Sexuality and Society

The Price(s) of Pleasure in the classroom: The Appalachian State University Controversy’s Relevance to Sex Workers

Jayne Swift — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 18:39:26 +0000

This past March, Appalachian State University (in Boone, North Carolina) put Dr. Jammie Price, a tenured professor of sociology, on administrative leave. Price was suspended after showing a documentary film which critiques the pornography industry, titled “The Price of Pleasure.” This temporary suspension was enacted as a result of four students’ protest to university administration; they claimed that the film was “inappropriate” for classroom use.

Of course, there has to be a backstory to this. Various sources report that Price was known as a vocal critic of university practices, such as their handling of sexual assault allegations leveled at student athletes.[1] Prior to screening the film, student athletes had complained to university officials that she had created a hostile environment by facilitating classroom discussions on sexual assault accusations against student athletes on the ASU campus.[2]

After conducting an investigation (in which the University states that it did not focus on the screening of the film itself, but the manner in which the classroom was conducted), the Provost has allowed Dr. Price to return to the classroom as long as she consent to a mandatory “professional development plan.” This professional development plan requires Dr. Price to, among other things, develop and implement steps to contextualize and debrief “sensitive” material in the classroom.

Sexuality scholars, researchers, and activists should be concerned about Price’s suspension for many reasons. This includes standard concerns about academic freedom, and questions of academic integrity in dealing with the complex and controversial matters of sexuality, power, and media. This also includes concerns about the “backstory” of student backlash (i.e. critically examining the gender, race, and sexuality dynamics of when students complain about their professors). But this case is also important for an additional set of concerns: that of sexual rights and justice as they pertain to sex work and sex workers.

Dr. Price’s suspension based on her inclusion of “graphic” material in the classroom has lit up the blogosphere. Some have drawn on the language of “academic freedom” in order to conceive of it as a tool to promote truly inclusive democratic debate. Gail Dines — a well-known anti-porn feminist who is featured in the film, has leapt to the defense of Professor Price and the film, The Price of Pleasure. Given the film’s sudden prominence as an educational tool and as a catalyst that re-ignited long held debate about academic freedom, it’s worth pausing to examine the film itself.

The film, produced and distributed by the Media Education Foundation, purports to examine “how pleasure and pain, commerce and power, liberty and responsibility have become intertwined in the most intimate area of our lives.” The MEF is a popular source for academics seeking to include educational films in the classroom and it is known for producing films that espouse similar anti-porn themes (The Bro Code, Dreamworlds). The Price of Pleasure includes clips from pornographic films with the claim that these clips “represent current trends in mainstream pornography.” Some porn performers featured in the film have criticized it for the ways in which they felt the film purposefully misrepresented their perspectives and encoded a patently anti-porn message into something they were told would be an “unbiased” exploration.

Gail Dines, a professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies, at Wheelock College was a senior consultant for the film.[3] The film argues that porn has become what Linda Williams has described as “on/scene”: in other words, that “sexual scenarios” once considered “obscene” have increasingly become part of the public sphere (albiet via public scandal) [4]. However, unlike Williams, the filmmakers name this as a universally bad phenomenon.

Some might critique the filmmakers for espousing a nostalgic, moralistic wish for the “way we never were” (a world free of commercial sex and its’ depictions). A brief survey of U.S. history reveals that commercial sex has been an integral feature in public social life (albeit in different ways) at different moments in time.[5] The filmmakers attempt to sidestep this critique by utilizing a somewhat crude version of Marxist mechanics. For example, in the opening scene, Gail Dines explains that she is accused by some for being “anti-sex” because she critiques pornography, but what such critics don’t realize is that you can criticize McDonalds and still eat food.[6] The comparison doesn’t quite hold up on at least two fronts.

First, unlike food, it is difficult to trace the effects of any cultural product, including pornography. Without rehashing the feminist sex wars and an entire body of social scientific literature, there is no consensus that consumption of pornography causes the perpetuation of sexual violence.[7] Furthermore, the idea that representations directly impinge on or cause individual actions is one that some feminists –via such campaigns as the reform of rape laws—have long sought to contest.

Given the absence of strong direct evidence that porn causes sexual violence, some anti-porn activists instead argue that pornography promulgates a “worldview” that reifies gender inequality writ large and has harmful consequences to the public at large. There are two main components to this anti-porn argument:

porn as a genre universally “objectifies” women, by which they mean that it, more than any other media outlet, trains them to relate to their bodies as a site of scrutiny, to eroticize submission and “degradation,” and that these activities can never be a source for women’s self-creation or pleasure.
pornography leads men (as Robert Jensen, Professor of Journalism at the University of Texas, testifies in the film), to have difficulty distinguishing between the modes of relating to women enabled in and potentially appropriate to erotic fantasy and the modes of relating to women on an everyday basis in which they are not sex objects that are continually available for one’s sexual use.

Embedded in The Price of Pleasure are these logics of direct and uncritical consumption: What you watch becomes who you are. Perhaps this is the message Professor Jammie Price was hoping to introduce to her students. It’s worth asking whether this message alone is able to stimulate expansive and inclusive classroom debate on the topic of commercial sex. It’s worth asking whether this logic is representative of the diverse body of intellectual thought on media reception—which frequently demonstrates that people contest, resist, rescript, as well as reproduce, inequalities in their interactions with media texts.

