Why Prostitutes Are Damned Freudian Style

For the discourse –or widely circulated myth–of ‘sex workers are molested therefore inferior people’ to be this popular (or vice veras: sex workers are inferior people because they were molested and therefore with low self-esteem), you have to go back to the very origination. I believe it has to do with Freud, and his passing reference to prostitutes and child molestation and their psyche. Look at  Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality by him. I thought there was literally a curt and insufficient but evident reference to prostitutes and their sexuality. This lazy assumption was attributing their engaging in the labor to molestation they had experienced in their childhood and sexuality developed by it. Since it was omitted and inadequate, I believe it was just another stretch of imagination of Freud’s with no research or data. If there was any ground he had at the time,

1) he was mostly seeing upper middle class women–not men– and studied hysteria and established his theory. (read his earliest records, even before Anna O.)

2) he was rather theorizing by the ground he gathered by seeing non-sex worker middle class women and had hypothesis that sexual acts achieve wholeness in one’s body if practiced in the appropriate conditions. To realize it, however, it would take appropriate investment of time and process and the participants’ wholesome mind.

3) Sex in prostitution is the best example of sexual acts devoid of what are raised in the above.

His interest was the least in studying what prostitutes and prostitution could be, so the rhetoric to condemn sex worker, women and self-esteem and trauma is rather a product of people’s over-enthusiasm of Freud and sex, and their desire to establish some theory to condemn their fear for women and their own sex.

Prostitution is an economic condition rather manifestation of pathology. Thus Marx has way more worthwhile regard on sexwork than Freud’s although his view was prostitution as the very condition of the utmost exploitation, therefore to be condemned. Engels’s view might be the very scientific enough to use nowadays if you are a sexworker who needs some back up theory from those who had opinions about our labor.

Our Acid Attack

While I was still pondering on the stigma seemingly attached to women and cooking, and/or women who dare to cook, my thought focused on the bizarre rhetoric that I had noticed for over half a decade or more, maybe, about women and ‘self-esteem.’ It becomes disturbing when the concept of ‘self-esteem’ becomes a tool to degrade women when it seems to have no scientific ground to prove. Yet people love it so much that it’s practically on the rage.

For example, the word ‘low self-esteem’ is very often employed to reason why some women find themselves in predicaments and tribulations. It gets out of control when one’s ‘self-esteem’ is addressed to explain the reason of women’s working in the sex industries and insinuated that therefore, they deserve your disrespect. Sample sentences;

women who work in sex related businesses are there because they have no self-esteem.

It used to be more common to hear

women who work in sex businesses are those who like it out of control pathologically.

I don’t know which is worse. These two ideas are still hand in hand but these two are both ignoring a fact that workers there would not do the same thing to you if they are not getting paid. It becomes alarming when these ideas progress to

Sex workers are there because they are inherently inferior to non-sex working women. 

For those who have the alarming theory nowadays often attribute their contempt for the sexworkers to their low self-esteems. Why their self-esteem is so low is because they are molested as a child. 

I see no scientific connection or explanation in this logic of ‘low self-esteem’ and it sounds more like a term to trash people unconditionally and still make it sound like you have a little consideration of psychology and those women’s interior and even welfare. I have observed this to be a mild manner to estimate and assume the other’s ‘social’ status, rather than her interior life, by the intangible and non-scientific measure and simply put them down.

The horror is now the term is so prevalent and handy that people use it to reason things that belong to social constructs and blame their incapacity of choice. As long as you regard social phenomena in this measure of judgment of individual interiors, there occurs inevitable incoherence. Take the public discourse dictated against sex workers. It is portrayed as if people’s minds are programmed by one’s trauma, they can’t control but they are dancing on the pole or turning tricks even without getting paid. To me, these are all justification of people who are benefiting ‘the inferior people’ and their guilt over it. Or projection of some inferior complex of their own as consumers before the desirability of the commodified women.

I find it noteworthy that those who actually say those things believe they have some insights and understanding about the women less privileged than themselves; this discourse is on the rage. The firm belief they seemed to have as well as fantasy they cling to while I cringe about is that sexwork is the outcome of mental dysfunction rather than another type of labor people can engage in.

Now that this surmounts the level of putting the sex workers down by almost a ‘caring rhetoric’, I think this is something we should study as the acid attack–the notorious tradition in regions from South Asia to Middle East for men to revenge women who reject their courtship: men throw acid to those who turned their marriage proposal down, which is still practiced and often the perpetrators get away with the violence in the belief that the act would discipline women in society and put things in order–in the first world premise.

As I have been observing men who are willingly to participate in the community of discussing sex work when they have practically nothing to do with the business, there is always this sort of mechanism of putting women down in a sneaky way and justify their disrespect. When it comes to women who would make them have to pay, they’re probably no better than any cave men in anywhere in the world in anytime in the history.

Though the Bitch is not necessarily in the kitchen

While I was going through an interview of bichin’ kitchen Sarah Katherine Lewis, whom I believed to have transformed into a food coordinator and often confounded with Nadia G by now. It seems I have to clear the misconception once and for all. Lewis was never morphed into a cook nor meant to be one. (Too Bad!?)

I read her first book Indecent when it came out and there were more than a couple of aspects that I found interesting about her such as her consciousness of the class struggle among sex workers and her attempt to arch the condition of sexwork to the labor issue per se, especially from the blue color women’s point of view.

While on the net search, however, her website that was observed when her second book came out was gone, as well as any one associated with her name. The interview that I linked the above touches upon her depression problem, and this made me think.

All in all, it is a good read and I found a passage that seemed to be noteworthy.

It’s a systemic issue, not a sex industry [specific] issue, which is what blows my mind about “abolitionist” anti-sex work feminists.  They argue that they care so much about women’s lives and safety, but I don’t see them working on campaigns with farm workers…
It’s absolutely systemic, and it’s not just women—it’s about dehumanizing the providers of our intimate labor: food, sex, caretaking.  The closer the labor is to us, the more we have to pretend they aren’t real people, because I suspect we can’t stand ourselves for needing and wanting it.  Nannies, food service workers, it’s all the same. It’s all about Mommy… we need her to wipe our ass not because she’s getting paid, but because she wants to, right?  But then of course her labor is devalued because it’s what she is, a good mommy, so why should we pay for that if she’d do it anyway?

I also found this and 6th reason in it –her articulation–was indeed the right one to market herself properly, especially to be distinguished from Nadia G, who seems the very embodiment of what is the opposite there. Don’t Get Me Wrong, Nadia is fine. She just reminds me of Marisa Tomay in the role of the movie My Cousin Vinny a bit too much.

Today’s:

The President’s Last Bang (2005 by Im Sang-Soo)

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