Off
Decrim
1nc
The United States should decriminalize sacred prostitution.
Competes: Legalizing prostitution requires the creation of a regulatory
system
Donna M. Hughes 4, Professor and Carlson Endowed Chair of the Women’s Studies Program at the
University of Rhode Island, Oct 20 2004, “Women’s Wrongs,”
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/212601/womens-wrongs/donna-m-hughes
At the polling booth this year, Berkeley residents will have a unique voting choice: Yes or no to the decriminalization of prostitution.¶
Decriminalization means the repeal of measures that outlaw prostitution, soliciting, pimping, pandering, and
brothels. Although the vote will take place only in the city of Berkeley, the decriminalization campaign’s ultimate goal is the repeal of California
state laws on prostitution and related offenses.**¶ Decriminalization is a more extreme measure than legalization.
Legalization would mean the regulation of prostitution with laws regarding where, when, and how
prostitution could take place. Decriminalization eliminates all laws and prohibits the state and law-enforcement
officials from intervening in any prostitution-related activities or transactions, unless other laws apply.
Their performance isn’t exclusive with decrim
I am godless, and I am the one whose God is great. I am the one whom you have reflected upon, and you
have scorned me. I am unlearned, and they learn from me. I am the one that you have despised, and you
reflect upon me.
The discourse of legalizing prostitution coopts struggle for justice for sex
workers into a system of regulatory oppression
Jane Scoular 10, Professor of Law at University of Strathclyde, March 2010, “What's Law Got To Do
With it? How and Why Law Matters in the Regulation of Sex Work,” Journal of Law and Society, Vol. 37,
No. 1, Wiley Online, Accessed 9/10/14
Despite being heralded as a `renewed welfare approach', which in any event is not necessarily benign, as my previous work with Maggie O'Neill94 points out,
contemporary forms of governance operate through these techniques of responsibilization. Techniques of `exiting'
women from prostitution must be viewed in the wider context of neo-liberalism in which welfare states, including the much renowned Swedish system, are retracting and being
leading to increasing conditionality in citizenship and penality for those who
cannot meet their terms/manage risks. In this context social exclusion is not tackled by structural change but via individual re-education, re-training, and entry
replaced by systems of private insurance, thus
into legitimate economies and relationships. By prioritizing `exiting' as a means of facilitating social inclusion rather than offering recognition, rights or redistribution to sex
workers as a group, abolitionist systems promote forms of self-governance which require active citizens to self-regulate according to the norms of the family and the market.
Those who act responsibly by adopting appropriate lifestyles via work and norms of sexuality are offered inclusion, those who do not or cannot and instead remain in sex work
(which retains its criminal label) are further excluded, having failed to meet the increasingly normalized terms of citizenship in late-capitalist societies.¶ The increased focus on
male clients involves the promotion of similar individuating modes of governance. Despite the rhetoric of gender equality, the increased punitiveness towards (some) purchasers
represents no more than the shifting of the `whore stigma' to a new deviant group. Responsibility becomes increasingly narrowed to client motives and individual sexual ethics,
which are pathologized rather than explained in relation to their historical specificity and to the social and economic institutions that themselves structure the relations of
gender domination.95 When action is taken through criminalization, or via the quasi-legal forums of john schools and name-and-shame campaigns, it typically operates on `a
lower-tier of male heterosexual practices' or to `re-gender sexual stigma in certain middle class fractions',96 leaving the more mainstream corporate and private market
regulation ism in the Netherlands encourages similar forms of self-governance and produces analogous exclusions. Research
legalized systems create a two-tiered (if not more) industry, as the costs and norms of compliance are
too onerous for most individuals and small brothel owners to bear. Thus, it overwhelmingly favours
profitable sex businesses which, as Brents and Hausbeck note, can now hardly be described as `other' to late-capitalist
industries.97¶ Alongside this, the system of licensing encourages workers to self regulate98 their behaviour in the interests of
public health promotion, to conform to certain modes of working in order to meet the conditions of registration.
Inclusion is offered to those who `can perform the rituals of middle class society'99 with all of the typical
exclusions based on age, status, race, health, and class that this entails. This point is well illustrated in an advert which followed the
untouched.¶ The system of
suggests that
decriminalization of brothels in New South Wales:¶ . . . tall, blonde and stylish, she recently completed her tertiary marketing course and is looking for employment in the field . .
This `ideal' typifies the rational subjects encouraged by these
as law operates alongside practices, such as public health, to create and maintain what Scott calls a `responsible prostitution population'.101
The low take-up rate in the Netherlands indicates that very few can conform to this responsibilized model, meaning that while licensing can offer some
increased improvement in the working conditions for a small section of workers, it also operates to identify
and exclude those who cannot meet the increasingly conditional nature of citizenship, for example, migrants, the
underage, and drug-users, all of whom are not incorporated within the framework of regulatory protection.¶ Thus in both systems, the moral
engineering of advanced liberal governance has co-opted feminist concerns into techniques of governance
and control. Whether based on a recognition of sex workers' inherent agency or victimhood, social exclusion is being used as leverage for
increased control rather than for increased social justice. Empowerment simply operates to sanction
. She provides her own condoms . . . and comes complete with a medical certificate.100¶
processes,
forms of self-governance that support neo-liberal interests. As Cruikshank notes, the recent proliferation of state-sponsored programmes
of empowerment must be treated with critical caution, as even while they are utilizing the vocabulary of radical politics, their promise of emancipation may be merely rhetorical
as they `endeavour to operationalise the self-governing capacity of the governed in the pursuit of governmental objectives'.102 Yet what both processes do well is to identify
those who cannot perform, rendering them vulnerable to exclusion or banishment.
Legal regimes for sex work require licensing and zoning---these
mechanisms will be used to police Others
Jane Scoular 10, Professor of Law at University of Strathclyde, March 2010, “What's Law Got To Do
With it? How and Why Law Matters in the Regulation of Sex Work,” Journal of Law and Society, Vol. 37,
No. 1, Wiley Online, Accessed 9/10/14
HOW LAW MATTERS¶ 1. Norms¶ By examining what law is doing in both cases, it becomes apparent that despite the difference in
rhetoric, legal strategies for the governance of sex work share a number of similarities in terms of their regulatory ambitions.
Empirical evidence points to two parallel processes in which prostitution becomes a target for the state's
wider efforts to responsibilize citizens, while simultaneously maintaining spaces for the operation of the
capitalist economy. Processes of licensing and exiting operate to normalize particular forms of citizenship
and sexual activity which enhance a broader structure of consumption, rendering deviant those who
cannot through poverty, race, immigration status or health meet these increasingly restricted norms of
citizenship, and marginalizing unproductive spaces. As Bernstein notes:¶ both the state policing of the street-level sex
trade and the normalization of other forms of commercial sex business reveal a shared set of underlying
economic and cultural interests; the excision of class and racial Others from gentrifying inner cities, the
facilitation of the post-industrial service sector, and the creation of clean and shiny urban spaces in which
middle-class men can safely indulge in recreational commercial sexual consumption.86¶ This normative
order is established not through law as such but via a continuum of regulatory mechanisms of which it forms part.
Law has no privilege in this system but it does play a vital role in authorizing other forms of knowledge, helping
to shape content, and empowering a much wider group of regulatory agents in exercising more diffuse forms of
power. ¶ 2. Authorizations¶ Examining the extended forms of governance operating in this area may enlighten us more about what
law is doing than the statute book. Thus, in the context of Sweden and the Netherlands, despite differences at a sovereign level in
prostitution policy, law authorizes and operates though a number of quasi-legal forums (john schools, exiting programmes,
rehabilitation schemes, and licensing boards) and techniques (anti-social behaviour orders, fines, rehabilitation orders, licenses) in
which an extended group of regulatory agents exercise normalizing power: `all the little judges of conduct [who]
exercise their petty powers of adjudication and enforcement'87 in what Valverde and Rose call `the bureaucratic workings of
our over-governed existence'.88 These forums feature a hybridization of legal and non-legal authority. The
state's role appears to recede but it may actually be augmented by a wider range of control mechanisms and
forms of professional intervention that may be even more pervasive than the previous systems.¶ Licensing
decision making is devolved to a wider group, yet operates to reaffirm the dividing lines between legitimate and
illegitimate forms of commercial sex. Indeed, it may be more useful than direct control as delegated authority refines law
more minutely in response to shifting realities on the ground and employs a wider group of authorities in its realization. This
ensures that the wider structures of governmentality fit with local conditions while appearing to comply
with the liberal objection to state interference. Thus, in the case of the Netherlands, while street sex work has not been
outlawed it has been made more and more difficult, as a number of municipalities in closing their tippelzones have dispensed with
their previous assumed duties to provide safe places for street sex work. Similarly the economic and racial segregation
apparent in indoor settings appears distant and accidental as it is effected by powers exercised by diverse
groups. In Sweden decriminalization premised on exiting may actually signal a wider range of control mechanisms and forms of
professional intervention which are even more pervasive than the previous system of fines. Thus, the apparent increased
`protection' promised by reforms results in the increased policing of many women's lives.89¶ 3.
Subjectifications¶ There is a question which is essential in the Modern Tribunal, but which would have had a strange ring to it 150
years [ago]: `Who are You?'90¶ Foucault's observation in The Dangerous Individual is that law in normalizing societies is
increasingly concerned with lives rather than with acts. This is evident in the current preoccupation with particular
subjects and spaces of sex work and the operationalizing of forms of governance to save, empower,
responsibilize, and ethically reconstruct individuals – all testament to law's increasing normalizing
ambitions as it acts alongside other discourses to construct `the fabric of the modern subject'.91 In doing so it
operates not ideologically, as there is always resistance, nor through the simple imputation of legal consciousness,92 but through a
process of subjectification, encouraging self-projects in ways that align with the diverse objectives of legislation.93 Thus, if we
examine the continuities in the projects of self-governance promoted in each jurisdiction, we begin to see that the commonly
accepted opposition between victim and agent may not be as marked when viewed through a governmental lens. Thus, through
parallel forms of subjectification, both licensing and exiting operate to encourage subjects to perform as `self-
governing, rational actors' required by the wider context of neo-liberalism and to identify those who
cannot self-manage or who resist normalization in order that they be excluded.
Legalization results in an OVERLY RESTRICTIVE regulatory regime –
causes increased underground & legal prostitution – this two tier system
turns case
Jordan 5 (Jan, Institute of Criminology Victoria University of Wellington, “The Sex Industry in New
Zealand: A Literature Review”)
Legalisation: Victoria, Queensland and Western Australia¶ The state of Victoria has long
been referred to as a classic
example of a legalised model . The Prostitution Regulation Act 1986 introduced the possibility of legal work within the sex
industry. Sex workers could work legally from their homes or from parlours and escort agencies as long as
the business obtained a planning permit from the local council (Sullivan, 1999). However, since many
councils were reluctant to sanction prostitution as a business, such permits were difficult to obtain.¶ In
1994 new prostitution laws were introduced in Victoria that increased the penalties associated with illegal
prostitution, especially street work. The Prostitution Control Act 1994 sought to actively involve the police in the regulation
of the brothel industry. A regulatory framework was established requiring all ‘prostitution service providers’ to
be licensed, with applicants having to pay high licence fees and undergo rigorous police scrutiny in
addition to holding a valid council planning permit for their establishment (Arnot, 2002; Sullivan, 1999).¶ The
planning controls determined under the Planning and Environment Act 1997 include requirements that sex establishments must not
be located near schools, churches or other areas where children congregate, ensure their exclusion from residential areas, and limit
the size of brothels to a maximum of six rooms (Sullivan, 1999). In an attempt to prevent organised crime, as well as
having to be licensed, brothel owners in Victoria are each restricted to the operation of one brothel venue.
The licensing system comprises a range of permits and licences for brothels, operators, and workers, with
Section 15 of the Act stating that simply being in, entering or leaving an unlicensed brothel without a
lawful excuse is an offence (Smith, 1999).¶ Concern has been expressed that Victoria’s system of legalised
prostitution has resulted in a split, two-tiered sex industry evolving, with a tightly controlled legal sector
operating alongside a large and often vulnerable illegal sector (Dobinson, 1992, cited in Sullivan, 1999).¶ Thus one
group of workers hold positions in the state-approved brothels, often claiming that they work in virtual
slave-like conditions for the privilege of being ‘state approved’ . Those who cannot obtain employment in
the licensed brothels work instead in the illicit underground sex industry where their insecure legal status
renders them vulnerable to exploitation, harassment and organised crime (Arnot, 2002).¶ Both the legal and
illegal sectors are said to have expanded since the legislation’s introduction, with the real growth
occurring in the illegal sector , which now outnumbers legitimate sex businesses (Arnot, 2002; Sullivan, 1999).
In December 1998 there were 82 licensed brothels in Victoria (79 of which were in Melbourne), as well as five ‘exempt’ brothels (solo
or twoperson establishments that were exempt from the licensing requirements but still needed town planning permits (Sullivan,
1999)). The number of unlicensed premises was unknown but believed to be considerable. Hence Sullivan argues that:¶ The cost
and legal scrutiny involved in the licensing process means that many (perhaps a majority) of prostitution
businesses in Victoria remain illegal. (Sullivan, 1999, 10).¶ Concern has been expressed that the legalisation process
has been accompanied by a proliferation of different forms of sex businesses all seeking to meet clients’
demands for more explicit and alternative commercial sexual services (Sullivan, 1999). Rather than resulting
in sex workers in Victoria being empowered by law reform initiatives , it is argued that, despite the legislation
seeking to limit this, large-scale sex industrialists now control the legal industry (ibid.). Women working in
legal brothels may be forced to hand over 50-60% of their takings to managers and operators, while
women who want to work from home or smaller cottage-type settings are forced into industrial or
docklands areas if they want to work legally . Such environments bring increased risks of violence and
isolation and work against health and safety concerns.¶ The Queensland Prostitution Act 1999 seeks to
regulate prostitution by a brothel licensing system and town planning controls . Recent criticisms have been
made suggesting that the tight regulatory framework has left most brothels operating illegally and put the lives
of street workers at risk. One of the only 12 licensed brothel owners commented:¶ We’ve been pushed into industrial areas and
hidden, we’re paying $20,000 a year for our licence before we can even open the doors, we’re fingerprinted and interrogated, we
have trouble getting workers because we can’t advertise and they’re (the Government) in our faces all the time. (The Courier-Mail,
2003, quoted in Smith, 2003, 21).
Aff Should Defend Plan
this is a mix of cards from 2nc/1nr
Vote neg on presumption---failure to specify policy details kills debate and
guarantees the plan’s manipulated beyond recognition by bureaucracy--they can’t fiat bureaucratic mindset change
Gary Galles 9, Professor of Economics at Pepperdine, Vagueness as a Political Strategy, March 2,
http://blog.mises.org/archives/author/gary_galles/
The problem with such vagueness is that any informed public policy decision has to be based on specific proposals.
Absent concrete details, which is where the devil lurks, no one--including those proposing a "reform"--can judge
how it would fare or falter in the real world. So when the President wants approval for a proposal which offers too few details for
evaluation, we must ask why. Like private sector salesmen, politicians strive to present their wares as attractively as possible. Unlike them, however, a
politician's product line consists of claimed consequences of proposals not yet enacted. Further, politicians
are unconstrained by truth
in advertising laws, which would require that claims be more than misleading half-truths; they have fewer competitors keeping them honest;
and they face "customers"--voters-- far more ignorant about the merchandise involved than those spending their own money. These differences
from the private sector explain why politicians' "sales pitches" for their proposals are so vague. However, if vague
proposals are the best politicians can offer, they are inadequate. If rhetoric is unmatched by specifics, there is no
reason to believe a policy change will be an improvement , because no reliable way exists to determine
whether it will actually accomplish what is promised. Only the details will determine the actual incentives
facing the decision-makers involved, which is the only way to forecast the results, including the myriad of
unintended consequences from unnoticed aspects. We must remember that, however laudable, goals and promises and
claims of cost-effectiveness that are inconsistent with the incentives created will go unmet. It may be that President Obama
knows too little of his "solution" to provide specific plans. If so, he knows too little to deliver on his promises. Achieving intended goals
then necessarily depends on blind faith that Obama and a panoply of bureaucrats, legislators, overseers and
commissions will somehow adequately grasp the entire situation, know precisely what to do about it, and
do it right (and that the result will not be too painful, however serious the problem)--a prospect that, due to the painful lessons
of history, attracts few real believers. Alternatively, President Obama may know the details of what he intends, but is not providing
them to the public. But if it is necessary to conceal a plan's details to put the best possible public face on it, those
details must be adverse. If they made a more persuasive sales pitch, a politician would not hide actual details. They would be trumpeted at
every opportunity, proving to a skeptical public he really had the answers, since concealing rather than revealing pays only when better informed
Claiming adherence to elevated principles, but keeping detailed
proposals from sight, also has a strategic advantage. It defuses critics. Absent details, any criticism can
be parried by saying "that was not in our proposal " or "we have no plans to do that " or other rhetorical
devices. It also allows a candidate to incorporate alternatives proposed as part of his evolving reform, as if
it was his idea all along. The new administration has already put vague proposals on prominent display.
However, adequate analysis cannot rest upon such flimsy foundations. That requires the nuts and bolts so
citizens would be more inclined to reject a plan.
glaringly absent. In the private sector, people don't spend their own money on such vague promises of unseen products. It is foolhardy to act any
differently when political salesmen withhold specifics, because political
incentives guarantee that people would object to
what is kept hidden. So while vagueness may be good political strategy, it virtually ensures bad policy , if
Americans' welfare is the criterion.
Reject the aff’s aspirational view of how the plan will be implemented--their politics is unethical if it fails to account for the lived realities in which
prostitution occurs---they can’t just wish this away
Z Al-Mwajeh 5, Indiana University of Pennsylvania The School of Graduate Studies and Research
Department of English, CRITIQUE OF POSTMODERN ETHICS OF ALTERITY VERSUS EMBODIED
(MUSLIM) OTHERS, https://dspace.iup.edu/bitstream/handle/2069/23/Ziad%20AlMwajeh.pdf?sequence=1
However, I also think that key postmodernism tenets of radical alterity, incommensurability and undecidability
cannot be easily thematized in writing, nor can they be realized in praxis . They are aporiatic. The only way to explicate their
meanings and possibilities is through using modernist vocabulary they initially oppose and deconstruct.