But it is actually the second part of Dines’ food metaphor (re: McDonalds) that I am interested in. The “McDonalds” analogy situates the amorphous public and producers of porn in a morality tale. In this morality tale, the public are those who, barraged by porn, are being sold a dangerous and harmful product. Producers are either callous, usually male, profiteers or the sex workers themselves, who are either victims or “brainwashed” apologists. To this end, the only self-described former sex worker interviewed at length in the film is Sarah Katherine Lewis, who speaks about what she loathed about working in the sex industry, pointing out that the only options open to her at the time were working in service economies—McDonalds or sex businesses. Either way, the workers in the films are not the ones asked to offer definitive meanings about or set the agenda around business practices. The McDonalds analogy essentially eliminates from the terms of the debate the desires, needs, or interests of those who work at the McDonalds in question, those who for whatever complex array of reasons and motivations make their living via sex work.

Sex workers (and allies) who craft their own intellectual analyses and political agendas around questions of political economy, labor and human rights, and the politics of representation are not even intelligible within the schema of the “anti-McDonaldites.” Based on watching The Price of Pleasure alone, viewers would have no idea that sex worker advocacy groups have advanced trenchant critiques about what can be done to improve their working conditions and social existence.

The case of Professor Price reveals the extent that academic discussion of pornography often centers on the (presumably) non-sex working academic, or the academic advancing an anti-porn critique. No one seems to be questioning the anti-porn message of the film —a message that was perhaps lost on the students who felt violated by its graphicness. What then what does that say about the state of protections for academics and aspiring academics who are current or former sex workers? Or simply those who wish to include in the classroom the voices and worldviews of sex workers speaking on their terms?

In response to Price’s suspension, Gail Dines suggested that if Price had given a ringing endorsement of commercial sex businesses or to have invited what she likes to call “pornographers,” or sex workers and adult business owners (often one and the same), to speak on campus, all would be good in Price’s life.[8] This characterization is reminiscent of what Michael Bérubé has described as the movement of “campus conservatives to construe themselves as victims of liberal intolerance.”[9] Dines may not consider herself a campus conservative, but her fanciful claims about the supposed cultural status of sex workers belie the myriad ways in which academic research has historically stigmatized those working in sex industries. Moreover, it defies recent evidence that suggests that the mere introduction of discussions of commercial sex cultures to academic spaces are often met with protest.

For instance, in 2008 the president of the College of William and Mary did not have his contract renewed in part for his begrudging refusal to censor the Sex Workers Art Show, who had been invited by student organizations to perform on campus.

The implication that former or current sex workers are immune and protected from pervasive forms of discrimination in the academic (or any other) workplace is beyond farcical. Were Price to have been suspended for having once been a sex worker, let alone dared to introduce that in the classroom, who would be speaking up for her? Dines herself proudly admits to a record of opposing the decision to “allow” those working in the commercial sex industry to speak on university campuses.[10]

Make no mistake, sex workers and former sex workers who are also students, are at jeopardy of losing their jobs in education and their place in institutions of higher learning. In 2001, a student at California State University-Fullerton was ejected from the track and field team for working as a stripper to pay her way through school. She was outed by male athletes who attended the strip club and who had no disciplinary action taken against them. In 2010 a former sex worker who had written openly about her experiences in the sex industry was fired from her position with the New York City Teaching Fellows Program. More recently, Stacie Halas, was fired from her position as a science teacher at a public school when students “discovered” that she was a former porn performer.

How might starting our analysis of the state of academic freedom from these stories complicate our understanding of what is at stake, and for whom, in the disciplining of academic bodies? Lisa Johnson, in her astute observations on the Price incident, points out that “there is still no vocabulary for resisting the conservative moral framework that says graphic sexual material is inappropriate for the classroom, and no public statement of feminist pedagogy that says our notions of what is deemed proper in the classroom are part of the very status quo that WGS (Women & Gender Studies) generally interrogates.”

While I agree with Johnson that too often feminist academics avoid publicly articulating the value of the explicit challenges to sexual normativties they explore in the classroom, it’s important to delineate where these challenges actually diverge. These divergences may very well work to consolidate an understanding of academic freedom that claims the virtues in speaking about “disreputable” topics in order to stimulate learning and/or to debate certain kinds of conclusions. Yet in doing so, they may very well replicate and embed social stigma against “disreputable” ontologies or subjects themselves. The consequences of this move do not just affect the educational opportunities for sex workers. Rather, they go to the heart of how scholars define the ethical and methodological questions that arise in studying historically marginalized communities.

At a moment in which an international movement for sex worker human rights is gaining momentum, it is worth reconsidering how the available intellectual frameworks frame commercial sex and represent commercial sex workers, and remind ourselves of the panics that invariably emerge around the presence of commercial sex in the classroom. Such panics function to demarcate the boundaries of how any stigmatized topic is or is not allowable as a topic of learning and how marginalized groups, including sex workers are allowed to participate in academic cultures.

Jayne Swift is a doctoral student in Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at University of Minnesota. Her areas of specialty include Commercial Sex Cultures & Obscenity, and Queer and Feminist Theory.

[1] Monte Mitchell. “ASU professor suspended after showing film on porn business, expressing views on athletes, racism,” Winston-Salem Journal. April 24, 2012. http://www2.journalnow.com/news/2012/apr/24/2/asu-professor-suspended-after-showing-film-on-porn-ar-2202862/

[2] Kellen Moore, “ASU professor decries university action,” WataguaDemocrat.com April 24, 2012. http://www2.wataugademocrat.com/News/story/ASU-professor-decries-university-action-id-007608

[3] The Price of Pleasure. Dir. Chyng Sun, Media Education Foundation, 2008.

