suicide – but it's hard to imagine how it could not be suicide. I imagine that popular culture still fails to realize that Marilyn Monroe could not be happy as Marilyn Monroe. 'Marilyn Monroe,' you see, truly is merely an object, working in fact to make popular culture happy. Undoubtedly it will neither help nor hurt her to treat her as such. Norma Jean Baker*, though, is fucked. She's the one with everything to lose, in fact has long since lost it.
*Norma Jean Baker died of a drug overdose, potentially suicide, 1962.**
**What.