Sometimes, thematizing these aporiatic concepts, one lapses into cryptic and even incantational figurative
language , a practice that exposes the practical limitation and limited accessibility of such cherished
concepts (or non-concepts). As a result, their translation into, or coextension with, lived realities become
basically hypothetical, too. Consequently, the abstract and idealized postmodern concepts verge on, and intersect
with, mystic, (sometimes Biblical) allusions and traditions, a situation that problematizes their political value and
descriptive power in the realm of action . For example, in Levinasian thought, knowing the other is incompatible with preserving its
alterity. All representational endeavors reduce, or fail to capture, what they supposedly represent not only due to imperfect linguistic mediums, but also
due to the fact that representation itself is a logocentric institution. It represents the other or the object from the perspective of the Same, usually a
priori reducing its uniqueness or sublimity to the known, quantifiable and predictable. To curb such modernist reductive practices, Levinas’s alterity
escapes all modernist categories as it is an Other not in a relational or quantifiable way. Rather, it is an Other
in the sense of eliding comprehension and representation. Such Other resembles Levinas’s (Biblical) conception of God as
absolute Alterity where our epistemological categories or mind cannot contain or represent Him. More important, the ethics of alterity
usually soars above urgent concrete issues that involve politically and economically charged self-other
transactions. Levinas’s other is ‘disembodied,’ not in Dr. Laing’s sense (e.g. The Divided Self). Rather, Levinas’s alterity
cannot be substantiated. Defining or embodying the other violates its alterity and sublimity. Hence, any
grand appeal such ethics may initially spark becomes questionable when juxtaposed to our existing
realities and the factors that regulate self/other different modes of relations. 6¶ Statement of the Problem, Limitations
of the Study and Methods ¶ In this study, I attempt to dislodge postmodern ethics from its speculative and elitist tendencies through turning to selfother ethical relations in various literary, discursive and political situations. I focus on bridging the gaps between theory and practice in order to expose
the rifts and blind spots in postmodern ethics of alterity. I think that the demands that ‘alterity’ as a generalized abstract term exert differ from those
raised by placed and temporalized others. For example, there
is an urgent need to know how well Levinas’s concept of ‘absolute
alterity’ or Derrida’s concept of ‘undecidability’ fares in political situations . In other words, to argue for prioritizing
alterity as a new ethical turn is not the same as to motivate and effect such prioritization . While I agree
that Levinas’s “infinite obligation to the other” sounds uplifting, realizing/effecting such a formula is a
different story. Theoretically speaking, alterity is embraceable, but in lived realities, others fall on a
spectrum of difference (sometimes opposition) from self according to various criteria. Actually, there is a
general tendency to posit self and others in terms of difference and opposition, when in fact these are
relative and operational terms. Polarizing self and other risks ossifying them into rigid negatively defining
entities at the expense of their interdependence and mutual constitution. The terms other and self do not
only designate metaphysical figures or linguistic relations, they also describe ontological realities. The
metaphor of the ‘embrace’ may in it turn conceal a whole repertoire of idealism, philanthropy, and
logocentrism/humanism. Worse, sometimes Levinasian ethics seems so good to be true or realizable, at least if taken literally. For the
demand to meet the other on a neutral ground, pre-ontologically, looks more like an aesthetic
ideal/condition that cannot be achieved as we always meet the other in context with our conceptions,
motivations and values. Blaming Western Metaphysics, or ontology, for the imbalanced self-other
relations somehow brackets subject’s role and agency in the self-other various equations. 7 ¶ Moreover, we
may indulge alterity ethics in closed and limited contexts that favor our train of thought and take that for a sufficient action.
We may embrace the other or theorize about embracing and preserving alterity as ethics per se, but we may still live
according to dialectical ‘alterity-blind’ institutions and practices. In such cases, we are either, consciously or
subconsciously, acknowledging and maintaining theory/practice divisions, or we know that acting ethically toward
the other entails more than theorizing about what form the most ethical relation should take. Acting
ethically demands sharing power and taking risks. More problematically, the theoretical formulas may
not function in the first place as the roots of ‘unethical’ self-other relations cannot be automatically
corrected by theoretically replacing modernist self-centered by alterity-centered ethics. ¶ Furthermore, most of
the writings about postmodernism—engage strenuous debates and often deploy elitist jargon, a practice that limits their accessibility and descriptive
value. Very often philosophical
and theoretical elitist debates alienate larger audiences and may even thrive at
the expense of addressing concrete self-other transactions. To a certain degree, these debates are inflated and
divorced from the stakes involved in political self-other lived transactions. Once one crosses the
threshold of speculating about self-other relations into considering them in light of indispensable
concrete constituencies of race, gender, nationality, power grid, and other variables, cherished
postmodern key terms—such as undecidability, alterity, and non-judgmentalism—become anomalous .
Hard lived realities demand resolutions and involve recalcitrant stakes. To solely dwell on the
linguistic/discursive as the origin of self/other imbalance is to overlook the complex and intricate relations
among discourses and actions. To put it differently, there has to be some mutual trafficking between
metaphysics and lived realities, but one cannot be reduced to the other in any straight predictable
manner . Nor are their relations reducible to cause-effect ones where Western Metaphysics’ privileging the
subject and reducing the other/object is the causer, while racism, sexism, and colonial exploitation are the
effects. This does not deny that there exists a ‘cause-effect’ relation between thought and lived realities, however.
The aff’s critique can’t directly translate into transforming the conditions
that produce fixing the motivations and pressures that result in coercion--their failure to account for the context in and ways in which prostitution
will be implemented proves their method fails and is an independent
reason to vote neg
Z Al-Mwajeh 5, Indiana University of Pennsylvania The School of Graduate Studies and Research
Department of English, CRITIQUE OF POSTMODERN ETHICS OF ALTERITY VERSUS EMBODIED
(MUSLIM) OTHERS, https://dspace.iup.edu/bitstream/handle/2069/23/Ziad%20AlMwajeh.pdf?sequence=1
However, alterity-oriented postmodernism can be described as idealistic in a Platonic sense . Plato’s “Myth of the Cave”
enacts a dialectical ascension or progress toward an ideal republic governed by reason. Plato’s world of matter is preceded and to some extent
controlled by the world of ideas, or by the Logos. Postmodern alterity seems to submit to the Platonic idea-matter dialectics. Thus, the
postmodernists critique metaphysical, linguistic, or symbolic superstructural systems as if fixing the idea
translates into fixing praxis . One implicit assumption is that knowledge translates into ethics. In other words, it
seems that postmodernists do not only consider man ‘good,’ but also assume that the moment one is enlightened about the
good, he/she will automatically choose it by virtue of its being good. I am not particularly opposed to such idealism. On the
contrary, the problem with such idealism is that it underestimates political and economic contexts, pressures,
motivations , and even the desire for power regardless of the consequences, sometimes. Postmodern thought
does not problematize the passage from metaphysics or the moment of knowledge into action. It seems
that the moment we know that our metaphysical or epistemological foundations are other-unfriendly
automatically translates into abandoning those ways in favor of more just arrangements such as alterity
ethics. Thus, postmodernists retain Platonic residues whenever they assume that self-other enduring
conflicts are primarily caused by ideational or metaphysical systems. They, too, become idealists whenever
they do not problematize the assumption that the world of ideas precedes the world of matter—almost in a
causal manner—or whenever they assume their automatic translatability as if fixing the philosophical or
epistemological system would automatically fix the institutions and practices that stem from them . 3
In other words, postmodern thinking remains ‘abstract’ and ‘idealized’ by assuming that correcting metaphysical
wrongs will guarantee a better world in the realm of matter, or that the realm of matter can be corrected
at the realm of ideas. Moreover, we usually equate utopian thinking with wishful, yet “impractical,” proposals. Sometimes, however, postmodernism suggests a
dystopia, whenever it is associated with the loss of a community based on justice and satisfaction.4 Such loss is usually attributed to different factors such as technological,
capitalist-consumerist developments (Jameson; Baudrillard; Guy Debord). Conservative critics also voice their dissatisfaction with any ‘identity-politics’ postmodernism that
compromises academic protocols and research methods by replacing them with personal, experiential, racial, gendered, and any other minority distinctive constituency. That is,
it is no longer a question of whether what one says submits to academic and logical standards of conviction and verification as much as it is a matter of “who” says it that makes
the difference (Jeffery Wallen’s Closed Encounters highlights such issues). Even minority and non-conservative critics such as Rey Chow sound uneasy toward making race,
gender, and sexual orientation a priori authoritative positions. In Ethics after Idealism, she shows that the desire to do justice to minority voices can be abused by both parties,
mainstream and minority subjects. I think what she is uneasy about is postmodern performativity. Minority and mainstream, although they have valuable and referential
descriptive values, can be performed and played out. In academia, being a female or coming from a previously colonized region invests the person with powers and rights,
sometimes at the expense of critical and academic norms.5
It’s counterproductive to divert our focus from the likely consequences of
the plan’s enactment---the aff overstates the transformative potential of
their critique
Z Al-Mwajeh 5, Indiana University of Pennsylvania The School of Graduate Studies and Research
Department of English, CRITIQUE OF POSTMODERN ETHICS OF ALTERITY VERSUS EMBODIED
(MUSLIM) OTHERS, https://dspace.iup.edu/bitstream/handle/2069/23/Ziad%20AlMwajeh.pdf?sequence=1
It is due to all of the above problems that beset postmodern alterity that I used the phrase “alterity hypothesis.” Granting alterity a hypothetical status
necessitates testing its internal (in) consistencies, yet more crucially, its workability and consequences. Moreover the ethical claims made in the name
of alterity are very often confined to theoretical/philosophical categories and debates leaving much needed work of translation into lived realities. This,
too, makes alterity ethics hypothetical—it may or may not be realizable. ‘Hypothetical’ also intersects with ‘theoretical’ as characteristically an abstract
and speculative genre with a utopian function. The phrase “alterity hypothesis” also better denotes the state of controversy and debate surrounding
postmodernism and its potential ethical claims. Critics, in principle, seem to valorize alterity, at least on the philosophical/theoretical level; moreover,
the causes/claims of others (minorities, nature, and the colonized) populate academic and public discourses, as well. To
a large extent, doing
justice to alterity may be more realizable and palatable in textual settings; it may not change the political
and economical conditions of lived realities. The discursive and textual are coextensive with lived realities,
but their stakes—what can be done and achieved within their parameters—differ from those involved in
everyday life matters, whether domestic or international. Sometimes, the concern for alterity can become a rhetorical means to
appropriate and utilize the cause of the others. Discursive practices can be so divorced from intention and consequent
actions.
Moreover, there are some blatant gaps between alterity ethics as theorized and prescribed and as possibly carried out and implemented. The alterity
hypothesis would have had radically tangible effects on our everyday lived realities, had it been translated into practices. In fact, a
haunting gap
exists between an ethics that prioritizes alterity (the different, underprivileged, usually exploited and
underrated others) over identity (the principle of the Same, egocentrism, or mainstream subjectivity),
casting ample doubt upon the very possibility and attainability of such ethics. Here too, the undertones of
“hypothetical” come to play: one may detect a deep-seated idealism/utopianism underpinning the desire to deal
justly with the others and redress wrongs done to them. But one may also discern diversionary mental
labor that may , in fact, be sidestepping ethical issues through the ideal of alterity ethics . Alterity and other
related words can become fetished buzzwords as long as they are a priori co-opted in a consumerist
system. Actually, there are many interpretations for the rise of such ethics at a time when consumerism,
globalism, fundamentalism, exploitation, genocide, simulation and narcissism proliferate. Once again, one may
ask: “Does the escalation of violence, or the persistence and intensification of exploitative unjust relations with others, make postmodern alterity ethics
irrelevant? Or does it make the need to adopt postmodern ethics of alterity more urgent than any other time ever?
Besides, alterity
ethics remains hypothetical in the sense that very little has been done to test whether it can
solve conflicts involving self/other, subject/object, or colonizer (oppressor)/colonized (oppressed) parties.
The problematic can be reworded differently: does an ethical system based on unbounded commitment to otherness work? Does it create just relations
and prevent violence? Or is it problematic since it does not explain why people, particularly those who are privileged, would adhere to such ethics, when
it entails removing their privileges and curtailing their powers? Consequently, the
descriptive as well as the
prescriptive/constrictive potential of this ethical model are also questionable. It does not describe real
ethical practices taking place. Nor does it have any prescriptive legal power to substantiate such ethics
other than the vague idealistic assumption of human goodness.
AT Performance/Vote for Our Knowledge
focus on privilege/individual manifestations of gender violence obscures
structural sources of oppression---the aff has no means by which to
translate their theory into politics
K Miriam 10, radical feminist/lesbian theorist, independent scholar to date, former academic, Hit me
with your privilege stick!, kmiriam.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/hit-me-with-your-privilege-stick/
Understandably this comment was ignored by sister-privie-pushers who do fancy themselves as fighters of patriarchy. However, the above statement
about patriarchy points to a common, if implicit, thread in the whole privie-pushing business. The notion of Patriarchy lacks reality for the privie-
pushers who, for radical feminists, display a curious blindness to the nature of oppression as structural
(institutional, systemic). The privilege-pushers have a view of structure (thus of patriarchy) that is so
vague that some of them dismiss the notion of a structural view of oppression as at best, academic bullshit, and at
worst, a way for an individual to dodge examination of her own privilege. Oppression for them is most vivid,
and perhaps only apparent, as it lives in individual behaviors. To them, this behavior—and thus
oppression itself—is primarily defined by two choices: conform or dissent to “patriarchy.” I put patriarchy in
quotes because “patriarchy” functions for them as more of a prop against which to measure an individual’s degree of conformity or dissent, rather than
as a systemic set of forces and barriers (M. Frye, “Oppression”) which structure (organize, shape, mold, pattern) relations between individuals.
Sometimes structural is called “institutional,” but it is deeper than that.
Thus armed with their behavioral notion of oppression, the privilege-pushers feel no sense of cognitive dissonance when claiming
that anorexic women are oppressors of fat women. Anorexic women—women in the throes of self-starvation to the point of (often) death—are
understood as willful conformists above and beyond anything else. Anorexia is a sub-category of those with “femininity-privilege,” namely those who
conform to patriarchy through their choice of individual dress, adornment, style, etc. And “femininity-privilege,” according to the privie-pushers,
directly oppresses butches (as well as fat women).
When looking for any idea of change in the privie-pusher discourse one can only come up with a 12-steppy (although in
admit you have a privilege and second, confess to everyone whom you
might affect with this privilege. Third—well this is unclear. One of the privie-pushers advocates that femme lesbians dress as
this case three-steppy) process: First,
neutrally as possible so as to protect butch women in “the community.” It’s not as clear as to what counsel they would offer to anorexic women. Maybe,
“Just say yes–to peanut butter!” ??
“Every woman’s privilege is at another woman’s expense”
The above line is a favored privie-pusher refrain. There is the deceptive appearance in here of some sense of collective responsibility. Indeed we
are all responsible for one another (and I mean not only all women, but all humans, and as humans, we are
responsible for animals and the non-human world as well), and this is the reality hidden by the atomized individualism of
capitalist-patriarchy. But the privilege-pushers actually mirror rather than challenge this individualism in
their notion of accountability and thus obfuscate collective responsibility. This is because for them (and I have
heard this voiced explicitly) “collective” means that individual women, one by one, “own up” to their privilege, and the idea is
that somehow if enough of us did this, presto, power relations between women would change. This just seems
like common sense to them—again like the air we breathe. The problem is that the view assumes that individual behavior
exists in a social vacuum—there is no social context for their notion of an individual. Instead there is a default notion that
individual change exists in the application of something like feminist principles from text-books (or blogs) to
everyday life. Needless to say, or it should be needless, this has never proved a particularly effective means for real change
at individual or collective levels .
For the privie-pushers, the individual and privilege itself is an entity, a sack of goodies, to be emptied or filled
(ohhh… nooo.. Peggy McIntosh, look what you wrought!). What is striking is the fact there is very little about their notion of
“privilege” that differs from the capitalist notion of “(self)interest.” To them all women and/or lesbians are atomized selfinterested individuals clashing against other self-interested individuals in a bumper-car like game of “community.” Thus femininity is no longer
understood as the way women are structured (marked and molded into) as feminine subjects but as a form of self-interest. “Got femininity?” If so, your
sack of interests are colliding with and subtracting from the sacks of women who have less of it—to them butches epitomize such a femininitydisadvantaged group of individuals.
Oppression is a zero-sum game in which there is a scarcity of resources (privileges) for all women. Is it odd that this is exactly the picture of women–as
already always competitive with one another–as engaged in an eternal cat-fight–offered by patriarchal ideology? This is
precisely the view of
obfuscates and thwarts collective responsibility . What is collective responsibility?: I will go into detail in
another post, but to abbreviate, it means that we look at the ways that oppression binds women together in both positive and destructive ways
and thus accordingly, align and ally ourselves with struggles that fight patriarchy as a comprehensive system
involving class, race and other social relations of exploitation and domination.
women that
Of course the issue of struggle is highly complex.. so to repeat, stay
tuned, or put in your own comments!
Got femininity? A personal anecdote about “femininity privilege”
The recent debacle did have the value of prompting me to reflect upon an unpleasant experience I had several years ago in the company of two thin straight women, and one straight man, all my friends. It was in Berkeley in 1999, and I had been looking forward to
the dinner all day. The two women, one of whom was in a couple with the man, were women of strong intellect, quick witted, and feminist. The man was one of my closest friends at the time, a graduate student colleague. I’ll call him Nigel (with a nod to the Aussies’
version of Tom, Dick or Harry), and the women, Lorraine and Suzanne. We were barely seated at our table in a low-lit Italian place when Lorraine and Suzanne began chatting about starting up a gym habit, and suddenly commenting on how out of shape they were,
Lorraine who is rail-thin not just thin, mocking her own supposedly flabby behind (I believe “cottage-cheese” was the metaphor du jour for her rump). Already sinking in disappointment—sinking on my comparably ample behind–another blow was yet in store.
Suzanne (the woman who was not Nigel’s girlfriend but who had harbored a long-time crush on Nigel) started doing the fluttering-girl thing. She was flirting, high-talking, giggling, and batting eyelashes, her attention entirely fixed on Nigel. I was almost crushed to
see this new friend and wonderful woman ignore me (and Lorraine) and just crumple into someone I could hardly recognize. The evening for me was ruined—not helped by the fact that the two skinny gals also ordered something ridiculously austere—salads–for
dinner while I defiantly ordered pasta of some sort. At the time I think that I attributed the pang of alienation and rejection to the behaviors of the two women: I felt that they had blithely discussed themselves as “fat” in the presence of a woman who was not thin,
and of course, had indulged typical hetero-feminine behavior in the presence of a lesbian. The privilege-pushers might call them “oppressive” towards me.