[4] Linda Williams. “Porn Studies: Proliferating Pornographies On/Scene: An Introduction,” in Porn Studies. Ed. Linda Williams. Duke University Press: 2004.

[5] See: Andrea Friedman, Prurient Interests: Gender, Democracy, and Obscenity in New York City, 1909-1945. Columbia University Press: 2000. Mara Keire, For Business and Pleasure: Red-Light Districts and the Regulation of Vice in the United States, 1890-1933. The Johns Hopkins University Press: 2010.

[6] The Price of Pleasure. Dir. Chyng Sun, Media Education Foundation, 2008.

[7] Based on their review of published academic literature, Ferguson and Hartley (2009) conclude that “it is time to discard the hypothesis that pornography contributes to increased sexual assault behavior” (p. 323). See: C. J. Ferguson, & Hartley, R. D. (2009). The pleasure is momentary…the expense damnable?: The influence of pornography on rape and sexual assault. Aggression & Violent Behavior, 14 (5), 323-329.

[8] Gail Dines, “The Power of the Porn Industry: The Shocking Suspension of Dr. Price,” Counterpunch, April 19, 2012. http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/04/19/the-shocking-suspension-of-dr-price/

[9] Micheal Berube. What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts? Classroom Politics and ‘Bias’ in Higher Education. W.W. Norton & Company: 2006. P. 61

[10] Gail Dines. “The Power of the Porn Industry: The Shocking Suspension of Dr. Price,” Counterpunch, April 19, 2012. http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/04/19/the-shocking-suspension-of-dr-price/

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Resisting SOPA (the Stop Online Piracy Act)

Kari Lerum — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 22:15:38 +0000

Dear Sexuality & Society readers:

Tomorrow, Jan, 18, 2012, the Society Pages (which hosts Sexuality & Society) will post a “blackout” screen to protest the proposed “Stop Online Piracy Act.” Wikipedia and many other major social media providers will be doing the same. To learn more about this protest as well as the censorship implications of the proposed SOPA legislation, click here: http://sopablackout.org/learnmore/

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Here’s a clip from Society Pages’ editor Chis Uggen about the situation:

Blackout: Solidarity against SOPA

by Chris Uggen, 3 hours ago at 01:27 pm

One of the core values of The Society Pages is that knowledge should be transparent, accessible, and uncensored. Proposed legislation, known as SOPA in the Senate and PIPA in the House, undermines these core values and threatens the very foundation of the Internet. Many prominent websites, such as Wikipedia, have chosen tomorrow as a day of action regarding these legislative moves.

We have decided to join in with these groups and we will present site visitors to The Society Pages with a “splash screen” or “blackout screen” for the entirety of 1/18/12. The screen will inform visitors of the implications of SOPA/PIPA and link to further reading on the subject.

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Stay tuned to the Society Pages front page tonight/tomorrow for more developments :http://thesocietypages.org/

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Coming soon: top 10 sexual stories of the year

Kari Lerum — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 19:21:33 +0000

As 2011 comes to a close, we are once again soliciting recommendations for top sexual stories of the year. As usual we are looking for stories from around the globe related to sexuality, culture, health, and politics from the past year. Please email us at sexuality@thesocietypages.org with your ideas (and we’ll be sure to credit you as well).

Sincerely,

Kari Lerum & Shari Dworkin, Eds, Sexuality & Society

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Evidence-based trafficking policy?: Sociologist gives State Department an “F”

Kari Lerum — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 03:39:21 +0000

When the Obama administration took office on Jan. 1, 2009, many scientists and scholars were hopeful that empirical evidence would play a greater role in defining a range of domestic and international policies, ranging from justifications for war, to global warming, to sex education, to policies about human trafficking. The hope was that the administration would turn away from making decisions that were rooted in ideological agendas and make decisions that were informed more directly by reliable empirical data. To some extent, this has been the case. [E.G.: see the State Department's (remarkable) response to evidence of human rights violations against people in the sex trade].

However, when it comes to directly criticizing the State Department about its international policies — even using solid empirical data — it is probably inevitable that the State Department machine will kick into defense mode. And this is what is happening now in response to Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, a professor of sociology at the University of Southern California, for her book Illicit Flirtations: Labor, Migration, and Sex Trafficking in Tokyo which is based on her ethnographic research with bar hostesses in Tokyo. The State Department argues that women who are similar to those Parreñas included in her study need to be “rescued.” Parreñas’ research suggests otherwise, and adds to the mounting evidence which indicates that calls for “rescuing” adult women are simplistic, not based in reliable evidence, and are ultimately harmful to the women who allegedly “need” to be “rescued.”

Parreñas’ more complicated and empirically-grounded analysis puts a wet blanket on widespread popular discourse about “sex trafficking” — a “victim/rescue” narrative that many critical feminist, human rights, and labor scholars critique as a colonialist, patronizing, (ironically) sexualizing fantasy of White Knights swooping in to rescue helpless women. Parreñas’ work also provides yet another push to the State Department — and other all parties interested in alleviating human trafficking — to ground their approaches in rigorous data collection, as well as analysis that addresses labor and migrant rights in the context of global economic inequalities.

See below for Nina Ayoub’s story which briefly summarizes Parreñas’ findings and the State Department’s response:

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Scholar’s Views Rile State Department

November 10, 2011, 9:00 pm

By Nina Ayoub

The author of a new scholarly book from Stanford University Press has become the target of criticism from an unusual source: the U.S. Department of State.

