prostitutes make men bad lovers

Besides, if a woman doesn’t want to have sex with her husband, it’s probably because he’s such a bad lover. And who makes men bad lovers ? The prostitutes! I want this to be noted:prostitutes teach men to be bad lovers because, in prostitution, the faster the me come the better. So they learn to ejaculate fast but they never learn to touch a shoulder or caress a face. And, after they’ve performed so badly, it’s the prostitute’s job to build up their ego. No matter how ugly and filthy he is, no matter how bad a lover he may be, she always builds him up: « No one has ever made me feel like this… » It’s so fake, I don’t know how they can do it. How can they play that little piece of theater for men and their pricks ? What happened to those girls ? Where’s their self-respect ?

Ariane Amsberg, in Wendy Chapkis, Live Sex Acts, women performing erotic labour, p.38

In neoliberal d…

In neoliberal discourse, married women are assumed to be responsible for children and dependent on wage-earning husbands, and are often advised to stay at home during their children’s early years to build self-esteem and independence in the young. They are also encouraged to volunteer, as the bulwarks of civil society and « faith-based » social service provisions, with their unpaid labor underpinning the privatized social safety net. Single, divorced, and widowed women may « choose » to work in a gender and race-segmented labor market without affordable childcare or public assistance in order to build their self-esteem and independence—or, some welfare reformers suggest, they may « choose » to put their children up for adoption by married couples, or house them in orphanages. Lesbian and gay, bisexual or transgendered parents may choose only to take their chances amid the patchwork legal minefield of inadequate to hostile partnership provisions, custody rulings, adoptions laws, social services, employment and health insurance practices, and educational (in)visibility.
For men, neoliberal policy wonks and politicians have advocated « law and order » programs, including the « war on crime » and the « war on drugs, » « zero tolerance » policing, « quality of life » crackdowns on crimes against public order, and the mass incarceration of young poor men, especially black men.

Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality : Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy, p. 17-18

 

This rhetoric p…

This rhetoric promotes the privatization of the costs of social reproduction, along with the care of human dependency needs, through personal responsibility exercised in the family and in civil society—thus shifting costs from state agencies to individuals and households. This process accompanies the call for tax cuts that deplete public coffers, but leave more money in the « private » hands of the wealthy.
The valorized concepts of privatization and personal responsibility travel widely across the rhetorics of contemporary policy debates, joining economic goals with cultural values while obscuring the identity politics and upwardly redistributive impetus of neoliberalism. Two general policy arenas have proved especially productive for these concepts and help to illustrate the relationship between the economic policies and the cultural projects of neoliberalism—welfare « reform » and « law and order » initiatives. In both arenas, neoliberals have promoted « private » competition, self-esteem, and independences the roots of personal responsibility, and excoriated « public » entitlement, dependency, and irresponsibility as the sources of social ills. And in both arenas, state policies reflect and enact identity and cultural politics invested in hierarchies of race, gender, and sexuality as well as class and nationality.
Welfare reform and the law and order politics of the past two decades clearly illustrate the dense interrelations among neoliberalism’s economic vision and its cultural projects. The goal of raising corporate profits has never been pursued separately from the rearticulation of hierarchies of race, gender, and sexuality in the United States and around the globe. Neoliberals, unlike many leftists and progressives, simply don’t assume that there is any important difference between material goals and identity politics. They make use of identity politics to obscure redistributive aims, and they use « neutral » economic policy terms to hide their investments in identity-based hierarchies, but they don’t make the mistake of fundamentally accepting the ruse of liberalism—the assertion of a clear boundary between the politics of identity and class.

Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality : Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy, p. 14-15

 

But the master …

But the master terms of Liberalism—public vs. private—have remained relatively consistent, as have the master categories—the state, the economy, civil society, and the family. Different forms of Liberalism define the categories somewhat differently and assign publicness and privateness to them in varying ways. But the most public site of collective life under Liberalism is always the state, the « proper » location of publicness, while the most private site is the family. The economy and civil society appear as mixed sites of voluntary, cooperative rational action (as opposed to the coerciveness of the state, and the passion and authority relations of the family), with both public and private functions— though both sites are generally regarded as more private than public. Much of the analytical force of Liberalism then is especially directed toward distinguishing the state from the economy and outlining the proper limits to the state’s power to regulate economic, civic, and family life.

Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality : Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy, p. 4-5

 

Neoliberalism w…

Neoliberalism was constructed in and through cultural and identity politics and cannot be undone by a movement without constituencies and analyses that respond directly to that fact. Nor will it be possible to build a new social movement that might be strong, creative, and diverse enough to engage the work of reinventing global politics for the new millennium as long as cultural and identity issues are separated, analytically and organizationally, from the political economy in which they are embedded.
What the progressive-left must understand is this: Neoliberalism, a late twentieth-century incarnation of Liberalism, organizes material and political life in terms of race, gender, and sexuality as well as economic class and nationality, or ethnicity and religion. But the categories through which Liberalism (and thus also neoliberalism) classifies human activity and relationships actively obscure the connections among these organizing terms.

Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality : Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy, p. 3

The most succes…

The most successful ruse of neoliberal dominance in both global and domestic affairs is the definition of economic policy as primarily a matter of neutral, technical expertise. This expertise is then presented as separate from politics and culture, and not properly subject to specifically political accountability or cultural critique. Opposition to material inequality is maligned as « class warfare, » while race, gender or sexual inequalities are dismissed as merely cultural, private, or triv- ial. This rhetorical separation of the economic from the political and cultural arenas disguises the upwardly redistributing goals of neoliberalism—its concerted efforts to concentrate power and resources in the hands of tiny elites. Once economics is understood as primarily a technical realm, the trickle-upward effects of neoliberal policies can be framed as due to performance rather than design, reflecting the greater merit of those reaping larger rewards.
But, despite their overt rhetoric of separation between economic policy on the one hand, and political and cultural life on the other, neoliberal politicians and policymakers have never actually separated these domains in practice. In the real world, class and racial hierarchies, gender and sexual institutions, religious and ethnic boundaries are the channels through which money, political power, cultural resources, and social organization flow. The economy cannot be transparently abstracted from the state or the family, from practices of racial apartheid, gender segmentation, or sexual regulation. The illusion that such categories of social life can be practically as well as analytically abstracted one from another descends from the conceptual universe of Anglo- European Liberalism, altered and adapted to the U.S. context during the early nineteenth century (see chapter 1). While reasserting this ideology of discrete spheres of social life, in practice contemporary neoliberal policies have been implemented in and through culture and politics, reinforcing or contesting relations of class, race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, religion, or nationality. The specific issues, alliances and policies have shifted over time and across differing locales, but their overall impact has been the upward redistribution of resources and the reproduction of stark patterns of social inequality.

Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality : Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy, p. XIV

le pouvoir des femmes et la subversion sociale

le pouvoir des femmes et la subversion sociale

par Mariarosa Dalla Costa et Selma James

During the rece…

During the recent years of struggle – by all women, not only prostitutes – it has become clear that the state is the prime target to attack, not the pimp or the client, who are merely secondary objectives. The state is the biggest “pimp” of all. Through fines and imprisonment it is always trying to reduce prostitute’s income to the average female level – low. The state is the true exploiter of both houseworkers and sexworkers, and all women should and must continue to unite internationally in struggle against the criminalization of prostitutes. It is every woman’s struggle.