Talking this over with my friend Nancy Meyer, a few points became crystal clear and enabled me to see even more clearly into the deceptions of the privilege-pushing discourse. First of all, my feelings about my own body were distorted by the same ideals that
filtered these other women’s perceptions of themselves. Although not “thin” I was not in the least fat. More importantly, my experience was that of being devalued in a competition that all of us suffered from believing in. Here I was taking the competition for
granted; naturalizing it. Although I was legitimately disappointed in these supposedly feminist women’s failure to critically reflect on this basic ideology about “body image,” the failure was not “oppressive” just alienating. And the source of th e alienation was the
ideology, not the two women’s behavior, ultimately. Most importantly of all, I had failed to scrutinize the main beneficiary of all this. Yes, that’s right, it was Nigel all along! Regardless of his own intentions—whatever they were—he was certainly magnified by that
magic mirror of feminine attention to men that Virginia Woolf talks about. It was not only Lorraine’s doting glances, but the specter of women’s self-scrutiny that magnified his subject-position as the One empowered as the ultimate dispenser of approval of female
bodies, and recipient of the pleasures gleaned from the system marking women as objects of male desire.
Here I was in 2010, re-discovering feminism 101! It is patently clear to me now how it is the Id-entity of privilege-pushing—where each privilege hardens into its own Id-entity category, and every individual has one of these Id-entities—that obfuscates such basic
feminist insights into the source of horizontal female hostility. And look who gets off the hook.
The main contradiction: Having your choice and eating it too?
Radical feminism is critical of the notion of individual choice when used by postmodern queer sex-positives to justify prostitution, pornography and pole-dancing and so forth as a matter of individual empowerment and agency. It is critical of the postmodern
positive affirmation that gender is something an individual can make up as she goes as is expressed by terms like gender-queer, and by practices like transgendering. It is also critical of the idea that women actually choose heterosexuality, marriage, and any range of
ways that male power is organized in a patriarchal society. Some radical feminists argue that women do have choices but that these choices are very constrained, often to the point of choosing between a rock and a hard place. Marilyn Frye’s notion of the “double
bind” as a feature of oppression perfectly captures the situation of choice for subordinate groups, and women in particular (Frye, “Oppression,” The Politics of Reality). If a woman “chooses” to be (hetero)sexual, she is stigmatized as a slut; if she chooses not to be
(hetero)sexual she is stigmatized as a prude or (horrors) dyke. If she is raped and found to have carried birth-control in her bag, her claim of rape lacks credibility since she is seen to be someone who was making herself sexually available. If she does not have birthcontrol she, not any man, is to be held responsible for (blamed for) her pregnancy. And so forth.
Given the radical feminist critique of individual choice, there is a major contradiction in radical feminist theory when it comes to notions of change—
especially when it comes to the issue of the relation between the self and society. Sticking to the issue of femininity, the
contradiction is in
the following two mutually exclusive (explicit and implicit) propositions: The first is the explicit argument
that femininity is the way that half of humanity is imprinted , molded, mutilated from birth into “becoming woman,” which
also means constructed as beings who exist fundamentally for the use of men and male interests. This
argument is that femininity—and gender—is structural, namely, a system of marking sex-differences as
hierarchal and exploitative. The second is the suggestion—implicit rather than explicit, that once one reaches adulthood at least and
certainly upon identification as feminist and/or lesbian-feminist, femininity is now amenable to a woman’s rational, moral choices. Now that we’re
grown up feminists, we can and should willfully reject all the trappings, so to speak, of femininity. So here’s the contradiction: If, as radical feminist
theory has it, gender is ideological, structural and hegemonic as a system of dividing human beings into male dominants and female subordinates, then
this gendering (feminine-izing) can not also be a matter of individual choice. We can not have it both ways. Am I saying that we are so socially
determined that change is impossible? Of course not. Would there be any point to feminism if that was the case? I do think, however, that change
far more complicated than individually willed actions and that the notion of individual choice mystifies
(obfuscates) individual change as much as it mystifies structural change. We need to think beyond the
liberal-individualist framework to discover/invent what we mean when we talk about transformation at
both individual and structural levels . We need to think about the notion of praxis: the complicated
process of putting ideas and ideals into practice and thus how to get from here to there when talking
about radically transforming , if not overthrowing , the patriarchal social order .
is
Performative ethics are useless in abstraction from institutional
determinants
Geoff Boucher 6, lecturer in literary studies at Deakin University, Australia, interdisciplinary PhD
from the University of Melbourne, has written on psychoanalysis, contemporary European philosophy,
and social theory, The Politics of Performativity: A Critique of Judith Butler, NUMBER 1 • 2006 • 112 –
141, www.parrhesiajournal.org/parrhesia01/parrhesia01_boucher.pdf
In Excitable Speech (1997), she proposes a model of political transformation through counter-hegemonic
cultural practices , one which continues to take gender parody as its paradigmatic instance . Butler’s recent
exploration of the ethics of alterity, then, is supposed to complement the politics of performativity by indicating why
it is good that individuals exploit the subversive potential identified by this theory. In her recent work, Giving an Account of Oneself (2005), she proposes an ethic of
Oppressed individuals
should subvert power , she suggests, and in doing so their political strategy should be
guided by a calculation of the probable consequence of actions aiming to maximise some good . In other words,
the politics of performativity is supported in Butler’s most recent work by a form of act consequentialism – but, in keeping
with the broad tenets of the ethics of alterity, the good to be maximised is not that of the subject but that of the other.
Against the widespread reception of this book in terms of celebration and congratulation, I propose a symptomatic reading of Butler’s
theoretical trajectory in terms of its underlying problematic, which I take to be that of methodological individualism .
Although Butler’s ethical turn has been read as a continuation of earlier inquiries, I shall demonstrate that it is best grasped as an effort to
rectify serious problems in the theory of performativity – indeed, I shall argue that Butler’s ethics reverses a crucial
element of her politics , without, however, arriving at a more satisfactory position. Central to this problem is
the perennial focus of Butler’s investigations of identity-formation, on the individual in abstraction from structural
determinants . Because she locates the central dynamic of contestation in the vicissitudes of hegemonic norms
in the “psychic life of power” within an individual , her theory remains confined to the perspective of the
isolated individual either resisting their subjectification or confronting their oppressor. Having located
the basis for resistance in individual psychology , Butler conceptualises this resistance in phenomenological
terms of personal narratives and subjective melancholy, in abstraction from structural determinants such
as material interests or crisis tendencies of the social system .These problems are most clearly exhibited in her repeated redrafting of
Althusser’s scene of interpellation, which Butler grasps through the phenomenological lens of the “struggle to the death for recognition”. Progressive rewriting of this scene
responsibility for the other as the antidote to modern universality and the supposed “ethical violence” of its conception of moral autonomy.
not only factually do subvert power, they also
erased Althusser’s concern with the institutional formation of subjectivity ,
and replaced it, via an exclusively cultural focus, with a concern for the interpersonal and intrapsychic dynamics of
identity conflict . The final result of this, I argue, is evacuates the materiality of institutions and the reduces the social
field to the sum of dyadic interpersonal collisions. To demonstrate these claims, I propose to trace the theoretical trajectory of Butler’s work
in the successive versions of her theory gradually
through close reading of her sometimes dense and difficult texts, as it unfolds in successive drafts of the theory of performativity.
Law
the law inevitability acts on prostitutes, so ignoring it is naïve,
wishful thinking --- the law can reframe the terms of prostitution
debates
Showden, 9 - Assistant Professor Political Science University of North Carolina Greensboro (Carisa,
“Prostitution and Women’s Agency: A Feminist Argument for Decriminalization”
http://policeprostitutionandpolitics.com/pdfs_all/Academics%20Research%20Articles%20Support%20
Prostitution%20%20Decriminalization/2009%20Prostitution%20and%20Womens%20Agency%20A%20
Feminist%20Argument%20for%20Decriminalization%20.pdf
The sex-as-work analysis is an answer to the abolitionist definition of sex and gender construction that
still recognizes the problems of current sexual practices. To insist on the labor value of sex work, and to
insist on women‘s understanding of sex as work and not just as sex, is to contest the meaning of sex that
says that men make women objects through sexual acts; it is to insist that the sex women have has
meaning for them and not just about them. This does not require giving up any challenge to the economic
system that limits women‘s options to sexual labor or poverty. Nor does it mean that any prostitution sex
is prima facie liberating; but it does mean that men don‘t get to define all of the terms on which sex is
engaged, even under conditions of asymmetrical power relations. To change the conditions of sexual
labor—to legalize it ; to organize it; to bring women together to challenge male definitions and male power
of ownership within prostitution (focusing on women‘s cooperative brothels rather than male pimps, for
example)—is to wrest agency from the configurations of power within which one exists; it‘s to face
victimization and find agency within it . To change the legal terms of prostitution is to launch a challenge
to extant configurations of power , to insist the formal rules governing women‘s sexualized existence
evolve in the face of women‘s sexualized challenge to the construction of sexuality as dominance/male,
submission/female. Such a challenge or denunciation is a form of sexual metaphysics, a means of bringing
about –or aiding the becoming of—altered sexual social relations.
Focusing on the personal ignores how illegalization is the cause
of the ill effects of prostitution- only our framework can include
the aff’s subversive potential
Noah D. Zatz 97, Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law, 1997, Sex Work/Sex Act: Law, Labor, and
Desire in Constructions of Prostitution, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3175273?seq=13
As Anne McClintock and Laurie Shrage have both pointed out (McCIintock 1992, 95; Shrage 1994, 93), radical feminist
distinctions be- tween sex work and other forms of labor tend to rely on two related and problematic
forms of essentialism about sex. In identifying sex, more so than other bodily mediated activities, with
both the body and the self, radical feminists tend to naturalize both sexuality itself and the relation- ship
between sexual acts and identity. In doing so, they tend to take for granted the culturally and historically
specific processes that sort practices into categories like "work," "recreation," "relation building," and so
on (Shrage 1994, 93). While Shrage emphasizes how these problems limit the extent to which Overall's analysis may apply outside
North America and western Europe, the same essentialist moments also create problems even if the
characterizations happen to fit dominant cultural understand- ings within a particular context. When those
dominant understandings are themselves part of oppressive systems of meaning and practice, it may be a
grave error to hold them as givens and then evaluate a practice in that light. By doing so, the critic may
inadvertently overlook both moments in which efforts are being made to resist, transform, or transgress
those norms and practices that provide the basis for such efforts, instead focus- ing attention on the
dangers of transgression rather than on creating spaces in which it is less dangerous. In just this way, radical
feminist approaches tend to underestimate how much of what they identify as harmful in prostitution is a
product , not of the inherent character of sex work or sexuality itself in any society roughly like this one, but rather of the
specific regimes of criminalization and denigration that serve to marginalize and oppress sex workers
while constraining and distorting sex work's radical potential. While radical feminists generally support
decriminalization of prostitutes' own actions, they nonetheless tend to support criminalization of activities associ- ated with
prostitution, including those of Johns and pimps, and support characterizations of commercial sex as inherently degrading to
prostitutes (Fechner 1994). Thus, while they hope to shift the burdens of criminaliza- tion from women sex workers to male clients
and pimps, they do so with an eye toward the elimination of sex work altogether. For radical femi- nists, the law and its
enforcement are largely irrelevant to understanding and/or affecting prostitution, since legal regimes
simply reflect underlying structures of sexualized inequality: "Because the stigma of prostitution is the stigma of
sexuality is the stigma of the female gender, prostitution may be legal or illegal, but so long as women are unequal to men and that
inequality is sexualized, women will be bought and sold as prostitutes, and the law will do nothing about it" (MacKinnon 1989, 168).
In analyzing sex work as an inherently oppressive practice that is part and parcel of patriarchal capitalism,
the radical feminist approach fails to offer an adequate explanation for why sex work is the subject of
repres- sive and marginalizing legal regulation and why its open practice is so widely abhorred. These
feminists claim that "our society's tolerance for commercially available sex, legal or not, implies general acceptance of principles
which perpetuate women's social subordination" (Shrage 1989, 356; emphasis added). Certainly there are myriad ways in
which sex work is either tolerated or promoted, but if sex work is such a seam- less fit with organizing
principles of Euro-American society, the question should not be why is it tolerated at all but why is it
tolerated only as a marginal, degraded activity without official legitimacy . Under the radical feminist
interpretation, prostitution is hardly different from marriage and is part of a general system by which men gain sexual access to and
domi- nance over women. But if this is the case, then why is prostitution and all its trappings not a culturally
exalted, legally sanctioned, flourishing industry of the patriarchy? Moreover, why is it that sexual conservatives who
explicitly advocate women's sexual and reproductive subordination to men are among the most outspoken critics of prostitution?
One can certainly respond by observing that, legal or not, prostitution is very prev- alent, but one still
owes an explanation of why it is neither actively pro- moted nor indifferently accepted or, better yet, an
explanation of how it is that illegality itself is part of how and why prostitution is tolerated or promoted.15
Prostitutes' own emphasis on the role that illegality and po- lice suppression play in shaping the structure
of prostitution can begin to provide some answers. It is not sex work per se that promotes oppressive
values of capitalist patriarchy but rather the particular cultural and legal production of a marginalized,
degraded prostitution that ensures its op- pressive characteristics while acting to limit the subversive
potential that might attend a decriminalized, culturally legitimized form of sex work.
Other Off
1nc T
Interpretation and violation: the aff should have to defend the
implementation of a topical plan
Most predictable—the agent and verb indicate a debate about hypothetical
government action
Jon M Ericson 3, Dean Emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts – California Polytechnic U., et al., The
Debater’s Guide, Third Edition, p. 4
The Proposition of Policy: Urging Future Action In policy propositions, each
topic contains certain key elements, although they have
agent doing the acting ---“The United
States” in “The United States should adopt a policy of free trade.” Like the object of evaluation in a proposition of value, the
agent is the subject of the sentence. 2. The verb should—the first part of a verb phrase that urges action. 3. An action verb to
follow should in the should-verb combination. For example, should adopt here means to put a program or policy into action
through governmental means . 4. A specification of directions or a limitation of the action desired. The phrase
slightly different functions from comparable elements of value-oriented propositions. 1. An
free trade, for example, gives direction and limits to the topic, which would, for example, eliminate consideration of increasing tariffs, discussing
The entire
debate is about whether something ought to occur . What you agree to do, then, when you accept the affirmative side in such a
diplomatic recognition, or discussing interstate commerce. Propositions of policy deal with future action. Nothing has yet occurred.
debate is to offer sufficient and compelling reasons for an audience to perform the future action that you propose.
Legalize means to make lawful by judicial or legislative sanction
Business Dictionary No Date, "legalize", www.businessdictionary.com/definition/legalize.html
legalize¶ Definition¶ To make enforceable, justifiable, or lawful by judicial or legislative sanction.
Prostitution is sex work for money
Dictionary.com no date, http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/prostitution?&o=100074&s=t
noun¶ 1.¶ the act
or practice of engaging in sexual intercourse for money.
A general subject isn’t enough—debate requires a specific point of
difference in order to promote effective exchange
Steinberg and Freeley 13, * David, Lecturer in Communication studies and rhetoric. Advisor to
Miami Urban Debate League. Director of Debate at U Miami, Former President of CEDA. And ** Austin,
attorney who focuses on criminal, personal injury and civil rights law, JD, Suffolk University,
Argumentation and Debate, Critical Thinking for Reasoned Decision Making, 121-4
Debate is a means of settling differences , so there must be a controversy, a difference of opinion or a conflict of interest
before there can be a debate . If everyone is in agreement on a feet or value or policy, there is no need or
opportunity for debate; the matter can be settled by unanimous consent. Thus, for example, it would be pointless to attempt to debate
"Resolved: That two plus two equals four,” because there is simply no controversy about this statement. Controversy is an essential
prerequisite of debate . Where there is no clash of ideas, proposals, interests, or expressed positions of issues,
there is no debate. Controversy invites decisive choice between competing positions. Debate cannot
produce effective decisions without clear identification of a question or questions to be answered. For example,
general argument may occur about the broad topic of illegal immigration. How many illegal immigrants live in the
United States? What is the impact of illegal immigration and immigrants on our economy? What is their impact on our communities? Do they commit
crimes? Do they take jobs from American workers? Do they pay taxes? Do they require social services? Is it a problem that some do not speak English?
Is it the responsibility of employers to discourage illegal immigration by not hiring undocumented workers? Should they have the opportunity to gain
citizenship? Does illegal immigration pose a security threat to our country? Do illegal immigrants do work that American workers are unwilling to do?
Are their rights as workers and as human beings at risk due to their status? Are they abused by employers, law enforcement, housing, and businesses?
How are their families impacted by their status? What is the moral and philosophical obligation of a nation state to maintain its borders? Should we
build a wall on the Mexican border, establish a national identification card, or enforce existing laws against employers? Should we invite immigrants to
become U.S. citizens? Surely you
can think of many more concerns to be addressed by a conversation about the topic
area of illegal immigration. Participation in this “debate” is likely to be emotional and intense. However, it
is not likely to be productive or useful without focus on a particular question and identification of a line
demarcating sides in the controversy. To be discussed and resolved effectively , controversies are best
understood when seated clearly such that all parties to the debate share an understanding about the
objective of the debate. This enables focus on substantive and objectively identifiable issues facilitating
comparison of competing argumentation leading to effective decisions. Vague understanding results in
unfocused deliberation and poor decisions , general feelings of tension without opportunity for resolution,
frustration, and emotional distress, as evidenced by the failure of the U.S. Congress to make substantial
progress on the immigration debate. Of course, arguments may be presented without disagreement. For
example, claims are presented and supported within speeches, editorials, and advertisements even without opposing or refutational response.
Argumentation occurs in a range of settings from informal to formal, and may not call upon an audience
or judge to make a forced choice among competing claims. Informal discourse occurs as conversation or panel
discussion without demanding a decision about a dichotomous or yes/no question. However, by definition ,
debate requires "reasoned judgment on a proposition . The proposition is a statement about which competing
advocates will offer alternative (pro or con) argumentation calling upon their audience or adjudicator to
decide. The proposition provides focus for the discourse and guides the decision process. Even when a decision
will be made through a process of compromise, it is important to identify the beginning positions of competing
advocates to begin negotiation and movement toward a center, or consensus position. It is frustrating and
usually unproductive to attempt to make a decision when deciders are unclear as to what the decision is
about. The proposition may be implicit in some applied debates (“Vote for me!”); however, when a vote or consequential decision is called for (as in
the courtroom or in applied parliamentary debate) it is essential that the proposition be explicitly expressed (“the defendant is
guilty!”). In academic debate, the proposition provides essential guidance for the preparation of the debaters prior
to the debate, the case building and discourse presented during the debate, and the decision to be made
by the debate judge after the debate. Someone disturbed by the problem of a growing underclass of poorly educated, socially
disenfranchised youths might observe, “Public schools are doing a terrible job! They' are overcrowded, and many
teachers are poorly qualified in their subject areas. Even the best teachers can do little more than struggle to maintain order in their classrooms."