In recent weeks, Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, a professor of sociology at the University of Southern California, has received media attention for Illicit Flirtations: Labor, Migration, and Sex Trafficking in Tokyo, a book about Filipina women working as bar hostesses in the Japanese capital. Bloomberg News ran excerpts of her work. She was called the “literary lovechild of Barbara Ehrenreich and Naomi Wolf” by Zócalo Public Square, which said the book will “inspire indignation for reasons you didn’t expect.” Parreñas also was interviewed onThe World, a program of Public Radio International. Following that broadcast, the State Department asked—essentially—for equal time.

The issue? Parreñas was highly critical of the ways in which State Department policies on international sex trafficking characterize the women who are the focus of her book, minimizing, she says, their individual agency as migrant laborers, and seeking to “rescue” them and regulate their lives in ways that Parreñas argues may leave them worse off.

On November 4, Alison Kiehl Friedman, deputy director of the State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons was interviewed on The World to “clarify U.S. policy on sex trafficking.” She told the host that “we agree with Dr. Parreñas that there is exploitation inherent in what is going on, and we agree that not all the people there are trafficking victims. And we agree that there needs to be more done to get unscrupulous labor recruiters out of the system and better protect migration flows. Where we disagree is that somebody can go in, have a personal experience for a couple of months, and categorically say these people weren’t sex-trafficking victims, and somehow calling some of them sex-trafficking victims is worse than ignoring their exploitation and trying to address it.”

In an e-mail interview, The Chronicle asked Parreñas for her response. Is she surprised at the public attention her research is getting from the State Department?

“As a scholar who is committed to ‘public sociology,’ that is, sociology that aims to transcend the academy and reach a wider audience, I couldn’t be anything but pleased that policy implementers have given attention to my work,” she writes. “Unfortunately, they seemed to have also misinterpreted the work.”

Parreñas adds: “I do wish that the U.S. State Department gave greater attention to the evidence-based research on human trafficking by scholars such as myself, and others including the anthropologist Denise Brennan, the legal scholar Dina Haynes, and the anthropologist Tiantian Zheng.” The department does not, she charges. Instead, they “insist on making unsubstantiated claims on human trafficking.”

What the sociologist is chiefly calling “unsubstantiated” is the Trafficking in Persons Report, which the State Department describes as its “principal diplomatic tool to engage foreign governments” on the subject. She is critical of the State Department, she says, for not fully accounting for its methods, as well as for its informants and sources. “The TIP Report would get an F if it were a social-science-research project.”

Parreñas says she is fairly sure that her critics at the agency have not yet read her book. “Otherwise, they would not be able to dismiss my methodology as ‘having a personal experience for a couple of months.’” she writes. As a qualitative sociologist, she used a varied set of methods, including “in-depth interviews with hostesses, brokers, club owners; participant-observation both as a customer (in nine clubs) and as a hostess (in one club primarily); archival research; and interviews with government representatives in both Japan and the Philippines. I spent not just ‘a couple of months’ but a total of 11 non-continuous months in Tokyo to conduct my project.”

Unlike Friedman and the TIP Report, she says, “all the claims that I have made about the situation of hostesses—a group they say are ‘forced into prostitution’—are based on evidence, i.e., concrete interviews with migrant Filipina hostesses who I made sure represented a diverse group.” The women included “those who are college educated and those who are high-school dropouts; some work in high-end bars and others in low-end bars; some undress in the club where they work and others never sit next to a customer at a club when at work.”

Speaking on the radio of the Filipina hostesses, Friedman, the State Department official, used an analogy she said her boss was fond of. “I think that focusing on how they got there and whether there was any initial consent to travel is really beside the point,” she told The World. “It’s almost like criminalizing driving to the bank robbery, but not the bank robbery itself.”

In her e-mail to The Chronicle, Parreñas counters: “As I explicitly described in the interview, the work of hostesses is not prostitution. Instead, the work is to flirt professionally with customers.”

Friedman, notes Parreñas, “said we should not focus on how one gets to commit a robbery, but to focus on the robbery. This statement just goes to show that she chooses not to consider the circumstances of people’s lives and the particular needs that arise out of those circumstances.

In the case of hostesses, she says, “these women are often from the poorest of the poor in the Philippines. We cannot understand why they do hostess work unless we consider the structural contexts that have shaped their lives.” Those who prefer they not become hostesses, she says, should work on easing the structural inequalities that limited their choices and made hostess work the best of bad options.

“But let us say I agree with Friedman’s boss,” she adds. “Let us look at the act of bank robbery. Let us disregard how they got there. In this case, we would look at the act of hostess work. We would actually see that the work is not prostitution but professional flirtation. Professional flirting could be performed in a variety of ways—via showing acts of care such as spoon feeding sensually, dancing on stage (clothed or unclothed), singing, verbal teasing. I would ask Friedman—what is wrong with professional flirting? What is so different between professional flirting and working as a waitress in Hooters?”

“Yes, I would say let us look at the act of ‘bank robbery’ or the act of ‘hostess work.’ If we were going to do it accurately, we would actually rely on evidence to know the specifics of that ‘bank robbery.’ We would perhaps realize that the robber walked away with three pieces of mint candy from the bank and not wads of cash. If one looks at the TIP Report,one sees that the U.S. Department of State provides no evidence related to working conditions. So it is questionable if they know anything about the ‘bank robber.’”

Commenting on Friedman’s statement that “compelled service is frequently misidentified as consent,” Parreñas says that the official is “cloaking the problem of human trafficking. She is looking at the surface and not the structure.” Most migrant workers, she says, are not free laborers. They are often guest workers whose legal residency binds them to a sponsoring employer. This leaves them in a highly unequal relationship of dependency. This, she writes, would apply to farm workers in North Carolina, non-immigrant-visa domestic workers in Washington, D.C.; likewise, domestic workers in Singapore, or the kafala system in the United Arab Emirates, or au pairs in Denmark, or migrant teachers in Baltimore.