Leopoldina Fortunati, The Arcane of Reproduction : Housework, Prostitution, Labor and Capital; Autonomedia, 1996, p. 56

Durant les récentes années de lutte – de toutes les femmes, pas seulement des prostituées- il est devenu clair que l’Etat est la première cible à attaquer, non le proxénète ou le client, qui ne sont que des objectifs secondaires. L’Etat est le plus gros “proxénète” de tous. Par les amendes et l’emprisonnement il tente sans cesse de réduire le revenu des prostituées au niveau moyen féminin ) bas. L’Etat est le véritable exploiteur tant des travailleuses ménagères que des travailleuses du sexe, et toutes les femmes devraient et doivent continuer à s’unir internationalement dans la lutte contre la criminalisation des prostituées. c’est la lutte de toutes les femmes.

L’injonction d’…

L’injonction d’arrêter la prostitution adressée aux étrangères revient à raviver une vieille distinction que l’on espérait pourtant révolue : celle entre les pauvres (pauvresses) méritants, à qui sont compassionnellement octroyés quelques maigres subsides, et ceux qui, persévérant dans leur mauvaises inclinations, ne recueillent que ce qu’ils méritent – en l’occurrence le centre de rétention et l’expulsion. Qu’un tel mode de pensée puisse aujourd’hui se targuer du féminisme est un incontestable révélateur des régressions qu’a ces dernières années connu la pensée du social.

Lilian Mathieu, « Les pauvresses méritantes et les autres. A propos du renforcement de la lutte contre le système prostitutionnel »

One the one han…

One the one hand, the woman is formally prevented from selling herself as houseworker and as prostitute in the same time, given that one person cannot at the formal level exist as legal (houseworker) and illegal (prostitute) subjects simultaneously. On the other hand for the prostitute to sell her labor-power as its capacity for production would also be formally incompatible. But in practice she can and she does. Nowadays, for example, with the crisis of family so rampant, housewives and others are becoming part-time prostitutes, as too are students, workers, teachers, secretaries, etc. The division in the female job market between prostitute and non-prostitute is thus blurring. Entering and leaving the two markets has become far easiest than in the past […]. The rise in prostitution, coupled with women’s increasing absenteeism from housework, is dangerously changing the face of the male worker’s consumption, where his consumption of housework should not only be complementary but also fundamental to his consumption of prostitution work, and vice versa. In response, capital has intensified its efforts to regain its quantitative control over the supply of prostitution work. The wave of repression of prostitutes is in reality capital’s attempt to re-establish the complementary aspects of the exchange, and to once more place prostitution work in a secondary position to housework in terms of the male worker’s quantitative consumption of it.

Leopoldina Fortunati, The Arcane of Reproduction : Housework, Prostitution, Labor and Capital; Autonomedia, 1996, p. 44-45

D’un côté, la femme est formellement empêchée de se vendre comme ménagère et comme prostituée en même temps, étant donné qu’une personne ne peut, au niveau formel, exister simultanément en tant que sujet légal (la ménagère) et illégal (la prostituée). D’un autre côté, pour la prostituée, vendre sa force de travail comme sa capacité pour la production serait aussi formellement incompatible. Mais en pratique, elle le peut et elle le fait. De nos jours, par exemple, avec la crise si endémique de la famille, les femmes au foyer et autres deviennent des prostituées à temps partiel, de même que les étudiantes, travailleuses, enseignantes, secrétaires, etc. La division dans le marché du travail féminin entre prostituée et non-prostituée devient brouillée. Entrer et quitter ces deux marchés est devenu bien plus facile que par le passé […] L’augmentation de la prostitution, couplée au croissant absentéisme  des femmes du travail ménager, est en train de dangereusement changer le visage de la consommation du travailleur, puisque sa consommation de travail ménager ne devrait pas être seulement complémentaire, mais fondamentale, par rapport à sa consommation de travail de prostitution, et vice versa. En réponse, le capital a intensifié ses efforts pour récupérer un contrôle quantitatif sur la réserve de travail de prostitution. La vague de répression des prostituées est en réalité une tentative du capital pour rétablir les aspects complémentaires de l’échange, et pour, une fois de plus, placer le travail de la prostitution dans une position secondaire par rapport au travail ménager en ce qui concerne la quantité qu’en consomme le travailleur.