That same concerned citizen, facing a complex range of issues, might arrive at an unhelpful decision, such
as "We ought to do something about this” or, worse, “It’s too complicated a problem to deal with." Groups
of concerned citizens worried about the state of public education could join together to express their frustrations , anger,
disillusionment, and emotions regarding the schools, but without a focus for their discussions , they could easily agree
about the sorry state of education without finding points of clarity or potential solutions . A gripe session
would follow. But if a precise question is posed—such as “What can be done to improve public
education?”—then a more profitable area of discussion is opened up simply by placing a focus on the search
for a concrete solution step. One or more judgments can be phrased in the form of debate propositions, motions for parliamentary
debate, or bills for legislative assemblies, The statements "Resolved: That the federal government should implement a program of charter schools in atrisk communities” and “Resolved; That the state of Florida should adopt a school voucher program" more
clearly identify specific ways of
dealing with educational problems in a manageable form , suitable for debate. They provide specific policies to
be investigated and aid discussants in identifying points of difference . This focus contributes to better and
more informed decision making with the potential for better results . In academic debate, it provides better
depth of argumentation and enhanced opportunity for reaping the educational benefits of participation. In the next section,
we will consider the challenge of framing the proposition for debate, and its role in the debate. To have a productive debate, which
facilitates effective decision making by directing and placing limits on the decision to be made, the basis
for argument should be clearly defined . If we merely talk about a topic, such as ‘"homelessness,” or
“abortion,” Or “crime,” or “global warming,” we are likely to have an interesting discussion but not to
establish a profitable basis for argument. For example, the statement “Resolved: That the pen is mightier than the sword” is
debatable , yet by itself fails to provide much basis for clear argumentation . If we take this statement to mean Iliad the
written word is more effective than physical force for some purposes, we can identify a problem area: the comparative effectiveness of writing or
physical force for a specific purpose, perhaps promoting positive social change. (Note that “loose” propositions, such as the example above, may be
defined by their advocates in such a way as to facilitate a clear contrast of competing sides; through definitions and debate they “become” clearly
understood statements even though they may not begin as such. There are formats for debate that often begin with this sort of proposition. However,
in any debate, at some point, effective and meaningful discussion relies on identification of a clearly stated
or understood proposition.) Back to the example of the written word versus physical force. Although we now have a general
subject, we have not yet stated a problem. It is still too broad , too loosely worded to promote well-organized argument. What sort of writing
are we concerned with—poems, novels, government documents, website development, advertising, cyber-warfare, disinformation, or what? What does
it mean to be “mightier" in this context? What kind of physical force is being compared—fists, dueling swords, bazookas, nuclear weapons, or what? A
more specific question might be, “Would a mutual defense treaty or a visit by our fleet be more effective in assuring Laurania of our support in a certain
crisis?” The basis for argument could be phrased in a debate proposition such as “Resolved: That the United States should enter into a mutual defense
treaty with Laurania.” Negative advocates might oppose this proposition by arguing that fleet maneuvers would be a better solution. This
is not to
say that debates should completely avoid creative interpretation of the controversy by advocates, or that good
debates cannot occur over competing interpretations of the controversy; in fact, these sorts of debates
may be very engaging. The point is that debate is best facilitated by the guidance provided by focus on a
particular point of difference , which will be outlined in the following discussion.
Vote neg:
1. Precision: what “the United States” means is a prerequisite to policy
debates
FGF 9, Family Guardian Fellowship, AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE MEANING OF THE TERM
"UNITED STATES",
http://famguardian.org/subjects/Taxes/ChallJurisdiction/Definitions/freemaninvestigation.htm
I doubt if many Americans have ever given a second thought to the meaning of the term United States, or
would believe that it could be a perplexing question. It would have my vote, however, as being by far the
most important and controversial word (or term) of art , vocabula artis also referred to as a statute term, leading word (or term), or
what the French call parol de ley, technical word of law in all American legal writings as well as the most dangerous . For it is
ambivalent, equivocal, and ambiguous. Indeed, as you will see, its use in the law exemplifies patent ambiguity, which is defined as: An ambiguity
apparent on face of instrument [sic] and arising by reason of any inconsistency or inherent uncertainty of language used so that effect is either to
convey no definite meaning or confused meaning. (Black's Law Dictionary, 6th edition. Emphasis added.) Reading Hamlet in the park this afternoon, I
chanced on to an intriguing way to put it. In the words of King Claudius: The harlot's cheek, beautified with plast ring art, Is not more ugly to the thing
that helps it Than is my deed to my most painted word. O heavy burden! (III, I, 51-54. Emphasis added.) The editor, Harold Jenkins, in his notes on
painted says: " fair but false in appearance, like the beauty of the painted cheek." What serendipity to find this, just as I am on my final proofing of this
paper. It is so appropriate, to describe how 'United States' usually is used by the government . And it has indeed
imposed on us all a heavy burden ! With dogged determination and perseverance, however, one can succeed in seeing through this meticulous and
painstakingly contrived duplicity. For, fortunately, Congress must define all terms that it uses in a particular and special way. For example, in the
Internal Revenue Code (IRC), chapter 79 Definitions, Section 7701 Definitions, it states: "(a) When used in this title, where not otherwise distinctly
expressed or manifestly incompatible with the intent thereof " It goes on, then, to define many terms of art. These definitions apply throughout the
code, "where not otherwise distinctly expressed" which will sometimes be done for a single chapter, section, subsection, or even sentence which, you
will later see, can be very instructive. I fear that such analysis can be tedious, and for this I apologize. I will try to be as pithy and compendious as
possible, but I am not writing merely to express opinions; I am writing to prove the points I discuss. And I will worry a question like a bull dog, until I
am satisfied that I have presented enough hard data to conclusively establish my particular contention, especially in the eyes of those of a different
persuasion. For there are intelligent and respected researchers, for whom I have the greatest regard, who do not agree, for example, with my
interpretation of the meaning of 'United States' in Title 26, as well as in all the other titles.
The history of the usage of United States,
from the time of the American colonies to the present , is remarkably complex. This is thoroughly investigated in an easy-reading yet
scholarly book that I highly recommend, by Sebastian de Gracia, A Country With No Name, Pantheon, 1997. Herein, however, I will have occasion to
my focus is primarily on the
relevance of this term as it relates to the law, especially tax law, to which he simply doesn t allude at least in the way I do. Before
getting started, let me give you just a hint as to why it is so extremely important to have an absolutely correct
interpretation of the term United States , but also, in the two quotes below, nonresident alien, and gross income. This preview is an
avail myself of virtually nothing from this wonderful tome. When I think of this, it astonishes even me. But
important section from the IRC, which is Title 26, also written in cites as 26 United States Code or 26 USC, Section (the symbol or, often, as in this
paper, these are omitted) 872 Gross income: (a) General rule. In the case of a nonresident alien individual gross income includes only (1) gross income
which is derived from sources within the United States and which is not effectively connected with the conduct of a trade or business within the United
States, and (2) gross income which is effectively connected with the conduct of a trade or business within the United States Add to this 26 USC
§7701(b)(1)(B): An individual is a nonresident alien if such individual is neither a citizen of the United States nor a resident of the United States and I
think you will agree that the cardinal conundrum here indeed the very crux is the determination as to what is meant by the term "United States" and,
above, nonresident alien. For, under certain circumstances we see that the nonresident alien is not subject to any federal income tax if his relationship
to the United States is of a certain nature.
The United States is an abstraction given substantiality when delegated
duties began to be performed , and when 1:8:17 of the Constitution was implemented, which provided for land for the seat of government,
as well as forts, magazines, arsenals, dockyards, and other needful buildings.
2. Failure to specify beyond “legalize” makes the plan void for vagueness---it
wrecks negative ground and makes policy analysis impossible
Kleiman 90 and Saiger, *lecturer public policy Harvard, **consultant drug policy
Rand 18 Hofstra L. Rev. 527 A SYMPOSIUM ON DRUG DECRIMINALIZATION: DRUG
LEGALIZATION: THE IMPORTANCE OF ASKING THE RIGHT QUESTION.
Defining Legalization Legalization, like prohibition, does not name a unique strategy. Perhaps the most
prominent inadequacy of current legalization arguments is their failure to specify what is meant by
"legalization ." Current drug policy provides an illustration of this diversity. Heroin and marijuana are
completely prohibited, 74 and cocaine can only be used in rigidly specified medical contexts , not including any
where the drug's psychoactive properties are exercised. 75 On the other hand, a wide range of pain-killers, sleep-inducers,
stimulants, tranquilizers and sedatives can be obtained with a doctor's prescription . 76 Alcohol is available for
recreational use, but is subject to an array of controls including excise taxation, 77 limits on drinking ages, 78 limits on TV and
radio advertising, 79 and retail licensing. 80 Nicotine is subject to age minimums, warning label requirements, 81 taxation, 82 and bans
on smoking in some public places. 83 [*541] Drug legalization can therefore be thought of as moving drugs along a spectrum of regulated statuses in the
direction of increased availability. However, while legalization advocates do not deny that some sort of controls will be required, their
proposals rarely address the question of how far on the spectrum a given drug should be moved, or how to
accomplish such a movement. Instead, such details are dismissed as easily determined, or postponed as a
problem requiring future thought . 84 But the consequences of legalization depend almost entirely on the
details of the remaining regulatory regime . The price and conditions of the availability of a newly legal drug will be more powerful in
shaping its consumption than the fact that the drug is "legal." Rules about advertising, place and time of sale, and availability to minors help determine
whether important aspects of the drug problem get better or worse. The amount of regulatory apparatus required and the way in which it is organized
and enforced will determine how much budget reduction can be realized from dismantling current enforcement efforts. 85 Moreover, currently illicit
drugs, because they are so varied pharmacologically, would not all pose the same range of the problems if they were to be made legally available for
non-medical use. They would therefore require different control regimes. These regimes might need to be as diverse as the drugs themselves.
3. Reading a plan doesn’t make you topical if you don’t defend it---magnifies
the abuse by allowing the affirmative to be vague and requires us to engage
in theory and substance just to make our substance viable---letting them
just say they meet our violation means we lose valuable CX and 1NC time
which is the only starting point for neg offense which is an independent VI
– i.e. the idea we have to win their imaginary is bad outside the plan makes
it impossible to be aff
1nc Neolib
The discourse of sacred prostitution as an empowering choice cements
neoliberal social relations---the celebration of prostitution as a means for
survival displaces transforming the conditions that necessitate someone
sell their body in the first place
Meghan Murphy 11, the founder and editor of Feminist Current. Masters degree in Women’s Studies
from Simon Fraser University. A progressive dialogue: Building a progressive feminist movement in neoliberal times, rabble.ca/news/2011/10/progressive-dialogue-building-progressive-feminist-movementneo-liberal-times
For me, feminism and the left have always been inextricably linked. The connections between gender
oppression and global capitalism, the ties between feminism and anti-colonialism, the fight for social
systems that put people first, starting from a place that views our existence as a group effort rather than a
wall one climbs alone -- those connections made feminism an obviously progressive movement in my
mind.
How could we make long-lasting change for women without a deep commitment towards addressing race
and class oppression? How could we uproot the deep foundations of patriarchy that support all of our
most powerful institutions without a profound commitment towards supporting the most marginalized?
While my love affair with the left has been plagued with anger and frustration, I remain not only
convinced that progressive movements must include the dismantling of patriarchy as a key element of
their analysis and action, but that a neo-liberal feminism , that is, a feminism that is disconnected from
the left, is a feminism that is hardly worth fighting for .
In a time when some of our hardest fought for rights and freedoms are under threat, when unions are
under attack, when American privatization is leaning heavily on our doorstep, when safe housing is
treated as a privilege, not a right, when we are told that concepts like universal daycare and decent social
assistance programs are inconceivable, mainstream feminism seems to be hacking away at its own knees .
It's as though we are so afraid of losing everything that we've decided to fight for nothing.
Desperation, coupled with the growing influence of neo-liberal discourse, has led us to look for
empowerment where there is none, twisting deeply sexist imagery and industries into a frighteningly
ironic version of female liberation . In the age of Slutwalks, the neo-burlesque "movement," the
mainstreaming of pornography, and of a "sex-positive" feminism that acts as an assault on decades of
feminist discourse, how must we work to revitalize a feminist movement that doesn't kowtow to American
neo-liberalism? That is, an ideology that wants very much for us all to believe that freedom lies in positive
thinking and that we can rise above institutionalized oppression by pretending it isn't there.
Denise Thompson describes the problem of individualism as such:
"If relations of domination and subordination are interpreted as nothing but properties of individuals,
they cannot be seen as relations of ruling at all. They become simply a matter of preferences and choices
engaged in by discrete individuals who have no responsibilities beyond their own immediate pleasures
and satisfactions ." (Radical Feminism Today, 2001)
This critique of individualism demands that feminism be a progressive movement and makes arguments
for individual autonomy in sex work, for example, problematic.
And yet we, we who should consider ourselves progressive, have bought into it. This is an ideology that
erases systems of domination and subordination and tells us that our empowerment depends only on
how we've framed our supposed oppression. It tells us that wealth is at our fingertips if only we would just
work at it a little harder (and that freedom is based on our ability to make money in whatever way
possible), focus our energy within, and forget about the plight of our neighbours. It tells us to work with
what we've got because, hey, we've been struggling long enough and still we suffer so why not just make
the best of it?
Feminism has not escaped this mindset; far from it. It would appear, rather, that much of mainstream
feminism has embraced this ideology with open arms.
Now, a popular feminist position to take is one that frames the sex industry as a potentially empowering
space for women so long as she "chooses" to participate.
But what is radical or progressive about women selling their bodies to men? What is progressive about the
male gaze? What is revolutionary about legalizing, and, in doing so, normalizing the concept of women as
sexual commodities ? These concepts seem far from progressive to me, propelling us backwards into an
age where sexism is not only accepted, but encouraged as a potential route towards liberation.
Visible examples of the way in which parts of the feminist movement have adopted individualism as part
of their discourse and action include efforts to decriminalize prostitution and the phenomenon of
Slutwalks.
Decriminalizaton of prostitution
The decriminalization or legalization of prostitution has been taken on by many Canadian progressives
and self-identified feminists as a goal worth fighting for. Positioned as a way to make women safer and
allow them to make "choices" about their own bodily autonomy, this argument is decidedly rooted in neoliberal discourse .
Rather than looking at prostitution as representative of how we, as a society view and treat women,
advocates argue that decriminalization will provide women with "the freedom to choose," and that we
should prevent state interference in said "choice."
The connection that these arguments fail to make is that women, historically, make these "choices" when
they are in poverty. They make these "choices" in order to survive. When there are no social structures in
place that support women's survival and safety, when women have no real choice, they "choose"
prostitution. And who benefits? Men.
A growing gap between the rich and poor ensures that women will continue to be forced to "choose"
prostitution as a means of survival.
Keeping women safe from violence and abuse means that we provide women with real options, with safe
and affordable housing, and with social safety nets. It does not mean that we frame exploitation as a
viable career path . If the left truly desires an equitable society, we must be working to end prostitution.
We must work towards freedom within the context of humanity rather than, simply, a lack of restrictions .
While certainly there are women who are privileged enough to consider their choice to do sex work to be
an empowered one, the nature of the industry is one that exploits the most marginalized . The answer is
not to pretend that this work is empowering, but rather to ensure that women have alternatives and that
men are not able to prey on women in need. I am not an object that exists to provide pleasure for a man
with more power and status than me, and neither are any of my sisters.
Slutwalks
Embraced by many young women around the world, and viewed by some as "the most successful feminist
action of the past 20 years," this movement, surprisingly, originated in Canada. I say surprisingly because
we tend to associate the kind of individualist rhetoric that has been so much a part of the Slutwalk
movement from the get-go, with American neo-liberalism. The "I wear what I want" mantra chanted
alongside women marching the streets in their underwear with the word "slut" written across their chests,
hardly seems to address any systematic inequity or the roots of rape culture. The epitome of
"MYCHOICE" feminism, Slutwalks were immediately embraced by those who argue that the sex industry
is an empowering space for women as well as by those who may not have previously aligned themselves
with feminism, perhaps out of fear that the movement would take away their stilettos.
While many view Slutwalks as feminist, this movement is disappointing from a progressive perspective.
Missing an opportunity to present a radical challenge to the roots of oppression, they remain deeply
focused on clothing and the "freedom" to identify as "sluts," making this "movement" one that places
individual freedom above social change .
In a culture that has successfully mainstreamed pornography, sexualized rape and dominance, presented
women's bodies consistently as things, cut up into pieces for consumption, it is troubling that these issues
have been visibly left off the table in a march against rape culture. Not only that but the marches continue
to play to a male gaze, featuring women on stripper poles and plenty of camera ops for the men watching
from the sidelines.
If our genuine goal, as the left, is equality for all, feminism can only be a progressive movement at its core.
Neo-liberal ideology that values individual "freedom" and " choice" over emancipation will not liberate the
poor and the marginalized. Selling sex has never provided women with independence, safety, and longlasting empowerment, but rather has further reinforced male power and privilege.
If we don't care about one another, if we don't look towards building a world where women's options for
survival do not involve selling their bodies to men with power, then this cannot be called a progressive
movement. It can't even be called a movement at all. This is not an idea that needs only to be absorbed by
the feminist movement, but it is something that must be understood by the left, as a whole. An "every man
for himself" ethic has never been our vision of freedom and yet, when it comes to women, we've been
manipulated into believing this means liberation.