“Eminent scholars such as Carole Vance and Ann Jordan have expressed their puzzlement over the obsession of the U.S. State Department on sex workers as well as their conflation of sex trafficking and prostitution,” says Parreñas. She says that the department’s “over-obsession with finding ‘prostitutes’ who are ‘sex trafficked’” has led them to misidentify migrant Filipina hostesses. “Hostess work is not a euphemism for prostitution,” says Parreñas. Yet, she claims, the U.S. Department of State, “without evidence,” misidentifies the hostesses as not just prostitutes but women “forced into prostitution.”

This misidentification is a “setback,” she argues, “because it has eliminated the jobs of tens of thousands of women, many of whom are now living in poverty in the Philippines.” This shift, the book indicates, occurred when Japan changed its visa policies on “Filipina entertainers” in a way that conformed with U.S. preferences. The scholar also cites the research of her Ph.D. student Maria Hwang at Brown University, where Parreñas taught before going to the University of Southern California. Hwang has found a sizeable number of Filipina hostesses displaced from Tokyo working as migrant sex workers in Hong Kong. Hwang’s research, says Parreñas, shows us that “falsely rescuing them from prostitution has actually forced them into prostitution.”

Her student’s finding “tells us that it is very important that the U.S. Department of State only provide evidence-based research in their reports. Not having evidence-based research could backfire on them in more ways than one.”

Parreñas will continue her research on migrant labor. She says she is preparing a second edition of her 2001 book, Servants of Globalization: Women, Migration and Domestic Work (Stanford), which compared Filipina migrant domestic workers in Rome and Los Angeles. She is conducting new research in both cities to update their situations. She also has a new project that will compare the experiences of domestic workers whose legal residency in a country binds them to a citizen sponsor employer, meaning “that they cannot quit their job unless they are willing to be deported.” She will compare domestic workers in that situation in Denmark, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States.

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Original story posted here: http://chronicle.com/blogs/pageview/scholars-views-rile-state department/29694?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

See also human rights law professor Ann Jordan’s prolific scholarship on this issue, including her article here: http://www.fpif.org/articles/sex_trafficking_the_abolitionist_fallacy

Other related Sexuality & Society stories:

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Advice for Weiner other “rising” neo-rock stars

Kari Lerum — Sat, 11 Jun 2011 05:18:18 +0000

When the Weiner sexting story broke, I was on holiday in Amsterdam, where prostitution is legally regulated, and newsstands display Penthouse and Vogue magazines side-by-side. It was no surprise then that “Weinergate” seemed to be met by the Dutch with a “here the Americans go again” eye roll.

In contrast to the Dutch, Americans love sex scandals. We love them so much that in a good year we produce and consume not just one of these high-profile scandals, but several. For many of us interested in sexual justice, the juiciest stories are those of the hypocrites: the Elliot Spitzers who lead anti-prostitute campaigns while purchasing sex; the George Rekers who champion the anti-gay movement while hiring “rent boys,” and the Newt Gingrichs who lead impeachment hearings while engaging in their own extra-marital affairs.

And then there are people like Anthony Weiner: Charismatic heterosexual men in powerful positions who thrive on taking risks.
Guys who benefit from the security and social status of marriage but who also have ample time away from their partners. Men who are fierce defenders of reproductive rights, are friends with the likes of John Stewart and Ben Affleck, and who (understandably) have many dedicated women fans. In pre-Twitter and Facebook days (circa 2006), such public figures were sometimes called “rock stars”; their fans, “groupies.” Today, with the democratizing boost of social media, more of us than ever before can construct our own neo-rock star status, supported by “Facebook friends” and “twitter followers.”

The privileges taken by (mostly heterosexual male) rock stars are nothing new; what’s new is the neo-rock star’s ability to showcase their goods on such a massive scale. But with this newfound power of instantaneous social impact, private digital messages are increasingly impossible. It’s the equivalent of whispering sweet nothings into a megaphone; or asking the masses to kindly shut their eyes while they flash that one special love interest in the crowd.

When teen girls send sexy words and images (and those photos are intercepted and distributed by “frenemies” for the purpose of shaming them), American parents panic and talk about “ruined lives.” But what about when the “sexting” is between consenting adults? Is there any harm in Weiner’s actions, and if so, harm to whom?

From a legal perspective, it seems that there is no case against Weiner. He did initially lie to reporters, his “fans,” and possibly also to his wife, but not under oath (so no perjury). He has admitted to engaging in several digital affairs, but adult, consensual sexual liaisons outside of heterosexual marriage and reproductive sexuality are (gratefully) no longer criminalized in the United States. If Weiner had campaigned against “dangers” of sexting and the internet, we could bash him for being a hypocrite (but alas, he was too busy championing issues like insurance industry reform).

I do not yet know enough about the situations and interpretations of Weiner’s sexting partners to comment on whether or not these women ever felt harmed by his messages (at this point I have not seen any self-reports of negative impact). But I will venture to guess that all of them (as well as Weiner’s wife, Huma Abedin) are being wounded by the invasive scrutiny of this media storm.

