A comment on the issue whether women forced into prostitution have some choice. 1. The fact of depriving a person some choices, even those deemed important in our society, does not meet depriving that person of all choices. A prostitute may have little choice as far as the selection of her occupation is concerned, but she may still have considerable (or some) choice of how she practices that occupation, howe she compensates for power inequalities etc. 2. In fact, if we take the petty bourgeois morality out of the picture, prostitution is work just as any other work, except that a prostitute owns the means of production, and under most circumstances she is paid for the "product" rather than for the time. These arrangements may vary, however. In case of "Comfort Women" or Asiatic forms of sex work in general, where women are held in some form of capitivity or debt slavery, their work is more like hiring a labourer who must toil for the capitalit for a fixed period of time during which the capitalist squeezes as much use value out of the worker as possible. 3. Since we should not view prostitution differently from any other kind of work (in fact, the term 'sex worker' is more appropriate than petty bourgeois 'prostitute') - whatever can be said of how workers deal with the lack of choice should apply for sex workers as well. That problem was specifically addressed by Michael Borawoy in his book _Manufacturing Consent_ -- which is an ethnography of how manual workers in Chicago area deal with the very limited choices they have regarding their work. The bottom line is that they usually develop a quite elaborate informal system that allows them to adapt (at least emotionally) to a situation that significantly affects their lives (how much their earn what hours they have to work, what they have to do) -- but over which they have very little choice. That is, depriving them of some, even important, choices does not mean depriving them of all choices. 4. Given the informal nature of sex work and the absence of any written rules, a sex worker has a greater latitude in negotiating with her employer how the work will be performed. That latitude is missing from more formal arrangement of non-sexual work, where work is done "by the book" and any changes must be first reflected in changing the formal rules, procedures and policies. Sex work is one of the few areas that is resistant to taylorisation -- in that respect a sex worker is in a relatively more advantegous postion vis a vis other employees whose work has been deskilled. >From that standpoint -- a sex worker may have a greater choice over performing her work than most employees: a choice of the client/employer, a choice of what kind of work she will do for that client/employer, and a choice of how much she will be paid for that work. Of course, that may not apply to the Asiatic forms of sex work, where women are held in captivity and forced to perform any kind of sex work requested by her employer or the client. The informality of sex work has its price -- a sex worker has virtually no protection against abusive employers. >From that standpoint, de-legalization of sex work is probably more advantageous for the worker beacuse: - it gives her more control of her work than any formal arrangemnt, usually governed by the rules of capitalist exploitation; - it precludes the enforcement of formal arrangements (cf. the Asiatic forms of sex work) that favour the typically male employer by giving him legal means to control the means of production (i.e. the worker's body); - it it pushes the price of her work up. 5. Another question, to which I have no answer, is how important the choice of sex partners is. As I understand it, in most Asian countries women have little choice in that respect in general, as marriages are typically pre-arranged by their families. In that respect, the distinction between sex work (or prostitution) and marriage is blurred if at all existent. In both cases, it is the family, or rather its male head, who materially benefits from sexual services his daughter(s) perform(s) to other men. In Western culture, the woman supposedly has a choice of her sex partner until she marries. After that, she is expected to perform sexual services to her husband, only him, and whenever he wants. The concept of marital rape is a very new one indeed, and, to my knowledge, is still unknown in many European countries. So what differentiates marital sex for sex work in Occidental culture is: (i) that the woman usually has a greater choice as a sex worker than a wife (ii) the forms of remuneration differ from a fixed sum to a loosely defined share of the man's income. Now, if retaining a choice of sex partners were very important, most women would not marry, would they? If that reasoning is correct, retaining the choice of sex partners does not seem too important. But since the unknown variables here are the tradeoff between choice and access (easy access to one partner vs. not so easy access to many partners) and the tradeoff between legitimate sex with one partner vs. illegitimate sex with many partners -- I leave that problem open. regards, wojtek sokolowski institute for policy studies johns hopkins university baltimore, md 21218 [EMAIL PROTECTED] voice: (410) 516-4056 fax: (410) 516-8233 POLITICS IS THE SHADOW CAST ON SOCIETY BY BIG BUSINESS. AND AS LONG AS THIS IS SO, THE ATTENUATI0N OF THE SHADOW WILL NOT CHANGE THE SUBSTANCE. - John Dewey