Your ballot has to center around class politics---capitalism is the root cause
of gendered and racialized oppression and makes mass violence and
extermination inevitable
Peter Mclaren 4, Education and Urban Schooling Division prof, UCLA—and Valerie ScatamburloD'Annibale; University of Windsor, Educational Philosophy and Theory, Vol. 36, No. 2, 2004,
www.freireproject.org/articles/node%2065/RCGS/class_dismissed-val-peter.10.pdf
For example, E. San Juan (2003) argues that race relations and race conflict are necessarily structured by
the larger totality of the political economy of a given society, as well as by modifications in the structure of
the world economy. He further notes that the capitalist mode of production has articulated ‘race’ with
class in a peculiar way. He too is worth a substantial quotation:
While the stagnation of rural life imposed a racial or castelike rigidity to the peasantry, the rapid
accumulation of wealth through the ever more intensifying exploitation of labor by capital could not so
easily ‘racialize’ the wage-workers of a particular nation, given the alienability of labor power—unless
certain physical or cultural characteristics can be utilized to divide the workers or render one group an
outcast or pariah removed from the domain of ‘free labor.’ In the capitalist development of U.S. society,
African, Mexican, and Asian bodies—more precisely, their labor power and its reproductive efficacy—were
colonized and racialized; hence the idea of ‘internal colonialism’ retains explanatory validity. ‘Race’ is thus
constructed out of raw materials furnished by class relations, the history of class conflicts, and the
vicissitudes of colonial/capitalist expansion and the building of imperial hegemony. It is dialectically
accented and operationalized not just to differentiate the price of wage labor within and outside the
territory of the metropolitan power, but also to reproduce relations of domination–subordination
invested with an aura of naturality and fatality. The refunctioning of physical or cultural traits as
ideological and political signifiers of class identity reifies social relations. Such ‘racial’ markers enter the
field of the alienated laborprocess, concealing the artificial nature of meanings and norms, and
essentializing or naturalizing historical traditions and values which are contingent on mutable
circumstances.
For San Juan, racism and nationalism are modalities in which class struggles articulate themselves at
strategic points in history. He argues that racism arose with the creation and expansion of the capitalist
world economy. He maintains, rightly in our view, that racial or ethnic group solidarity is given ‘meaning
and value in terms of their place within the social organization of production and reproduction of the
ideological-political order; ideologies of racism as collective social evaluation of solidarities arise to
reinforce structural constraints which preserve the exploited and oppressed position of these “racial”
solidarities’.
It is remarkable, in our opinion, that so much of contemporary social theory has largely abandoned the
problems of labor, capitalist exploitation, and class analysis at a time when capitalism is becoming more
universal, more ruthless and more deadly . The metaphor of a contemporary ‘tower of Babel’ seems
appropriate here—academics striking radical poses in the seminar rooms while remaining oblivious to the
possibility that their seemingly radical discursive maneuvers do nothing to further the struggles ‘against
oppression and exploitation which continue to be real, material, and not merely “discursive” problems of
the contemporary world’ (Dirlik, 1997, p. 176). Harvey (1998, pp. 29–31) indicts the new academic
entrepreneurs , the ‘masters of theory-in-and-for-itself’ whose ‘discourse radicalism’ has deftly sidestepped ‘the enduring conundrums of class struggle’ and who have, against a ‘sobering background of
cheapened discourse and opportunistic politics,’ been ‘stripped of their self-advertised radicalism.’ For
years, they ‘contested socialism,’ ridiculed Marxists, and promoted ‘their own alternative theories of
liberatory politics’ but now they have largely been ‘reduced to the role of supplicants in the most degraded
form of pluralist politics imaginable .’ As they pursue the politics of difference, the ‘class war rages
unabated’ and they seem ‘either unwilling or unable to focus on the unprecedented economic carnage
occurring around the globe.’
Harvey’s searing criticism suggests that post-Marxists have been busy fiddling while Rome burns and his
comments echo those made by Marx (1978, p. 149) in his critique of the Young Hegelians who were, ‘in
spite of their allegedly “worldshattering” statements, the staunchest conservatives.’ Marx lamented that
the Young Hegelians were simply fighting ‘phrases’ and that they failed to acknowledge that in offering
only counter-phrases, they were in no way ‘combating the real existing world’ but merely combating the
phrases of the world. Taking a cue from Marx and substituting ‘phrases’ with ‘discourses’ or
‘resignifications’ we would contend that the practitioners of difference politics who operate within
exaggerated culturalist frameworks that privilege the realm of representation as the primary arena of
political struggle question some discourses of power while legitimating others. Moreover, because they
lack a class perspective, their gestures of radicalism are belied by their own class positions.10 As Ahmad
(1997a, p. 104) notes:
One may speak of any number of disorientations and even oppressions, but one cultivates all kinds of
politeness and indirection about the structure of capitalist class relations in which those oppressions are
embedded. To speak of any of that directly and simply is to be ‘vulgar.’ In this climate of Aesopian
languages it is absolutely essential to reiterate that most things are a matter of class. That kind of
statement is … surprising only in a culture like that of the North American university … But it is precisely
in that kind of culture that people need to hear such obvious truths.
Ahmad’s provocative observations imply that substantive analyses of the carnage wrought by ‘globalized’
class exploitation have, for the most part, been marginalized by the kind of radicalism that has been
instituted among the academic Left in North America. He further suggests that while various postMarxists have invited us to join their euphoric celebrations honoring the decentering of capitalism, the
abandonment of class politics, and the decline of metanarratives (particularly those of Marxism and
socialism), they have failed to see that the most ‘meta of all metanarratives of the past three centuries, the
creeping annexation of the globe for the dominance of capital over laboring humanity has met, during
those same decades, with stunning success’ (Ahmad, 1997b, p. 364). As such, Ahmad invites us to ask
anew, the proverbial question: What, then, must be done? To this question we offer no simple theoretical,
pedagogical or political prescriptions. Yet we would argue that if social change is the aim, progressive
educators and theorists must cease displacing class analysis with the politics of difference.
Conclusion … we will take our stand against the evils [of capitalism, imperialism, and racism] with a
solidarity derived from a proletarian internationalism born of socialist idealism. —National Office of the
Black Panther Party, February 1970
For well over two decades we have witnessed the jubilant liberal and conservative pronouncements of the
demise of socialism. Concomitantly, history’s presumed failure to defang existing capitalist relations has
been read by many self-identified ‘radicals’ as an advertisement for capitalism’s inevitability. As a result,
the chorus refrain ‘There Is No Alternative’, sung by liberals and conservatives, has been buttressed by the
symphony of post-Marxist voices recommending that we give socialism a decent burial and move on.
Within this context, to speak of the promise of Marx and socialism may appear anachronistic, even naïve,
especially since the post-al intellectual vanguard has presumably demonstrated the folly of doing so. Yet
we stubbornly believe that the chants of T.I.N.A. must be combated for they offer as a fait accompli,
something which progressive Leftists should refuse to accept—namely the triumph of capitalism and its
political bedfellow neo-liberalism, which have worked together to naturalize suffering, undermine
collective struggle, and obliterate hope. We concur with Amin (1998), who claims that such chants must
be defied and revealed as absurd and criminal, and who puts the challenge we face in no uncertain terms:
humanity may let itself be led by capitalism’s logic to a fate of collective suicide or it may pave the way for
an alternative humanist project of global socialism.
The grosteque conditions that inspired Marx to pen his original critique of capitalism are present and
flourishing. The inequalities of wealth and the gross imbalances of power that exist today are leading to
abuses that exceed those encountered in Marx’s day (Greider, 1998, p. 39). Global capitalism has paved
the way for the obscene concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands and created a world
increasingly divided between those who enjoy opulent affluence and those who languish in dehumanizing
conditions and economic misery . In every corner of the globe, we are witnessing social disintegration as
revealed by a rise in abject poverty and inequality. At the current historical juncture, the combined assets
of the 225 richest people is roughly equal to the annual income of the poorest 47 percent of the world’s
population, while the combined assets of the three richest people exceed the combined GDP of the 48
poorest nations (CCPA, 2002, p. 3). Approximately 2.8 billion people—almost half of the world’s
population—struggle in desperation to live on less than two dollars a day (McQuaig, 2001, p. 27). As
many as 250 million children are wage slaves and there are over a billion workers who are either un- or
under-employed. These are the concrete realities of our time—realities that require a vigorous class
analysis, an unrelenting critique of capitalism and an oppositional politics capable of confronting what
Ahmad (1998, p. 2) refers to as ‘capitalist universality.’ They are realities that require something more
than that which is offered by the prophets of ‘difference’ and post-Marxists who would have us relegate
socialism to the scrapheap of history and mummify Marxism along with Lenin’s corpse. Never before has
a Marxian analysis of capitalism and class rule been so desperately needed. That is not to say that
everything Marx said or anticipated has come true, for that is clearly not the case. Many critiques of Marx
focus on his strategy for moving toward socialism, and with ample justification; nonetheless Marx did
provide us with fundamental insights into class society that have held true to this day. Marx’s enduring
relevance lies in his indictment of capitalism which continues to wreak havoc in the lives of most. While
capitalism’s cheerleaders have attempted to hide its sordid underbelly, Marx’s description of capitalism as
the sorcerer’s dark power is even more apt in light of contemporary historical and economic conditions.
Rather than jettisoning Marx, decentering the role of capitalism, and discrediting class analysis, radical
educators must continue to engage Marx’s oeuvre and extrapolate from it that which is useful
pedagogically, theoretically, and, most importantly, politically in light of the challenges that confront us.
Our alternative is recommitment to class struggle grounded in socialist
humanism---pedagogical recommitment to Marxist struggle is key
Peter Mclaren 4, Education and Urban Schooling Division prof, UCLA—and Valerie ScatamburloD'Annibale; University of Windsor, Educational Philosophy and Theory, Vol. 36, No. 2, 2004,
www.freireproject.org/articles/node%2065/RCGS/class_dismissed-val-peter.10.pdf
These are the concrete realities of our time—realities that require a vigorous class analysis , an
unrelenting critique of capitalism and an oppositional politics capable of confronting what Ahmad (1998,
p. 2) refers to as ‘capitalist universality.’ They are realities that require something more than that which is
offered by the prophets of ‘difference’ and post-Marxists who would have us relegate socialism to the
scrapheap of history and mummify Marxism along with Lenin's corpse. Never before has a Marxian
analysis of capitalism and class rule been so desperately needed. That is not to say that everything Marx
said or anticipated has come true, for that is clearly not the case. Many critiques of Marx focus on his
strategy for moving toward socialism, and with ample justification; nonetheless Marx did provide us with
fundamental insights into class society that have held true to this day. Marx's enduring relevance lies in
his indictment of capitalism which continues to wreak havoc in the lives of most. While capitalism's
cheerleaders have attempted to hide its sordid underbelly, Marx's description of capitalism as the
sorcerer's dark power is even more apt in light of contemporary historical and economic conditions.
Rather than jettisoning Marx, decentering the role of capitalism, and discrediting class analysis, radical
educators must continue to engage Marx's oeuvre and extrapolate from it that which is useful
pedagogically, theoretically, and , most importantly, politically in light of the challenges that confront us.
The urgency which animates Amin’s call for a collective socialist vision necessitates, as we have argued,
moving beyond the particularism and liberal pluralism that informs the ‘politics of difference.’ It also
requires challenging the questionable assumptions that have come to constitute the core of contemporary
‘radical’ theory, pedagogy and politics. In terms of effecting change, what is needed is a cogent
understanding of the systemic nature of exploitation and oppression based on the precepts of a radical
political economy approach (outlined above) and one that incorporates Marx’s notion of ‘unity in
difference’ in which people share widely common material interests. Such an understanding extends far
beyond the realm of theory , for the manner in which we choose to interpret and explore the social world,
the concepts and frameworks we use to express our sociopolitical understandings , are more than just
abstract categories. They imply intentions, organizational practices, and political agendas. Identifying
class analysis as the basis for our understandings and class struggle as the basis for political
transformation implies something quite different than constructing a sense of political agency around
issues of race, ethnicity, gender, etc. Contrary to ‘Shakespeare’s assertion that a rose by any other name
would smell as sweet,’ it should be clear that this is not the case in political matters. Rather, in politics ‘the
essence of the flower lies in the name by which it is called’ (Bannerji, 2000, p. 41).
The task for progressives today is to seize the moment and plant the seeds for a political agenda that is
grounded in historical possibilities and informed by a vision committed to overcoming exploitative
conditions. These seeds , we would argue, must be derived from the tree of radical political economy. For
the vast majority of people today—people of all ‘racial classifications or identities, all genders and sexual
orientations’—the common frame of reference arcing across ‘difference’, the ‘concerns and aspirations
that are most widely shared are those that are rooted in the common experience of everyday life shaped
and constrained by political economy’ (Reed, 2000, p. xxvii). While post-Marxist advocates of the politics
of ‘difference’ suggest that such a stance is outdated, we would argue that the categories which they have
employed to analyze ‘the social’ are now losing their usefulness, particularly in light of actual
contemporary ‘social movements.’ All over the globe, there are large anti-capitalist movements afoot. In
February 2002, chants of ‘Another World Is Possible’ became the theme of protests in Porto Allegre. It
seems that those people struggling in the streets haven’t read about T.I.N.A., the end of grand narratives
of emancipation, or the decentering of capitalism. It seems as though the struggle for basic survival and
some semblance of human dignity in the mean streets of the dystopian metropoles doesn’t permit much
time or opportunity to read the heady proclamations emanating from seminar rooms. As E. P. Thompson
(1978, p. 11) once remarked, sometimes ‘experience walks in without knocking at the door, and announces
deaths, crises of subsistence, trench warfare, unemployment, inflation, genocide.’ This, of course, does not
mean that socialism will inevitably come about, yet a sense of its nascent promise animates current social
movements. Indeed, noted historian Howard Zinn (2000, p. 20) recently pointed out that after years of
single-issue organizing (i.e. the politics of difference), the WTO and other anti-corporate capitalist
protests signaled a turning point in the ‘history of movements of recent decades,’ for it was the issue of
‘class’ that more than anything ‘bound everyone together.’ History, to paraphrase Thompson (1978, p. 25)
doesn’t seem to be following Theory’s script.
Our vision is informed by Marx's historical materialism and his revolutionary socialist humanism, which
must not be conflated with liberal humanism. For left politics and pedagogy, a socialist humanist vision
remains crucial, whose fundamental features include the creative potential of people to challenge
collectively the circumstances that they inherit. This variant of humanism seeks to give expression to the
pain, sorrow and degradation of the oppressed, those who labor under the ominous and ghastly cloak of
‘globalized’ capital. It calls for the transformation of those conditions that have prevented the bulk of
humankind from fulfilling its potential. It vests its hope for change in the development of critical
consciousness and social agents who make history, although not always in conditions of their choosing.
The political goal of socialist humanism is, however, ‘not a resting in difference’ but rather ‘the
emancipation of difference at the level of human mutuality and reciprocity.’ This would be a step forward
for the ‘discovery or creation of our real differences which can only in the end be explored in reciprocal
ways’ (Eagleton, 1996, p. 120). Above all else, the enduring relevance of a radical socialist pedagogy and
politics is the centrality it accords to the interrogation of capitalism. We can no longer afford to remain
indifferent to the horror and savagery committed by capitalist's barbaric machinations. We need to
recognize that capitalist democracy is unrescuably contradictory in its own self-constitution. Capitalism
and democracy cannot be translated into one another without profound efforts at manufacturing empty
idealism. Committed Leftists must unrelentingly cultivate a democratic socialist vision that refuses to
forget the ‘wretched of the earth,’ the children of the damned and the victims of the culture of silence—a
task which requires more than abstruse convolutions and striking ironic poses in the agnostic arena of
signifying practices. Leftists must illuminate the little shops of horror that lurk beneath ‘globalization’s’
shiny façade; they must challenge the true ‘evils’ that are manifest in the tentacles of global capitalism's
reach. And, more than this, Leftists must search for the cracks in the edifice of globalized capitalism and
shine light on those fissures that give birth to alternatives. Socialism today, undoubtedly, runs against the
grain of received wisdom, but its vision of a vastly improved and freer arrangement of social relations
beckons on the horizon. Its unwritten text is nascent in the present even as it exists among the fragments
of history and the shards of distant memories. Its potential remains untapped and its promise needs to be
redeemed.
Case
1NC Can’t Solve
Their reclamation fails – imagery of female divinity justifies gendered
societal structures
Joan Goodnick Westenholz 2k, Ph.D. in Near Eastern Languages and Literatures from the
University of Chicago, “King by Love of Inanna - an image of female empowerment?,” 2000, Nin - Journal
of Gender Studies in Antiquity 1
The legitimation of kingship is thus mythologized as the bestowal of kingship by the goddess Inanna on the king through her
marriage and love of him. Does this myth reflect society at any time? What is the connection between theology and
gender ideology? In general, it has been stated that in her being and in her cult, Inanna/Ishtar provides an
outlet for female gender expression. Nevertheless, She maintains the gender order by providing a sacred
example and divine warrant for the gendered structure of society . Goddesses are said to define the female
in society, to be godwomen. Feminist scholars have attempted to explore the relationship between the
worship of the goddess and the political and economic power of women in acneint times. In general, it is clear
that women played a very active role in the economic life of Sumer and even in Babylonia and Assyria. They controlled
certain administrations, and they formed a major part of the work force. Unfortunately, our understanding of the
earliest evidence is hampered by our inability to determine the Sex of many persons active in the public
sector as the Sumerian language does not distinguish grammatically between masculine and feminine . Thus,
many of the persons assumed to be men may in fact be women and women´s roles in Sumerian society may be much more extensive
than now imagined. However, the question "Were there women of such authoritarian power in ancient Sumerian
society?" is not simple to answer. Certain theorists maintain that since Inanna wielded such political power,
this must be evidence that women also once had such power in a matriarchal system of rule. A better
understanding of the gender symmetry of Sumerian ideology would undermine such blatant assumption . A
strong goddess is mated with a strong king because their union is the basis of a balanced system. The
highest cultic functionary, the en, and thus the earthly representative of the deity, was always of the opposite Sex.
Consequently, strong human female models are to be found outside the city of Uruk and outside the cult and worship of Inanna.
Those few legendary queens who held power in their own name are known from he Northern city of Kish. The next to last ruler of the
first dynasty of Kish is Enmebaragesi, who is described in the Sumerian King List as the king who carried away the weapons of Elam
as booty. There is certain recent evidence indicating that Enmebaragesi was a woman. It has been suggested that she was the enpriestess of Zababa of Kish and thus ruler of Kish, while her brother Gilgamesh was en-priest of Inanna of Uruk and thus ruler of
Uruk. However, the third dynasty of Kish begins with Ku-Ba-ú, designated a female tavern keeper, the one who is said to have
consolidate the foundation of Kish and become king (lugal). Another reference to a woman of Kish as the female representative of a
city is to be found in an old Akkadian text from Nippur. Consequently, although a female may be a bestower of kingship, it is rare
that a female holds the kingship. It has been noted in other societies that highly positive feminine religious
symbolism fails to translate into the secular gender roles . Anne Klein has shown that even the existence of a
generous array of female imagery at the heart of a religious tradition does not guarantee that women will
automatically achieve ecclesiastical and social roles congruent with this imagery
[paragraph ends there was just no period In the article.]
