the transit—home to street, street to home— is there any place,
reason, or chance for female intelligence that is not simply looking
for the best buyer?
*
So ladies, ye who prefer labor to prostitution, who
pass days and nights in providing for the wants of
your family, it is understood of course that you
and honor belong to idleness.
You, Victoria of England, Isabella of Spain— you
command, therefore you
Jenny P. D’Hericourt,
The sex labor of women for the most part is private—in the bedroom—or secret—prostitutes may be seen, but how the johns use them may not. Ideally women do nothing; women simply are
women. In truth women get used up in private or in secret being
women. In the ideal conception of womanhood, women do not do
work that can be seen: women only do hidden sex labor. In the real
world, women who work for wages outside of sex are dangerously
outside the female sphere; and women are denigrated for not being
ideal— apparently idle, untouched by visible labor.
Behind the smoke screen of ideal idleness, there is always
women’s work. Women’s work, first, is marriage. “In the morning
I’m always nervous, ” Carolina de Jesus wrote. “I’m afraid of not
getting money to buy food to eat.. . . Senhor Manuel showed up
saying he wanted to marry me. But I don’t want to. . . a man isn’t
going to like a woman who can’t stop reading and gets out of bed to
write and sleeps with paper and pencil under her pillow. T hat’s
why I prefer to live alone, for m y ideals. ” 21
The woman in marriage is often in marriage because her ideal is
eating, not writing.
Women’s work, second, is prostitution: sexual service outside of
marriage for money. “I’d like so much to have the illusion that I
had some freedom of choice, ” said J . in Kate M illett’s
way I got into prostitution, how determined m y life had been, how
fucked over I was. . . So I believed I’d chosen it. W hat’s most
terrifying is to look back, to realize what I went through and that I
endured it. ” 22
The woman in prostitution learns, as Linda Lovelace said in
of pain or the momentary lessening of terror. ” 23 The woman in
prostitution is often in prostitution because her ideal is physical
survival— surviving the pimp, surviving poverty, having nowhere
to go.
Women’s social condition is built on a simple premise: women
can be fucked and bear babies, therefore women must be fucked
and bear babies. Sometimes, especially among the sophisticated,
“penetrated” is substituted for “fucked”: women can be penetrated,
therefore women must be penetrated. This logic does not apply to
men, whichever word is used: men can be fucked, therefore men
must be fucked; men can be penetrated, therefore men must be
penetrated. This logic applies only to women and sex. One does
not say, for instance, women have delicate hands, therefore women
must be surgeons. Or women have legs, therefore women must
run, jump, climb. Or women have minds, therefore women must
use them. One does learn, however, that women have sex organs
that must be used by men, or the women are not women: they are
somehow less or more, either of which is bad and thoroughly discouraged. Women are defined, valued, judged, in one way only: as women—that is, with sex organs that must be used. Other parts of
the body do not signify, unless used in sex or as an indicator of
sexual availability or desirability. Intelligence does not count. It
has nothing to do with what a woman
Women are born into the labor pool specific to women: the labor
is sex. Intelligence does not modify, reform, or revolutionize this
basic fact of life for women.
Women are marked for marriage and prostitution by a wound