And so, from my perspective Weiner’s biggest “crime” may be that he was reckless with his neo-rock star privileges. I thus will
offer two pieces of sincere advice to Representative Anthony Wiener and other rising neo-rock stars:

Invest in a good therapist who will help you reflect upon your desires, social/sexual identities, and social privileges. This is crucial information for then reassessing your own goals for yourself and your relationships including your marriage.
Never confuse your fans and followers for your friends. This is especially important when operating under “schoolyard” conditions, where the status of one person or political interest depends on the beating down of others, and where conservative or knee-jerk normative definitions of “good” vs. “bad” sexuality rule.

Meanwhile, for the most part, American media coverage continues to uncritically replicate the notion that Weiner’s messages are simply “inappropriate” and “shameful.” And that’s why some of us with “Dutch” and sexual justice sensibilities — including us at Sexuality & Society — are rolling our eyes.

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Related Sexuality & Society stories:

Lerum, K. Dec. 23, 2009. The real problem with sexting: Adult complicity in labeling teens “sluts,” “perverts,” and “criminals.”
Dworkin, S. Dec. 17, 2009. Critically examining media coverage of Tiger Woods: Sex addict, masculine privilege, or racialized sexuality in sport?
Lerum, K. May 2, 2010. Sex addiction clinics as capitalist confession booths.

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Sex worker and GLBT rights take UN platform

Kari Lerum — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 16:18:02 +0000

I recently wrote a story for Rh Reality Check about the Universal Periodic Review process for the US, specifically highlighting the text of recent speeches delivered to the United Nations Human Rights Council; I’m re-posting the story here for Sexuality & Society readers … the story can also be found here: http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/blog/2011/03/21/settingglobal-mandate-towardhuman-rights-approach-work-policy

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Last Friday, March 18, 2011, was a day of celebration for sex worker activists and allies, as well as for global advocates of sexual health, justice, and human rights. Why the celebration? The United States made public its new position that: “No one should face violence or discrimination in access to public services based on sexual orientation or their status as a person in prostitution.”

The first part of this position regarding sexual orientation was not a surprise. (Despite predictable and periodic right-wing backlashes, GLBT justice movements have continued to make gains at all levels of US society, including increased federal recognition by the Obama administration that sexual orientation is not a valid litmus test for full citizenship.)

The second part of this statement, however – a commitment to uphold the human rights of all sex workers — is completely unprecedented at the federal level of the United States.

The occasion for this public statement on the part of the US was the first Universal Periodic Review (UPR) at the United Nations Human Rights Council. The UPR is new process where the UN community evaluates the human rights record of each member state. Upon its first UPR review in November 2010, the US received 228 recommendations by its global peers for improving its human rights record, including recommendation #86 from member state Uruguay: “undertake awareness-raising campaigns for combating stereotypes and violence against gays, lesbians, bisexuals and [transgender people], and ensure access to public services paying attention to the special vulnerability of [sex] workers to violence and human rights abuses.[i]

On Friday, March 18, at the Palais des Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, the US presented its written response to each of the 228 recommendations (including the one listed at the top of this post). Additionally, Harold Koh, Legal Advisor for the US Department of State, delivered a verbal summary statement of the US commitment to human rights. Invoking the spirit of more recent US history including the civil rights movement, Koh stated that it is now “a fundamental American belief” that “society as a whole is transformed for the better through our work to protect and promote the civil and human rights of its least powerful members.”

Following Koh’s remarks, ten UN member state representatives were allowed to read two-minute prepared response statements, followed by statements read by ten civil society representatives. The process of getting a speaking position in this forum resembles a competitive race, with adversarial member states (such as Cuba and Iran) highly motivated to achieve a speaking slot. As a result of perseverance, luck, and sponsorship by the Sexual Rights Initiative and member group Action Canada for Population and Development, sex worker and transgender rights activist Darby Hickey[ii] was able to secure the 10^th and last civil society speaking position. Below are segments from her speech:

Thank you, Mr. President. I am a sex worker and transgender rights activist from the United States. On behalf of hundreds of civil society organizations that called on the U.S. government to ensure the human rights of people engaged in sex work, I would like to both congratulate and thank the U.S. delegation for accepting recommendation #86. We believe that it is the first instance of affirmation of sex workers‚ rights in this forum.

Due to stigma and criminalization, sex workers — and those profiled as such — are subjected to violence and discrimination, and are often barred from necessary services and the right to equal protection under the law. State agents themselves, specifically police officers, commit physical and sexual violence against sex workers. These abuses are particularly rampant in low income, African-American and immigrant communities and also greatly affect transgender, bisexual, lesbian, and gay people. Globally, U.S. policies, such as the “anti-prostitution pledge,” have negatively affected international HIV/AIDS efforts.

As part of such implementation, it is critical that the government work to systematically involve sex workers in policy decisions that affect them. Specifically, we hope to see the government eliminate federal policies that conflate sex work with human trafficking, investigate and prevent human rights abuses perpetrated by state agents against sex workers, and examine the impact of criminalization on our communities. Protecting the human rights of sex workers is also connected with broader efforts to ensure sexual and reproductive rights and address the problems of the criminal justice system in the U.S.

We are deeply appreciative of the respect for, openness to, and engagement with civil society that the U.S. government has shown throughout this UPR process. We stand ready to work with the administration to implement this recommendation and others.

This first UPR has brought about an unprecedented opportunity for dialogue between government and civil society around issues of human rights. At the close of the United States’ UPR process we face a unique opportunity – a global mandate – to begin implementing human rights principles into policies around sex work and human trafficking. In his concluding statement to the UN on Friday, Harold Koh stated that “this is an ongoing process leading to concrete policy and self conscious change.” We (A broad coalition of sex work activists and researchers in the fields of sexual and reproductive health, human rights, and justice) are excited and prepared to begin implementing these principles into policy.