Sacred prostitution is a construct of essentialist scholarship that
perpetuates patriarchal norms – no historical basis for the empowerment
archetype
Johanna H. Stuckey 5, PhD from Yale University, University Professor Emerita at York University,
"Sacred Prostitutes," MatriFocus Cross-Quarterly for the Goddess Woman, Samhain 2005 5(1),
www.matrifocus.com/SAM05/spotlight.htm
An "improbable percentage of the population [of Mesopotamia and Syria-Canaan] must have been either
secular or religious prostitutes of some sort," wrote Beatrice Brooks in 1941 (231). She was drawing conclusions
from the writings of predominantly male scholars who accepted without question the concept of "sacred,
cult, or temple prostitutes." Female temple functionaries, they maintained, regularly engaged in sexual intercourse in return
for a payment to their temples. Female devotees of Inanna/Ishtar, the Mesopotamian goddess of sexuality and love, were
"immediately" suspect of such behavior (Assante 1998:6). Until recently, most scholars took this view for granted, and
some still do. In the nineteenth century, scholars
thought Mesopotamia to be a hotbed of " naïve and primitive
sexual freedom " (Assante 1998:5-6). Members of the then-new discipline of anthropology, such as Sir James Frazer of The
Golden Bough fame, made matters worse by presenting for readers' delectation the orgiastic rites of fertility cults (Assante 2003:2224; Oden 2000:136-138). The result was a fertility-cult myth which took hold among scholars (Stuckey 2005:32-44;
Assante 2003:24-25; Lambert 1992:136). A number of ancient sources were ultimately responsible for the concept of
"sacred prostitute": the Hebrew Bible; later Greek writers like Herodotus (ca.480-ca.425 BCE), Strabo (ca.64 BCE19CE), and Lucian (ca.115-ca.200 CE); and early Christian churchmen. They greatly influenced later writers (Oden
2000:140-147; Assante 1998:8; Henshaw 1994:225-228; Yamauchi 1973:216). Herodotus reported a "wholly shameful"
custom by which every woman "once in her life" had intercourse near the temple of Aphrodite (Ishtar) with
the first stranger who threw "a silver coin" into her lap (Herodotus 1983:121-122,I:199).[1] Similarly, Lucian described the
punishment of women who declined to shave their heads in mourning for Adonis: "For a single day they [had to] stand offering their
beauty for sale … [in a] market … open to foreigners only, and the payment [became] an offering to Aphrodite [Astarte]" (1976:1315). The Christian writers accused pagans of indulging in orgies in honor of Aphrodite, ritual pre-marital sex, and "cult prostitution"
(Oden 2000:142-144). It is true that much ritual activity in the ancient Eastern Mediterranean focussed on
promoting the fecundity of the land. In early Mesopotamia, for instance, the "Sacred Marriage," with its fertility focus,
could possibly have involved a "sacred prostitute." Webster's English Dictionary defines a prostitute as, first, "… a woman who
engages in sexual intercourse for money; whore; harlot"; second, "… a man who engages in sexual acts for money" (1996:1553).
According to one scholar, "Cultic prostitution is a practice involving the female and at times the male devotees of fertility deities,
who presumably dedicated their earnings to their deity." The "Sacred Marriage" rite was one of "the motives of the practice,
particularly in Mesopotamia," where the king had intercourse with "a temple prostitute" (Yamauchi 1973:213). "Obviously, most
scholars did not distinguish between ritual sex and sexuality for pay (Cooper forthcoming). However, ritual sex
would not have been prostitution even if the act produced an offering for a temple (Lambert 1992:136).
Rather, it would have been an act of worship. In the Hebrew Bible, the word normally translated "sacred or
cult prostitute" is qedeshah/qedeshot (feminine singular/ plural) and qadesh/qedeshim (masculine singular/plural). These four
titles do not occur very often in the Hebrew Bible (Henshaw 1994:218-221).[2] The root qdsh means "set apart,
consecrated" (Brown, Driver, and Briggs 1978 (1953):871-874).[3] For the most part, the terms occur in books from
Deuteronomy through to II Kings, the so-called Deuteronomistic History, which is especially nationalistic,
polemical, and denunciatory of Canaanite religion (Oden 2000:131,132; Olyan 1988:3). The assumption that
"sacred prostitution" had not only occurred, but had happened in the context of fertility cults, resulted from the
Hebrew Bible's "deliberate" association of qedeshah, "sacred/consecrated woman," with zonah, "prostitute"
(Bird 1989:76).[4] Thus, an important category of cult functionary called qedeshah existed in Canaan (Henshaw
1994:235-236). Otherwise, why would the Bible need to discredit such women? Their function in Canaanite religion is
not known, but they were "consecrated women," probably priestesses. When the archives of Ugarit, an ancient Semitic-speaking city
in Syria, began to be interpreted, it quickly became evident that the religion of Ugarit was similar to the Canaanite religion vilified in
the Hebrew Bible. Thousands of clay tablets dated to the Late Bronze Age, 1300-1200 BCE (Astour 1981:4), were found to contain,
among other things, lists of gods, offerings, and religious functionaries (del Olmo Lete 1999; de Tarragon 1980). None of the priestly
titles in the texts is grammatically in the feminine gender (de Tarragon 1980:7,8,139ff.), but they could have included women if the
masculine form included the feminine, as it used to do in English. The word qdshm, "consecrated ones," designated
important functionaries: "... we find [them] listed second after the khnm `priests' " (Henshaw 1994:222-225; de Tarragon
1980:134,141; Yamauchi 1973:219). Qdshm had high status, could marry and establish families, and could hold other
There is no suggestion that the ritual role of the qdshm was sexual, nor , indeed, is
there any evidence to date of "sacred prostitution " at Ugarit (de Tarragon 1980:139,140; Yamauchi 1973:219). In
Mesopotamian lists, the Semitic word kharimtu, usually translated "prostitute," was often written with, or close to,
the titles of female cultic personnel. As a result, the latter became "tainted" by proximity (Assante 1998:11). Thus
offices (de Tarragon 1980:141).
not only qadishtu but other female cultic titles were translated "sacred or temple prostitute" (Assante 2003:32). The Mesopotamian
Semitic titles which have usually been translated as "sacred prostitute" include naditu, qadishtu, and entu (Oden 2000:148-150;
Assante 1998:9; Lambert 1992:137-141). In general, naditu priestesses were high-status women who were expected to be chaste
(Assante 1998:38-39; Henshaw 1994:192-195). At Sippar in Old Babylonian times (ca.1880-1550 BCE), they included royal and
noble women (Harris 1960:109,123ff.). There is no evidence that a naditu's duties included ritual sex (Oden 2000:148). The title
qadishtu, "holy, consecrated, or set-apart woman," has the same root as the Hebrew qedeshah (Assante 1998:44-45; Henshaw
1994:207-213). After scholars have carefully scrutinized "extensive evidence of [the qadishtu's] cultic and
other functions" (Gruber 1986:139), it is clear that the qadishtu was no "cult prostitute " (Oden 2000:149). Indeed,
it is likely that most Mesopotamian priestesses , with one possible exception, were expected to be pure
and chaste. The one exception might have been the entu, whom the Sumerians called Nin.Dingir "Lady Deity" or "Lady Who Is
Goddess" (Henshaw 1994:47; Frayne 1985:14). If the "Sacred Marriage Rite" ever involved human participants, this priestess might,
as "Inanna," have had ritual intercourse with the king. However, the entu had very high status (Henshaw 1994:46) and, according to
Mesopotamian law codes, had to adhere to "strict ethical standards" (Hooks 1985:13). Whatever else she was, she was not a
prostitute. For a certain period, the "Sacred Marriage" was an important fertility ritual in Mesopotamia (Frayne 1985:6). As a result
of the king's participation, whatever form it took, he became Inanna's consort, sharing "her invaluable fertility power and potency"
(Kramer 1969:57), as well as, to some extent, her divinity and that of her bridegroom Dumuzi. Unfortunately, no text tells us what
happened in the temple's ritual bedroom, not even whether the participants were human beings or statues (Hooks 1985:29).
However, in a persuasive article, Douglas Frayne argues that, at least in early times, the participants were human: the king and the
Nin.Dindir/entu (Frayne 1985:14). In the "Sacred Marriage" material, the female participant is always called Inanna (Sefati
1998:305), so her human identity is obscured. That is not surprising, for I suspect that, during the ritual, the only female present was
Inanna. What I am suggesting is that the Nin.Dindir/entu was a medium. Through talent and training, she went into a trance and
allowed Inanna to take over her body. Then the goddess could actually be present during the ritual. To a greater or lesser degree, the
king could similarly have embodied the god Dumuzi. A medium is "… a social functionary whose body only, the person's awareness
suppressed while in an ecstatic state, serves as a means for spirits to assist and/or communicate with members of the medium's
group in a positive manner" (Paper 1995:87). The "witch of Endor" in the Hebrew Bible (I Samuel 28:7-25) was likely a medium, and
other ancient examples include the oracular priestesses through whom Apollo spoke at Delphi and the Maenad devotees of Dionysus
(Kraemer 1989:49). Today mediums function in many religions: for instance, Chinese, Korean, African, and African-Christian of the
Americas (Paper 1997:95,104-107,222-226,303; Sered 1994:181-193). Interestingly, the majority of contemporary mediums are
female (Paper 1997:95). Ancient Mesopotamia, like most other cultures, had its prophets and seers (Westenholz 2004:295). A
number of them probably worked through trance. Indeed, "… ecstatic religious functionaries, that is, those whose religious
functioning involves trance, are virtually ubiquitous in human cultures" (Paper forthcoming). So it would not surprise me to discover
that the Inanna of the "Sacred Marriage" rite was actually properly named, for the goddess was using the body of a willing and
devout ecstatic and priestess, who was certainly not a "cult prostitute." On the contrary, she would have had extremely high status
and have been deeply revered, for she was chosen of the goddess. Finally, then, the identity of the human female participant in the
ritual is irrelevant. She was Inanna! "Tragically," says one contemporary scholar, "scholarship suffered from scholars
being unable to imagine any cultic role for women in antiquity that did not involve sexual intercourse "
(Gruber 1986:138). However, recent scholars are fast setting the record straight. Even if ancient priestesses were involved in ritual
sex, even if they received offerings for their temples, they were not prostitutes but devotees worshipping their deity.
1NC Silencing Turn
Sex work is not a choice for many women – the universal glorification of
female sexuality exoticizes and decontextualizes prostitution through
erasure of experienced violence – the idea that ‘every woman’ must honor
her inner Goddess proves the link and means they can’t solve
Maddy Coy 11, Deputy Director of Child and Woman Abuse Studies Unit at London Metropolitan
University, Josephine Wakeling, UK practitioner working alongside women affected by prostitution,
Maria Garner, PhD student with Child and Woman Abuse Studies Unit at London Metropolitan
University, "Selling sex sells: Representations of prostitution and the sex industry in sexualised popular
culture as symbolic violence," September-October 2011, Women's Studies International Forum 34(5), pp.
441-448
the harms women experience in the sex industry: violence,
coercion and exploitation as well as the dehumanisation of the body as commodity disjunctions between
women's experiences of prostitution and sanitised versions
are most acute
with respect to violence; women's experiences of violence in prostitution are either absent entirely and
invisibilised
or trivialised
the majority of women in the sex
industry report experiences of physical and sexual violence
Harms of prostitution Central to framing the glamourisation of prostitution as symbolic violence is recognition of
. The
in many popular media representations (characterised by pimp and ho chic)
by an emphasis on ‘fun’,
— one study of 854 people in nine countries found that
in the name of humour, as we shall demonstrate. For context, research demonstrates that
63% had been raped
since entering prostitution,
suggesting that violence is a routine rather than
exceptional event
(Farley, et al., 2003). Violence and abuse are not confined to specific settings — a quarter (23.3%) of exotic dancers, and over two thirds (66.7%) of women in prostitution in U.S. drug houses reported sexual violence, while
one in five (21%) of women in prostitution on the street, in their own homes and as escorts had been raped more than ten times (Raphael & Shapiro, 2004). A UK study across three cities found almost half of women in street prostitution and over a quarter of those in
indoor prostitution had experienced violence in the last six months (Church, Henderson, Barnard, & Hart, 2001). Qualitative analysis of women's accounts of prostitution illustrates parallels with their experiences of sexual violence in terms of their sense of violation
This pervasive violence reveals
the depth of stigma and worthlessness attached to women involved in the sex industry such stigma
has an acute meaning for women in prostitution since ‘the ‘prostitute’ is the ‘end
stop’ in discourses on good and honest women’
and disruption of relationship with the body (Coy, 2009b). The harms that we refer to throughout this article thus involve these physical, sexual, material and psychosocial layers of abuse.
; while
attached to
sexual reputation affects all women to varying degrees, it
(O'Neill, 2001: 186). An acute illustration is the way in which language used to describe women in prostitution – whore, ‘ho’ – persists as a means
of denigrating all women, despite its apparent reclamation in popular culture. For example, in May 2011 a British woman described being labelled ‘a prostitute’ in a civil Anti-Social Behaviour Order (ASBO) as having ruined her ‘whole life’ (BBC News, 2011). The
designation of women in prostitution as ‘other’ and ‘lesser’ has been cited as justification by serial murderers (Salfati et al., 2008 and Smith, 1990). Research suggests that women in prostitution are almost 18 times more likely to be murdered than women not in
prostitution (Potterat et al., 2004). In the majority of cases, the perpetrator is a sex buyer (Kinnell, 2008). One UK study showed that 89% men paying for sex thought women who sell sex were dirty, 91% more sexually available and 77% inferior (Elliott et al., 2002).
In this context, portrayals of prostitution in popular culture that reinforce the pornified mythology of women as sluts and ‘hos’ (Dines, 2010), failing to recognise the multiple abuses that women contend with, constitute symbolic violence. For instance,
glamorising prostitution appears
to carry the potential to subvert stigma. However, the sex industry is
built on objectification and commodification of women
as well as on women's lack of
subjectivity and suspension of the self to serve men's desires
Glamorisation of
prostitution in popular culture brings these notions into wider currency.
even
embracing that status, mainstreams a conceptual justification for
potent symbolic violence
equating sexualisation
with
empowerment enacts symbolic violence on women who experience prostitution as harmful, desperate and
distressing
, for some,
(Barry, 1995 and Jeffreys, 2009),
(Coy, 2008 and O'Connell Davidson, 1998).
Mainstreaming the idea that women exist as sex objects,
violence. This is in itself
popular consciousness the sense that as sexual objects women are less than human. Furthermore, glamorising the sex industry and
, bringing into
, pornification and pimp and ho chic
. The mainstreaming and normalisation of the sex industry Across the globe, the sex industry is tightly knitted into corporate culture and generates billions every year that contribute significantly to national and local economies (Barry,
1995, Brents and Hausbeck, 2007 and Jeffreys, 2009). Globalisation – in terms of extension of free markets and opening up of national borders – has increased both the availability and visibility of prostitution (Marttila, 2008). Commercial sex premises proliferate
in cities and urban spaces, in the form of strip/lap dancing clubs, sex tours and in some areas licenced parlours, with the anodyne epithet of ‘adult entertainment’ (Jeffreys, 2009). This normalisation of commercialised sexual activity is what Marjut Jyrkinen (2005)
refers to as ‘McSexualisation’, in recognition of the links with global consumerism. One study of brothels in Nevada draws attention to the use of marketing strategies associated with mainstream businesses and audiences, including the packaging of buying sex as a
commercial sex premises
(re)present
paying for sex as a normalised commodity in the ‘global cultural marketplace’
The process of such
normalisation contributes to the invisibilising of the gendered consumption of women's bodies by male
buyers, thus misrecognising power inequalities
the paradigm of prostitution has entered
popular culture in interlinked
ways
normalisation of prostitution would lead to it
being a reference point for all other heterosexual relationships
touristic experience (Brents & Hausbeck, 2007). Through this,
embed themselves further into tourism industries, increase their economic and political power, and
(Altman, 2001: 83).
. As part of ‘McSexualisation’,
, but myriad,
. Kathleen Barry (1995) argued that the
, whether or not they involve the exchange of money. In Meagan Tyler's (2008) trenchant analysis of ideal
hetero(sex) in self help books recommended by sex therapists, she defines ‘the sex of prostitution’ as ‘synonymous with the servicing of men… the model of sex which is performed in prostitution rather than the element of monetary exchange’ (p365). In these selfhelp books, the key messages are that (hetero)sex is biologically determined and privileges men's desires; for instance, penetrative intercourse is repeatedly acknowledged to offer limited pleasure for women and detailed advice is given to overcome discomfort of oral
while the commodification of sex is one feature of the
socio-cultural prostitution motif, another is the reframing of (hetero)sex to align with the instrumental
model of sex in prostitution that foregrounds male pleasure
sex. Similar advice is often used to condition women in prostitution about expectations and appropriate activities (ibid). Th us
. Finally, Tyler identifies a major theme in self help texts that mirrors the portrayals of prostitution in popular
culture that we discuss: the requirement for women to engage in and embrace the sex of prostitution, just as Gill, 2007 and Dines, 2010 point out the similar requirement in sexualised media and pornography. Ariel Levy succinctly captured this equation with
empowerment in her exploration of the mainstreaming of the sex industry: Because we have determined that all empowered women must be overtly and publicly sexual, and because the only sign of sexuality we seem to be able to recognise is a direct allusion to redlight entertainment, we have laced the sleazy energy and aesthetic of a topless club or a Penthouse shoot throughout our entire culture ( Levy, 2005:26). Sexualised consumerism actively promotes models of prostitution as a prototype for intimate relationships.
