Oh the Misogynist Feminist

* Updated * Here, Bob Herbert tells us about the ills of a society that is still full of misogyny. Of course, it’s true – we are a misogynistic people, relegating women to second class positions with second class compensation, etc…. That’s all true.
But I must take umbrage at his characterizations of misogyny. Namely his attack on prostitution. It smacks of the same reasoning that kept the woman at home and out of the gamey and unsightly institutions of the workplace. He calls the prospective customer’s selection process a “humiliating inspection”. Surely no more than having your underwear checked by your Drill Instructor when you join the military. Surely no more than having to send a resume out to 50 firms in the hopes that one of them calls you. Surely no more than having to get as dressed up as you can (dust off the ol’ interview suit) for a humiliating inspection process to make sure you are what the new firm wants. Surely no more humiliating than the same thing every human being goes through just to get by in this society.
These attacks on Pornography and Prostitution are thinly veiled vestiges of the Puritan heritage in America. To suggest that sexual desire is somehow off limits to commercialism is patently stupid. To say it’s simple-minded is simple-minded. In reality, it’s the same kind of Misogyny that he is arguing against. The world we live in requires that we sell what we posses that is in the highest demand. In the case of a technology worker, it’s their knowledge of technology that they sell. In the case of a writer, it’s his creative genius that they sell. In the case of a sex worker, it’s their sex that is sold.

I wonder what the author would call gay male pornography: Parallel Misogyny? And clearly he’s not thought too much about male prostitution either. I suppose in his world, all men are beautiful and can get laid at the drop of a hat, because, one might surmise, that once misogyny is gone, women will be just as wanting of sex as men, therefore removing the demand for the sex worker. Of course, I’m sure he has no problems getting a woman to go to bed with him without having to pay her, and of course, I’m sure he also has no temptation or gets no enjoyment from any sort of visual depiction of the things he desires. Perhaps he’s desire-less.
What he should really be assaulting is not the industry that has grown up around sex, but the culture that makes it so taboo and therefore ruins thousands, if not millions, of women’s lives as they live with a false sense of shame and a social stigma for earning a living the best way they can, perhaps even a way they enjoy. If only it were a despicable enterprise to be a journalist instead of a sex worker, then our esteemed author could enjoy the same opinion of his offerings to the commercial world as those oppressed sex workers do. Imagine if he would be thrown out of his house were he to be found out! That kind of treatment isn’t oppressive? The very fact that he looks down on prostitution, even if it is in feigned pity, is oppressing by the insult it makes to the contribution these women make.
This moral high-ground that he stakes out is a lie.

Prostitution is legal in much of Nevada and heavily promoted even where it’s not. In Las Vegas, where prostitution is illegal but flourishes nevertheless, Mayor Oscar Goodman has said that creating a series of legal, “magnificent” brothels would be a great development tool for his city.
The fundamental problem in all of this is that women and girls are dehumanized, opening the floodgates to every kind of mistreatment. “Once you dehumanize somebody, everything else is possible,” said Taina Bien-Aimé, executive director of the women’s advocacy group Equality Now.

Dehumanization is the fundamental problem – he’s quite right in that statement, but it’s not a result of offering sex; it’s the result of being required to offer something of yourself in the hopes that you will survive in the society at large, and then find out that your survival isn’t acceptable – that’s dehumanizing. Instead of addressing the issue that by relegating a particular job to some sub-human status, you create a situation where those that find themselves with few choices can rely on there being positions available in sub-human occupations. Further, you can be assured that a sub-human job has sub-human working conditions. This is the real misogyny – the failure to admit that there is nothing wrong with a woman who enjoys her job as a sex-worker. And add to that its criminalization! Go to jail for your desires – normal desires, I think we can accept as an axiom – and go to jail for earning a living. How arcane; how Barbaric!
Further, this kind of puritanical misogynist reasoning (or failure of reasoning) helps to create the conditions for other crimes against women and people in general. It masks real problems lying under the fabric of our society. By focusing wrongly on prostitution, pornography and sex-work in general, as the dehumanizing factor harming us, we can’t see the real dehumanizing things that happen every day, every hour and pile up like one million mole-hills until we can’t see each other, even in everyday situations, as human. We lose our humanity with every paycheck, every reprimand, review, bill payed and alarm clock woken to. We lose our humanity when we placidly accept war. We lose our humanity when we knowingly kill people for their beliefs, for their values, for their ideology – these are the real causes of misogyny.
He was right to shine a light on the plight of women in the military, especially those in conflict areas. Where life has no value, the physically weak are preyed upon. This is the barbarism of sexism – people reduced to animal survival bring it into view like a microscope. Zoom out a fair amount and you find hefty pay discrepancies: a situation clearly associated with survival, without the blood and immediacy of death, but clearly required for survival. This is the place where someone is taken advantage of because of their sex and its relationship to society. Until we deal with the acceptance of animal barbarism, we won’t deal with its mutant child uncivil-discrimination. When we do, we can look forward to a path where people who would choose otherwise, have an option outside of prostitution, and those who would choose pornography or prostitution can without any external negativity imposed on them. But as long as we blindly follow that false cause and effect of blaming prostitution and pornography for the problem women face in their quest for mutual respect, we will never find the solution for an issue we refuse to understand