Useful Links:

Archived video of Darby Hickey’s speech, as well as that of Harold Koh and others available here. http://www.un.org/webcast/unhrc/archive.asp?go=110318#pm2 (UN Human Rights Council, Sixteenth session, at the Palais des Nations in Geneva, Switzerland. 36^th Plenary Meeting, Archived video, Friday 18 March 2011. )

“Human Rights for All”( http://www.humanrightsforall.info/), is the group of organizations and individuals (including myself) who organized on behalf of recommendation #86. Included on this site are primary documents and evidence including: the original UPR report (written by members of Best Practices Policy Project and Desiree Alliance), a policy brief for the US state department, and a call to action with dozens of stakeholder signatures.

To see another recent posts about sex workers and the UPR, see:http://msmagazine.com/blog/blog/2011/03/15/for-sex-workers-recommendation-86-will-go-down-in-history/

i The translation of Uruguay’s recommendation uses the term “transsexuals.” “sexual workers.” In our advocacy response to this recommendation we inserted the terms “transgender people” and “sex workers” which more accurately reflects terms used in the United States.

ii Darby Hickey is a member of the Best Practices Policy Project.

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/sexuality)

Body Size, Sexuality and Girls: Thinking beyond Correlations

Natalie Ingraham — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 23:03:01 +0000

In the midst of public health panic over obesity, a parallel concern about “fat” girls and their sexuality exists. In particular, the question that appears to be on many researchers’ minds these days is: “Are “fat” girls at higher risk of sexual dysfunction or STI/pregnancy risk than girls of average BMI (body mass index)?” One way that researchers have attempted to answer this question is by searching for statistical correlations between BMI, sexual behavior and self-esteem.

Indeed, several recent studies have focused on the relationship between body image or body size and sexual health, with a special concern around girls and women. For example, the authors of a recent study (Bajos et al., 2010) found links between obesity and “adverse sexual health outcomes” for both men and women, noting that obese women were less likely to access family planning, more likely to have unplanned pregnancies and less likely to consider sexuality an important part of their “personal life balance.” In a June 2010 interview for HealthDay News, Bajos went well beyond the reach of his data to make generalized comments about obese women:

“Being obese has a strong influence on people’s sexual life. Because of social pressure or social stigmatization, obese women are less likely to engage in sexual intercourse and more likely to find sexual partners via the Internet. Because of their obesity, they are not comfortable meeting men through friends, through work, through parties.”

In that same interview, Bajos made the assertion (despite any direct evidence from his data) that:

“a lot of these problems are driven by the stigmatization of obese women [because] these women are more likely to have low self-esteem.”

Beyond this particular study, researchers’ focus on female bodies and sexuality even occurs when larger cross-sectional studies survey both men and women about sexuality and sexual pleasure. Typically such studies describe associations between BMI and sexuality factors as measured by sexual attitude or behavior measure (Addofson et al 2004).

While the BMI measure is ubiquitous as an indicator of health, its measurement problems are numerous. For example, BMI does not account for the ratio of muscle and fat in bodies (e.g. why a bodybuilder or elite athlete could be labeled as overweight or obese) nor does it take into account a number of other important factors related to health beyond height and weight including cholesterol levels, blood pressure and family history of diabetes, all things commonly associated with obesity and poorer health (Burkhausera and Cawley, 2008).

Despite concerns over the adequacy of BMI as an indicator of health, BMI continues to be a popular measure in population-based studies of sexuality, sexual health and obesity. Another recent study that garnered press attention was led by Dr. Margaret Villers of Medical University of South Carolina. The study findings (based on data taken from the CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System, a large scale data set that gathers information of youth behaviors ranging from sexual behavior to substance use to violence) were presented at the 2010 ACOG conference in San Francisco under the title “Sexual Behavior in Obese and Overweight Adolescent Females.” The researchers found that overweight and obese girls were more likely to have sex before the age of 13, have three or more sexual partners during their teen years and were less likely to use contraception. Although the findings have yet to be peer reviewed, or published, the results have been taken up by a number of news outlets and sexual health blogs including the Black AIDS Institute and Kinsey Confidential, a sexual health blog from the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction. Eric Grollman, a sociology doctoral student at Indiana University, had this to say about about the Villers study:

Given the link between weight and attractiveness – a societal standard of beauty that favors skinny bodies over fat bodies – some might find the study’s findings surprising: why are heavy girls having more sex with more partners? [In a press release from Dr. Villers' university – see Brazell reference below], Dr. Villers and her fellow researchers provide two possible explanations for the difference in sexual behavior among teen girls: development during puberty and self-esteem. The researchers suggest that overweight and obese girls may begin puberty sooner and thus develop faster, which may put them at risk from more pressure from boyfriends and friends to have sex.

Since Villers’ study has yet to be published, reviewing the findings is a bit of a challenge. But the popularity of the initial report of the study by MSNBC reinforces a number of ideas about sexuality and obesity, and especially about the sexuality of girls and women: early puberty means more sexual activity and/or body shame, which leads to sexual pressure from partners. In the press release from her department at the Medical University of South Carolina, Villers points to the need for conversations about sexuality and safer sex regardless of what “daughters” weigh; at the same time Villers’ work presents a clear message about the dangers of not just female teenage sexuality but in particular of obese female sexuality.

Portrayals of overweight girls and women, both in mainstream media and by many health and sexuality researchers, seem to be making several assumptions. These include perceptions that obese women don’t deserve positive messages about their bodies or that these positive messages can only come from a (male) romantic partner (who is then demonized as pressuring the girl into sex). These messages speak to larger assumptions that obese girls/women are (and perhaps should be?) disempowered in terms of their sexuality.