There are few cultural references to sex buyers in pimp and ho chic, indicating a selective discourse which minimises men's accountability and visibility as consumers. Yet the limited representations are revealing. For instance, in 2005, a UK based lads mag, FHM,
ran a feature which invited readers to calculate how much sex cost them, by dividing costs such as wine, meals, gifts, by the number of acts of sexual intercourse (Viner, 2006). As one journalist commented, ‘this aggressively blur[s] the line between
girlfriend/boyfriend and prostitute/punter relationships’ (Viner, 2006) and is also couched in open misogyny since the budgeting advice is ‘less than £5 is about the same price as a Cambodian whore …. Each shag now needs to be a better purchase than a new CD’
(Turner, 2005). Research with men who pay for sex demonstrates these themes of ‘value for money’ and market forces influence their decision making processes (Coy, Horvath, & Kelly, 2007). Sex buyers report seeking quality of service and ensuring that contractual
obligations are fulfilled, with the most transparent expression of this sexualised consumerism a comparison of the relative cost of paying for sex to heterosexual dating: To go out looking for a girl, it's a lot of expense… paying for sex, it's an agreement between you
and the girl, you pay your money and then that's done with. I've taken girls out, I take her for a meal, that cost me £40… you don't get bugger all after that… [whereas when paying for sex] you can do anything you want for 20 min. Everything and anything. For £40
(cited in Coy et al., 2007: 20). Interestingly a study in Australia reports virtually the same account from one sex buyer: ‘I could spend 100 bucks a night taking some bird out, you could do that 3 or 4 times you know before you're anywhere…. I'd rather come here
every now and again and then, pay my money and you know, that's that’ (cited in Plumridge, Chetwynd, Reed, & Gifford, 1997: 172). Similar sentiments were also noted in diary accounts of sex tourists to Thailand (Bishop & Robinson, 2002). Thus in reproducing
these cost benefit analyses in a lads mag, albeit in what is claimed as a ‘tongue in cheek’ style (that, as Benwell, 2004 and McRobbie, 2009 note, deflects criticism), FHM instals the dynamics of prostitution into the thought processes and relationships of readers.
Women in the sex industry are mocked using notions of race and ethnicity (the article also refers to ‘Cypriot tarts’ for £20 and over £31 ‘Cuban show girls’) that fail to acknowledge the structural inequalities underpinning women's involvement in prostitution. The
symbolic violence of these discourses is both the objectification and dehumanisation of women to serve men's instrumental sexual desires and the disguising or ‘misrecognising’ of gendered, racialised power. This casual normalisation of the exchange of women's
bodies for money tells a strong story about how prostitution, not just sexualisation, has become a lexicon and potential paradigm for heterosexual relationships. How this is framed as ‘entertainment’ is of the most relevance in this article. Borrowing from AmyChinn's (2006) analysis of how lingerie advertisements position women as actively embracing a sexualised self while reinforcing masculine norms, we ask for who are these forms of sexualised entertainment? This is evidenced by research showing that globally the
majority of sex buyers are men (Coy et al., 2007, Jeffreys, 2009, O'Connell Davidson, 1998 and Ward et al., 2005). Thus commercial sex is, as O'Neill (2001: 155) notes, ‘with few exceptions… a market for men’. Accounts from men who visit strip clubs in Scandinavia
and the U.S. indicate that many are seeking a space that affirms ‘traditional’ gender roles based on masculine superiority, free from obligations of gender equality (Frank, 2003 and Marttila, 2008). Yet the framing of prostituti on as entertainment obscures these
structural power relations and privileges a masculine entitlement to sex (Barry, 1995 and Coy et al., 2007), by normalising the sexualisation of women's bodies. Airbrushing harm: the glamorisation of prostitution Here we explore how portrayals of women in
prostitution in television and films, with a thematic construction of ‘superficial empowerment’ (Boyle, 2010: 99), propagate
notions of ‘choice’ to explain women's involvement in
the sex industry
and adoption of ‘ho chic’ fashion. The most iconic film, ‘Pretty Woman’, (re)presented a mythology of prostitution whereby wo men are saved by a rich man, but films such as Taxi Driver and Leaving Las Vegas also contribute
to these perceptions. As Rochelle Dalla (2000) notes: Popular images presented on the big screens often portray prostitution as a temporary course of action, where in the end the heroine finds love and happiness and suffers few, if any, enduring scars from her brief
research
shows prostitution actually impoverishes women, if time out of the employment market and lack of
opportunities to develop and update skills/training are calculated over the life course
stint on the streets; an image not borne out by empirical research and the realities of drug use, homelessness and the multiple challenges of leaving prostitution that women face (p352). In contrast to the fairytale route to prosperity,
the
(DeRiviere, 2006). The profits from the sex industry
for owners of brothels, sexualised dance clubs and escort agencies, however, run into billions — indicative figures suggest that men spend $15 bn a year on strip clubs in the U.S.; trafficking of women is worth $31 bn annually (Jeffreys, 2009) and sex industry profits
in Japan alone are an estimated annual 4.2 trillion yen (Sassen, 2002). Two examples of representations of women's involvement in prostitution illustrate the discourses of superficial empowerment and entertainment. The first is a 2006 British television situation
comedy Respectable, set in a brothel, which featured women involved in prostitution to buy new shoes (Hayley) and pay student fees (Kate), and men who pay for sex as timid and seeking kindness (Michael). The series was broadcast for a late night audience, and
while not commissioned for a second series in the UK, it was subsequently shown in Germany, Australia and Hungary ( Internet Movie Database, 2010). In response to feminist critique of the characters and plotlines, producers contrarily claimed that as a comedy
there was no requirement for Respectable to be realistic, but it was based on real stories from women in prostitution ( BBC News, 2006). One possible reading of the series is that it attempted to personalise the characters and thus diminish stigma and ‘othering’.
These fictional characters do not, however, reflect the range of experiences of women in prostitution and there are no references to poverty and coercion. In particular, the representation of an Eastern European woman (Yelena) masks the issue of trafficking of
women into the UK from Eastern Europe. At a time when media coverage and government campaigns were urging sex buyers to be aware of women being trafficked from these regions, the portrayal here was of an empowered woman from Eastern Europe in control
of her situation. Whether or not individual women like Yelena, Hayley, Kate and men like Michael exist is not our point here (see also Mendes et al., 2010), rather the ways in which these narratives paint a picture of the sex industry which airbrushes out the all
negative aspects (see also Cochrane, 2006). Similar debate followed the UK dramatisation of the novel ‘Secret Diary of a Call Girl’, ( De Jour, 2005), where a young woman with a university education engages in prostitution for hundreds of pounds an hour, loves sex
glamorisation in popular
culture diminishes the space to recognise harm, violence and exploitation within the sex industry and
places notions of choice and empowerment at the forefront of cultural discourse
and enjoys luxury in all aspects of her life. The concern of many critics was not whether or not the character of Belle herself is real, 2 or women with similar experiences exist, but that such
( Saner, 2007, see also Boyle, 2010). The second example is an
analysis of the film Moulin Rouge (and associated commercial merchandise that has evolved into a genre of clothing named after the film) where notions of ‘choice’ are also reflected. The film portrays a young ‘courtesan’ (Satine) for whom prostitution has the
potential to be socially and financially rewarding, as women are depicted as able to choose buyers ( Della Giusta & Scuriatti, 2005). Despite these emblems of empowerment, the virgin/whore dichotomy of femininity is reinforced — as Satine's virginity is her
marketing point, her death in the film is inevitable in order to enable her to be the lost love of the two male protagonists (ibid). In dying, Satine cannot be ‘despoiled’ through prostitution, and can be immortally preserved as ‘untainted’ and ‘pure’. This reveals the
ultimate contradiction of the representation in prostitution in Moulin Rouge — that while it spawned clothing ranges inspired by the film, the stigma attached to the actual exchange of sex for money is left intact (ibid). Della Giusta and Scuriatti's (2005) analytic
focus is on the ‘process through which prostitution, which still bears a negative cultural stigma, is deployed to make clothes attractive to buyers’ (p36). Following the release of the film, women's clothing on the high street and in designer ranges featured corsets,
basques bustiers, chokers and stockings as synonymous with sexy femininity ( Freeman, 2001). Similar paths from the sex industry to high street fashion are reflected in the mainstream popularity of the ‘stripper shoe’, ( Roach, 2007), and sales of Playboy bunny
branded clothing, stationery and home accessories ( Attwood, 2005). Sexually objectifying clothing has become trendy and is marketed as empowering, born of both patriarchy and consumerism. Della Giusta and Scuriatti suggest: The use of images of prostitution in
fashion and fashion advertising is located at the intersection of these issues: the commodification of women's bodies is a product of non-egalitarian relations, which express themselves at the social, economic and sexual levels, and on which capitalism is ultimately
based. The need for a specific role for women as consumers leads to continuously reinventing their subordinate role, and in this sense glamorization of images of subordination is just one tool (2005: 41). The transformation of prostitution into a fashion marketing
device is harmful in two ways: the (re)presentation of prostitution as empowering; and the ongoing stigma attached to women in ‘real’ prostitution (ibid). Catherine Roach insightfully identifies that clothing associated with the sex industry has led to a context where
‘it may be acceptable for your average college girl to look like a hooker, but hookers [sic] themselves are not benefitting from this upturn in their popularity’ (Roach, 2007: 117). However, Angela McRobbie (2008) argues that precisely this assimilation of ‘hooker’ chic
into everyday fashion destigmatises women in prostitution. While it may be superficially true that women in prostitution are ‘less visible as an object of contempt or derision’ (ibid: 228), we question how the camouflaging of young women as objects for men's sexual
release represents power or equality, and why adopting a role so often associated with harm and violence should be celebrated. Metaphors of prostitution are marketed to women as a fun, liberatory way to be sexually adventurous and desirable, while grim realities of
poverty, abuse, coercion are unchallenged. Through this, the sex industry myth of inevitability (‘the oldest profession’, see Jeffreys, 2005) and the male sex right of sexual access to women's bodies (Barry, 1995) are implicitly normalised, whilst women in prostitution
remain ‘other’. Attwood (2005) analysis of how sex is marketed to women through the lens of fashion, beauty and appearance is also relevant here. She suggests that as sexualised femininity is still largely shaped by patriarchal mores, nascent attempts at an
empowering framing of sexuality are constructed around masquerade and theatrical accessories. The incursion of apparel associated with prostitution might therefore be understood as ‘trying on the clothes of an adult female sexuality’ (p402), in the absence of a
fully formulated autonomous sexuality for women. However, the promotion and popularity of ‘ho chic’ links such an adult female sexuality with prostitution, and the motifs and messages associated with commercialised sex without the exchange of money (Barry,
1995). While the stigma of prostitution still exists in reality, prostitution is simultaneously being sold as glamorous and emblematic of individual choice in popular culture. There are also explicit links with the sex industry in some contemporary children's clothing,
including t-shirts for babies that have ‘pimp squad’ or tassles for twirling nipples emblazoned across the front (Coy, 2009a). These products normalise prostitution as a light-hearted topic for embellishing clothing, an emblem of edgy, ‘cool’ fashion, but link children
to an industry that is defined as exploitative and abusive when they are involved in it in real life. It is difficult to imagine other contexts and forms of abuse of children that would be subject to ‘ironic’ promotion in the name of humour. Yet the mainstream cultural
backdrop of prostitution as harmless entertainment facilitates this symbolically violent marketing device. The language of prostitution: mainstreaming ‘pimp and ho’ Here we explore how the celebration of the pimp and ho vocabulary constitutes symbolic violence.
References to pimping in popular culture originated in commercial hip hop music lyrics (Rose, 2008) and the term has since become widely used as a verb.3 The MTV show Pimp my Ride introduced pimping as a verb in 2004, as the title of a programme where old
cars are restored to a brand new appearance and technical standard with luxury additions (www.mtv.co.uk/shows/pimp-my-ride). Versions of Pimp my Ride are/have been broadcast in the US, the UK, Germany, the Baltic Region, Finland, Italy, the Ne therlands,
New Zealand, Brazil and through MTV Arabia. Subsequently, ‘to pimp’ has become a verb that if not exactly mainstream, is associated with youth-oriented popular culture, as a light hearted way to describe improving an object to make it more valuable. There is an
implicit connection here with the traditional use of the word ‘pimp’ — the value of an object [woman] can be increased by enhancing ‘packaging’ and negotiating the demands of the market. For instance, one use of the word that is rooted in the gendered dimensions
of pimping is the UK website Pimp my Bride, which aims to enable women to lose weight before a wedding. Their rationale for choosing this term is revealing: defensively claiming postmodern irony — ‘Though the name's a little tongue in cheek, we take your
training serious’ (sic) (www.pimpmybrideuk.co.uk). Pimp my Bride identifies the gendered nature of the concept of pimping when seeking to attract customers — ‘We don't just cater to brides to be either, but ‘Pimp My Groom’ wouldn't have worked…’! There are
transparent links between the use of ‘pimping’ as a marketing device and the original meaning of the term, specifically with respect to notions of women as commodities to be made as desirable as possible for marketing purposes. Popular culture is saturated with
exemplars of how the term ‘pimp’ has become normalised as a marketing device through corporate sponsorship (Lloyd, 2010): ‘Pimp that snack’, a website dedicated to massive enlargements of snacks and chocolate bars; ‘Pimp my search’ — a website that enables
users to create a personalised website with their own logo. Virgin Airlines advertised their upper class passenger facilities with the tag-line ‘Pimp My Lounge’ (Frith, 2006). An extras package for the computer game ‘The Sims’, featuring clo thes, accessories and
makeup to enhance players' characters in the game, is called ‘Pimp my Sims’. A similar site exists for additions to the software package Safari — ‘Pimp my Safari’ (www.pimpmysafari.com). The website ‘Pimp-text’ invites users to ‘create your own pimp text’ by adding
sparkle to fonts for use on social networking sites. The application of the word ‘pimp’ for products associated with information technology also has an iterative impact for young people that use the Internet on a daily basis (Roberts, Foehr, & Rideout, 2005). One
acknowledgement of how entrenched in contemporary youth culture the term ‘pimping’ has become is the publication of the book Pimp Your Vocab in September 2009, a guide to ‘teenglish’ for adults ( Tobin, 2009). A prominent marketing use of the term is the
energy drink ‘Pimp Juice’, named after the rap singer Nelly's track and sold internationally, targeted at young people. It is an example of what Eithne Quinn (2000) calls the ‘lifestylisation’ of the ‘misogynist, street-heroic figure’ (p116). While Ice-T claims that
‘pimping’ denotes a ‘fly, cool lifestyle which has nothing to do with prostitution’ (cited in Quinn, 2000: 124), many of the ways in which pimping has become a verb in popular culture frequently invoke the prostitution-related meaning of the term. For instance, a
2005 Christmas advertising campaign for Selfridges (a UK department store), for example, featured a black man holding a glass of champagne and dressed in ‘pimp chic’, while women wearing only lingerie posed beside him (Frith, 2006), drawing on intersections of
race and gender in pimp discourse. In references to pimping and ‘hos’ that proliferate in commercial hip hop song lyrics, these themes are also apparent — for instance, in P.I.M.P. by 50 cent, the video for which features women being walked on leashes (Levin &
Kilbourne, 2008), and Three 6 Mafia's (2005) ‘It's hard out here for a pimp’, which won an Academy Award for best original song, and refers to ‘making change off these women’. That song which valorises the ‘trials’ of men who profit from selling women's bodies
was re(a)warded by the film industry is extremely telling; despite references to women's fear of murder and poverty, the lyrics reiterate the inevitability of prostitution (‘that's the way the game goes’) and the sovereignty of the market in securing men's sexual access
to women (‘you pay the right price and they'll both do you’). Here symbolic violence is evident in the way in which pimping as a verb has become so mainstreamed that it is not only an acceptable topic for popular music songs, but also that the lyrical content
explicitly endorses and promotes profiting from women's bodies while disguising (misrecognising) this through the lens of entertainment. Pimping has also become a role play game identity, available in board and online game formats. One particular example of
hostile attitudes to women in prostitution is found in the ‘Pimps and Hos’ game, developed in 2004 and marketed on ‘adult’ board game websites. It is described on one website as ‘made for the person with a twisted mind that wants gut busting laughs’
(www.pimpcostumes.com). All the players are designated pimps, and the aim is to ‘acquire hos’ and pimp them out while travelling around the board (a fictional city named HoTropolis), with the winner being the first to reach $1500 profit from their ‘ho’. Sample
cards enable players to infect rival ‘hos’ with STIs, and ‘bitch-slap’ women for ‘lipping off’ — trivialising violence against women and reiterating age old stigmatising images of women in prostitution as reservoirs of infection. Sexual violence as a core aspect of
prostitution is a consistent theme; in contrast to many of the representations that we discuss such violence is acknowledged here, but treated as a legitimate source of humour, as one sample card demonstrates: ‘when the guards were tossing your cell for contraband,
they find a tube of sex lube; too bad they decided to pound you dry…Pay the clinic $200 for the soothing cream’ (www.guanabee.com). Pimp and ho chic, equated with ‘cool’, reduce violence and harm to humour, rearticulating physical and sexual violence as a form
of symbolic violence by celebrating abusive, predatory masculinity. Free online pimping based games also echo these themes: Pimp War requires players to ‘play the part of a ruthless pimp on a quest for power and money. You will become a master at the art of
pimping your hos’ (www.pimpwar.com). The game is linked to social networking sites and claims to have registered over a million ‘pimps’ since its 1999 launch (ibid). Pimps Street is similarly transparent about the significance of ‘hos’ on the site, reminding players
that ‘to keep hos happy you want to make sure you have a good stock of condoms, crack and medicine and to increase this stock as your hos use them up (during turns, attacks, whoring etc.) and as more hos join your crew’ (www.pimpsstreet.com). As Tricia Rose,
author of books about the racialised, gendered dimensions of commercial hip-hop notes: Despite the cuddly and fuzzy hat image in some mainstream outlets and celebrated films like Hustle and Flow that attempt to generate sympathy for pimps, pimp ideology and
its expression in popular culture are fundamentally exploitative to women ( Rose, 2008: 168). To recognise the symbolic violence of the mainstreaming of the term ‘pimping’ requires recalling the manipulative techniques that men who pimp women use to secure
control, including disrupting or destroying identity, violence and drugs (Barry, 1995). These are used to form the basis, and humour, of the games discussed above, again mainstreaming notions of women as less than human, existing for men's pleasure and profit. In
pornified popular culture, shored up by notions of choice and empowerment associated with prostitution, ‘to pimp’ has become shorthand for ‘to market’ something for maximum profit — a usage seemingly devoid of, yet fundamentally based on, the term's semantic
representations of, prostitution
indicative of the
normalisation of commercial sex
is associated with female empowerment and
entertainment, reflecting a ‘postfeminist media sensibility’
that women can use their bodies
or profit as a means of, and route to, personal empowerment
obscures empirical realities of violence, exploitation and harm and the structural inequalities on which
the sex industry is built
airbrushing of harm and equation with empowerment lead us to conclude that many
contemporary representations of prostitution constitute symbolic violence.
origins of exploiting women in prostitution. Conclusion References to, and
across a wide range of sources in contemporary popular culture are
. In many of these portrayals, commercial sex
(Gill, 2007), a key notion of which is
. Yet we argue that the increasing use of prostitution as a motif and marketing device in popular culture
. Our analysis also draws attention to the mainstreaming of ‘pimp’ as a cultural motif, and its defence and normalisation through humour and irony even where violence is a core theme. Selling sex may
indeed, in marketing terms, sell, but the
Archetypal Psychology Bad
Archetypal psychology and religion worsens the plight of the soul it
attempts to resolve---social divisions and antagonisms are fueled by
specifically modern conditions of shared existence, but archetypal
psychology directs energy away from addressing them by futilely looking
back to a supposedly lost relationship with divinity
Woflgang Giegerich 1, Ph.D from Berkeley and former Professor of German Literature at Rutgers,
2001, The Soul’s Logical Life, p. 178-79
A psychology that does not know about the rupture in the soul, that is not responsive to it in the very
constitution of the categories of its thinking and thereby does not allow the brokenness to find adequate
expression in it, is a psychology which cannot do justice to the soul’s wound. It cannot possibly meet the
soul where it actually is today. Psychology needs a sense of Time, History, the Animus. As long as it
cocoons itself in the timelessness of a Platonistic realm of images, it misses the soul’s fundamental
brokenness that is its (psychology’s) actual subject matter. It rests content to dwell in the abstract realm
of potentialities, and to the degree that it does this foregoes any handle on concrete psychological reality.