These simplistic and fat-phobic assumptions point to how research about sexuality is often more productive when it is not limited to simple associations. Instead, qualitative or mixed methods research (where both statistical/survey and open-ended questions are asked of participants) allow for greater understanding of how social context impacts the meanings that girls and women attach to their bodies and their sexual behavior. For example, what kinds of positive or negative messages do overweight or obese girls receive about their bodies from romantic partners, friends, or family? How did those messages make them think about their sexuality, and how do they resist or incorporate these messages into their lives? For that matter, what messages about sexuality or sexual behavior did they receive, and which had the most salience? How did those messages impact their view of their bodies?

While correlational studies will have a continued and important presence in almost all types of research, especially in public health, when the focus is on sexuality or sexual health, perhaps we need to think beyond numbers. In order to better understand how bodies and emotions relate to each other in the context of human sexuality, research about body size and sexuality warrants a more varied approach.

Natalie Ingraham is a doctoral student in sociology at the University of California, San Francisco. She is interested in fat studies, embodiment and human sexuality.

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References and Recommended Readings

Adolfsson, Birgitta , Stig Elofsson, Stephan Rössner and Anna-Lena Undén. 2004. Are Sexual Dissatisfaction and Sexual Abuse Associated with Obesity? A Population-Based Study. Obesity Research, 12, 1702–1709.
Bajos, Nathalie, Kaye Wellings, Caroline Laborde, Caroline Moreau. 2010. Sexuality and obesity, a gender perspective: results from French national random probability survey of sexual behaviours. British Medical Journal, 340:c2573. Accessed online at: http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/abstract/340/jun15_1/c2573
Brazell, Dawn. 2010. “Obese teens more likely to have unsafe sex.” Press release. Accessed March 12, 2011. http://www.musc.edu/catalyst/archive/2010/co6-18teens.html
Burkhausera, Richard V. and John Cawley. 2008. Beyond BMI: The value of more accurate measures of fatness and obesity in social science research. Journal of Health Economics. 27:2, 519-529.
Grollman, Eric. 2010. Plus-Size Girls Are More Likely To Have Sex Early And Unprotected. Kinsey Confidential blog. Accessed at: http://kinseyconfidential.org/plus-size-girls-unprotected-sex-early/
Reinberg, Steven . 2010. Obesity Can Take Toll on Sex Life. HealthDay News. ©2011 HealthDay Accessed at: http://www.healthfinder.gov/news/newsstory.aspx?docID=640149
Rothman, K.J. 2008. “BMI-related errors in the measurement of obesity.” International Journal of Obesity (2008) 32, S56-S59.
Simopoulos, Artemis P. 1986. “Obesity and Body Weight Standards.”American Review of Public Health, 7, 481-92
Villers, Margaret S. . 2010. Sexual Behavior in Obese and Overweight Adolescent Females. Presented at the annual meeting of the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), San Francisco, CA, May 2010.

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/sexuality)

US makes historic move to recognize human rights of sex workers

Kari Lerum — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 19:36:45 +0000

Great news for advocates of sexual health, human rights, and social justice! See my story below (first posted March 15, 2011 at Ms Magazine Blog):

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Recently I blogged about how the United Nations’ Human Rights Council flagged sex worker rights in its periodic review of the United States’ human-rights record. Member state Uruguay recommended that the U.S. “ensure access to public services paying attention to the special vulnerability of sexual workers [sex workers] to violence and human rights abuses.”

Within four months of Uruguay’s recommendation to the U.S., and after a subsequent flurry of advocacy efforts by sex worker activists, researchers, and allies (including me), the State Department has released its response. To each of the 228 Universal Periodic Reviewrecommendations, the State Department replied in one of three ways: “fully support,” “partially support” or “do not support.”

In what is being heralded as a victory for sex workers’ rights, the State Department chose to “fully support” Uruguay’s recommendation, stating: “No one should face violence or discrimination in access to public services based on sexual orientation or their status as a person in prostitution.”

This simple statement marks a potential monumental shift in U.S. policy: a new recognition that anti-trafficking policy alone is not an adequate response to the human rights violations of all sex workers. There is mounting evidence that current anti-trafficking policy ignores (and even exacerbates) human rights violations of adult, consensual sex workers and of people working under coercive or trafficked conditions.

Members of my group, Human Rights For All: Concerned Advocates for the Rights of Sex Workers and People in the Sex Trade (HRA) were ecstatic. “People in the sex trade have been marginalized and stigmatized when seeking public services, including through law enforcement. This is a big step forward to acknowledging sex workers’ human rights,” says Kelli Dorsey, Executive Director of Different Avenues, a group dedicated to reproductive justice by and for girls and women of color.

“We were long overdue for the United States to take the needs of sex workers seriously, particularly the need to stem violence and discrimination,” says attorney Sienna Baskin, Co -Director of the Sex Workers Project at the Urban Justice Center in New York.

On Friday, March 18, sex workers will stage demonstrations in cities across the country to celebrate the adoption of Recommendation #86. For further information on the demonstrations, as well as supporting documents, see the HRA website.

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Links:

K. Lerum, March 15, 2011. For sex workers, recommendation 86 will go down in history. Ms Magazine Blog.
K. Lerum. March 3, 2011. Human Rights for US Sex Workers now on Global Stage. Sexuality and Society.
Human Rights for All: Concerned Advocates for the Rights of Sex Workers and People in the Sex Trade (HRA)

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/sexuality)

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