It then inevitably has to fall into the ego that it officially tries to overcome: by acting as if modern man’s
loss of the Gods were his neglect and as if he only had to return to imagining in order to experience a true
“Renaissance.” However, by flirting with the idea of a “Renaissance,” you merely glue over the break. And
by putting the burden of a rebirth of the Gods on us, you show that you do not really reckon any more with
the Gods as the innermost truth of real life, much as you pretend to be doing. To be sure, the Gods need us
humans. But if they were still alive, all the world would serve them and praise their name. We could not
help it, because this is the sign that Gods are alive (just like any real joy or love instinctively spills over
into behavior and speech). Conversely, the widespread feeling of a loss of meaning and the death of God is
the spontaneous self-manifestation of the psychological obsolescence of God and Gods. All Hillman has to
offer by way of an answer to the predicament of the modem soul seems to boil down to what can be
expressed in the lines, “Gimme that old-time [i.e., pagan] religion, it’s good enough for me.” I cannot
detect any genuine response to Descartes, Kant, globalization, cyberspace, etc., a response that would
have come from an unreserved listening to these phenomena and from taking them seriously, namely as
phenomena having their place in the history of the soul. There is only a rejection, a counter-program, with
which the real plight of the soul is simply side-stepped, but also left free to develop without
conscious, soulful accompaniment.
AT: Psychoanalysis
Archetypal imaginaries are not empirical and have no explanatory power --prefer some materiality
Slava Sadovnikov 7, York University, "Escape from Reason: Labels as Arguments and Theories",
Dialogue XLVI (2007), 781-796, philpapers.org/archive/SADEFR.pdf
The way McLaughlin shows the rosy prospects of psychoanalytical social theory boils down to this: there are
people who labour at it. He reports on Neil Smelser’s lifelong elaborations of psychoanalytical sociology, which prescribed the use of Freudian
theories. Then he presents a “powerful” psychoanalytical theory of creativity of Michael Farrell, commenting on how the theorist “usefully utilizes
psychoanalytic insights,” though McLaughlin does not specify them. He
correctly expects that I might not view his examples as
scientific. Their problems begin well before that. First, due to their informative emptiness, or tautological
character, all they amount to is rewordings of everyday assumptions. Second, due to their vagueness these
accounts are compatible with any outcomes; in other words, they lack explanatory and predictive power.
The proposed ideas are too inarticulate to subject to intersubjective criticism, and to call them empirical
or scientific theories would be, no matter how comforting, a gross misuse of words. ¶ On the constructive side, a
psychoanalytic theorist may be challenged to unambiguously formulate her suppositions and specify conditions of their disproof, to leave out what we
already well know and smooth out internal inconsistencies, and revise the theories in view of easily available counter-examples and competing
accounts. Only after having done this can one present candidate theories to public criticism and thus make them part of science, and fruitfully discuss
their further refinements. Another suggestion is not to label them “powerful theories,” “classics,” or anything else before their real scrutiny begins. ¶
That criticism and disagreement are indispensable for science is not a “Popperian orthodoxy ,” although Popper
does champion this idea; it is the pivot of the tradition (which we owe to the Greeks) which identifies rationalism with
criticism. 4 McLaughlin ostensibly bows to the critical tradition but does not put it to use. Instead of critical evaluation of the theories in question he
writes of “compelling case,” “powerful analytic model,” and “useful conceptual tool.” ¶ On the methodological side of the issue, we
should inquire into the mode of thinking common to Fromm and all adherents of confirmation-ism. The trick consists in
mere replacement of familiar words with new, more peculiar ones; customary expressions are substituted by “instrumental
intimacy,” “collaborative circles,” and “idealization of a self-object.” Since the new, funnier, and pseudo-theoretical tag does the job
of naming just as well, it “shows how” things work. The new labels in the cases criticized here do not add anything
to our knowledge; nor do they explain. We have seen Fromm routinely abuse this technique. The vacuity of Fromm’s explanations by
character type was the central point in my analysis of Escape , yet McLaughlin conveniently ignores it and, like Fromm, uses the method of labelling as
somehow supporting his cause. ¶ The
widely popular practice of mistaking new labels for explanations has been
exposed by many methodologists in the history of philosophy, but probably the most famous example of such critique comes from
Molière. In the now often-quoted passage, his character delivers a vacuous explanation of opium’s property to induce sleep by renaming the property
with an offhand Latinism, “virtus dormitiva.” The satire acutely points not only at the impostor doctor’s hiding his lack of knowledge behind foreign
words, but also at the emptiness of his alleged explanation. (Pseudo-theoretical literature is boring precisely because of its “dormitive virtue,” its
shuffling of labels without rewarding inquiring minds.) ¶ Let me review notable criticisms of this approach in the twentieth century by Hempel,
Homans, and Weber leaving aside their forerunners. This problem was discussed in the famous debate between William Dray and Carl Hempel. Dray
argues, contra the nomological account of explanation, that historians and social
scientists often try to answer the question, “What
is this phenomenon?” by giving an “explanation-by-concept” (Dray 1959, p. 403). A series of events may be better understood
if we call it “a social revolution”; or the appropriate tag may be found in the expressions “reform,” “collaboration,” “class struggle,” “progress,” etc.; or,
to take Fromm’s suggestions, we may call familiar motives and actions “sadomasochistic,” and any political choice save the Marxist “escape from
freedom.Ӧ Hempel agrees with Dray that such
concepts may be explanatory, but they are so only if the chosen labels
or classificatory tags refer to some uniformities,
or are based on nomic analogies. In other words, our
new label has explanatory force if it states or implies some established
regularity (Hempel 1970, pp. 453-57). For example, you travel to a foreign country and, strolling along the street,
see a boisterous crowd. Your guide may explain the crowd with one of several terms: that it is the local soccer
team’s fans celebrating its victory, or it is a local religious festival, or a teachers’ strike, etc. The labels applied
here—celebration, festival, strike— have explanatory value , because we know that things they refer to
usually manifest themselves in noisy or unruly mass gatherings.¶ If, on the other hand , by way of explaining
the boisterous crowd the guide had invoked some hidden social or psychological forces, or used expressions
such as embodiment, mode of production, de-centring, simulacra, otherness, etc., its causes would remain obscure . If
she had referred to psychoanalytic “character types” (say, Fromm’s authoritarian, anal, or necrophiliac types), the
explanation would not make much sense either. Nothing prevents us nevertheless from unconditionally attaching all these labels
to any event. The mistake McLaughlin and confirmationists persistently make is in thinking that labelling social
phenomena alone does theoretical and explanatory work. 5 George Homans observed the prevalence of this trick some decades
ago:¶ Much modern sociological theory seems to us to possess every virtue except that of explaining anything.
. . . The theorist shoves various aspects of behavior into his pigeonholes, cries “Ah-ha!” and leaves it at that.
Like magicians in all times and places, the theorist thinks he controls phenomena if he is able to give them
names, particularly names of his own invention. (1974, pp. 10-11)
jung bad
Their reclamation fails – imagery of female divinity justifies gendered
societal structures
Joan Goodnick Westenholz 2k, Ph.D. in Near Eastern Languages and Literatures from the
University of Chicago, “King by Love of Inanna - an image of female empowerment?,” 2000, Nin - Journal
of Gender Studies in Antiquity 1
The legitimation of kingship is thus mythologized as the bestowal of kingship by the goddess Inanna on the king through her
marriage and love of him. Does this myth reflect society at any time? What is the connection between theology and
gender ideology? In general, it has been stated that in her being and in her cult, Inanna/Ishtar provides an
outlet for female gender expression. Nevertheless, She maintains the gender order by providing a sacred
example and divine warrant for the gendered structure of society . Goddesses are said to define the female
in society, to be godwomen. Feminist scholars have attempted to explore the relationship between the
worship of the goddess and the political and economic power of women in acneint times. In general, it is clear
that women played a very active role in the economic life of Sumer and even in Babylonia and Assyria. They controlled
certain administrations, and they formed a major part of the work force. Unfortunately, our understanding of the
earliest evidence is hampered by our inability to determine the Sex of many persons active in the public
sector as the Sumerian language does not distinguish grammatically between masculine and feminine . Thus,
many of the persons assumed to be men may in fact be women and women´s roles in Sumerian society may be much more extensive
than now imagined. However, the question "Were there women of such authoritarian power in ancient Sumerian
society?" is not simple to answer. Certain theorists maintain that since Inanna wielded such political power,
this must be evidence that women also once had such power in a matriarchal system of rule. A better
understanding of the gender symmetry of Sumerian ideology would undermine such blatant assumption . A
strong goddess is mated with a strong king because their union is the basis of a balanced system. The
highest cultic functionary, the en, and thus the earthly representative of the deity, was always of the opposite Sex.
Consequently, strong human female models are to be found outside the city of Uruk and outside the cult and worship of Inanna.
Those few legendary queens who held power in their own name are known from he Northern city of Kish. The next to last ruler of the
first dynasty of Kish is Enmebaragesi, who is described in the Sumerian King List as the king who carried away the weapons of Elam
as booty. There is certain recent evidence indicating that Enmebaragesi was a woman. It has been suggested that she was the enpriestess of Zababa of Kish and thus ruler of Kish, while her brother Gilgamesh was en-priest of Inanna of Uruk and thus ruler of
Uruk. However, the third dynasty of Kish begins with Ku-Ba-ú, designated a female tavern keeper, the one who is said to have
consolidate the foundation of Kish and become king (lugal). Another reference to a woman of Kish as the female representative of a
city is to be found in an old Akkadian text from Nippur. Consequently, although a female may be a bestower of kingship, it is rare
that a female holds the kingship. It has been noted in other societies that highly positive feminine religious
symbolism fails to translate into the secular gender roles . Anne Klein has shown that even the existence of a
generous array of female imagery at the heart of a religious tradition does not guarantee that women will
automatically achieve ecclesiastical and social roles congruent with this imagery
[paragraph ends there was just no period In the article.]
Sacred prostitution is a construct of essentialist scholarship that
perpetuates patriarchal norms – no historical basis for the empowerment
archetype
Johanna H. Stuckey 5, PhD from Yale University, University Professor Emerita at York University,
"Sacred Prostitutes," MatriFocus Cross-Quarterly for the Goddess Woman, Samhain 2005 5(1),
www.matrifocus.com/SAM05/spotlight.htm
An "improbable percentage of the population [of Mesopotamia and Syria-Canaan] must have been either
secular or religious prostitutes of some sort," wrote Beatrice Brooks in 1941 (231). She was drawing conclusions
from the writings of predominantly male scholars who accepted without question the concept of "sacred,
cult, or temple prostitutes." Female temple functionaries, they maintained, regularly engaged in sexual intercourse in return
for a payment to their temples. Female devotees of Inanna/Ishtar, the Mesopotamian goddess of sexuality and love, were
"immediately" suspect of such behavior (Assante 1998:6). Until recently, most scholars took this view for granted, and
some still do. In the nineteenth century, scholars
thought Mesopotamia to be a hotbed of " naïve and primitive
sexual freedom " (Assante 1998:5-6). Members of the then-new discipline of anthropology, such as Sir James Frazer of The
Golden Bough fame, made matters worse by presenting for readers' delectation the orgiastic rites of fertility cults (Assante 2003:2224; Oden 2000:136-138). The result was a fertility-cult myth which took hold among scholars (Stuckey 2005:32-44;
Assante 2003:24-25; Lambert 1992:136). A number of ancient sources were ultimately responsible for the concept of
"sacred prostitute": the Hebrew Bible; later Greek writers like Herodotus (ca.480-ca.425 BCE), Strabo (ca.64 BCE19CE), and Lucian (ca.115-ca.200 CE); and early Christian churchmen. They greatly influenced later writers (Oden
2000:140-147; Assante 1998:8; Henshaw 1994:225-228; Yamauchi 1973:216). Herodotus reported a "wholly shameful"
custom by which every woman "once in her life" had intercourse near the temple of Aphrodite (Ishtar) with
the first stranger who threw "a silver coin" into her lap (Herodotus 1983:121-122,I:199).[1] Similarly, Lucian described the
punishment of women who declined to shave their heads in mourning for Adonis: "For a single day they [had to] stand offering their
beauty for sale … [in a] market … open to foreigners only, and the payment [became] an offering to Aphrodite [Astarte]" (1976:1315). The Christian writers accused pagans of indulging in orgies in honor of Aphrodite, ritual pre-marital sex, and "cult prostitution"
(Oden 2000:142-144). It is true that much ritual activity in the ancient Eastern Mediterranean focussed on
promoting the fecundity of the land. In early Mesopotamia, for instance, the "Sacred Marriage," with its fertility focus,
could possibly have involved a "sacred prostitute." Webster's English Dictionary defines a prostitute as, first, "… a woman who
engages in sexual intercourse for money; whore; harlot"; second, "… a man who engages in sexual acts for money" (1996:1553).
According to one scholar, "Cultic prostitution is a practice involving the female and at times the male devotees of fertility deities,
who presumably dedicated their earnings to their deity." The "Sacred Marriage" rite was one of "the motives of the practice,
particularly in Mesopotamia," where the king had intercourse with "a temple prostitute" (Yamauchi 1973:213). "Obviously, most
scholars did not distinguish between ritual sex and sexuality for pay (Cooper forthcoming). However, ritual sex
would not have been prostitution even if the act produced an offering for a temple (Lambert 1992:136).
Rather, it would have been an act of worship. In the Hebrew Bible, the word normally translated "sacred or
cult prostitute" is qedeshah/qedeshot (feminine singular/ plural) and qadesh/qedeshim (masculine singular/plural). These four
titles do not occur very often in the Hebrew Bible (Henshaw 1994:218-221).[2] The root qdsh means "set apart,
consecrated" (Brown, Driver, and Briggs 1978 (1953):871-874).[3] For the most part, the terms occur in books from
Deuteronomy through to II Kings, the so-called Deuteronomistic History, which is especially nationalistic,
polemical, and denunciatory of Canaanite religion (Oden 2000:131,132; Olyan 1988:3). The assumption that
"sacred prostitution" had not only occurred, but had happened in the context of fertility cults, resulted from the
Hebrew Bible's "deliberate" association of qedeshah, "sacred/consecrated woman," with zonah, "prostitute"
(Bird 1989:76).[4] Thus, an important category of cult functionary called qedeshah existed in Canaan (Henshaw
1994:235-236). Otherwise, why would the Bible need to discredit such women? Their function in Canaanite religion is
not known, but they were "consecrated women," probably priestesses. When the archives of Ugarit, an ancient Semitic-speaking city
in Syria, began to be interpreted, it quickly became evident that the religion of Ugarit was similar to the Canaanite religion vilified in
the Hebrew Bible. Thousands of clay tablets dated to the Late Bronze Age, 1300-1200 BCE (Astour 1981:4), were found to contain,
among other things, lists of gods, offerings, and religious functionaries (del Olmo Lete 1999; de Tarragon 1980). None of the priestly
titles in the texts is grammatically in the feminine gender (de Tarragon 1980:7,8,139ff.), but they could have included women if the
masculine form included the feminine, as it used to do in English. The word qdshm, "consecrated ones," designated
important functionaries: "... we find [them] listed second after the khnm `priests' " (Henshaw 1994:222-225; de Tarragon
1980:134,141; Yamauchi 1973:219). Qdshm had high status, could marry and establish families, and could hold other
There is no suggestion that the ritual role of the qdshm was sexual, nor , indeed, is
there any evidence to date of "sacred prostitution " at Ugarit (de Tarragon 1980:139,140; Yamauchi 1973:219). In
Mesopotamian lists, the Semitic word kharimtu, usually translated "prostitute," was often written with, or close to,
the titles of female cultic personnel. As a result, the latter became "tainted" by proximity (Assante 1998:11). Thus
offices (de Tarragon 1980:141).
not only qadishtu but other female cultic titles were translated "sacred or temple prostitute" (Assante 2003:32). The Mesopotamian
Semitic titles which have usually been translated as "sacred prostitute" include naditu, qadishtu, and entu (Oden 2000:148-150;
Assante 1998:9; Lambert 1992:137-141). In general, naditu priestesses were high-status women who were expected to be chaste
(Assante 1998:38-39; Henshaw 1994:192-195). At Sippar in Old Babylonian times (ca.1880-1550 BCE), they included royal and
noble women (Harris 1960:109,123ff.). There is no evidence that a naditu's duties included ritual sex (Oden 2000:148). The title
qadishtu, "holy, consecrated, or set-apart woman," has the same root as the Hebrew qedeshah (Assante 1998:44-45; Henshaw
1994:207-213). After scholars have carefully scrutinized "extensive evidence of [the qadishtu's] cultic and
other functions" (Gruber 1986:139), it is clear that the qadishtu was no "cult prostitute " (Oden 2000:149). Indeed,
it is likely that most Mesopotamian priestesses , with one possible exception, were expected to be pure
and chaste. The one exception might have been the entu, whom the Sumerians called Nin.Dingir "Lady Deity" or "Lady Who Is
Goddess" (Henshaw 1994:47; Frayne 1985:14). If the "Sacred Marriage Rite" ever involved human participants, this priestess might,
as "Inanna," have had ritual intercourse with the king. However, the entu had very high status (Henshaw 1994:46) and, according to
Mesopotamian law codes, had to adhere to "strict ethical standards" (Hooks 1985:13). Whatever else she was, she was not a
prostitute. For a certain period, the "Sacred Marriage" was an important fertility ritual in Mesopotamia (Frayne 1985:6). As a result
of the king's participation, whatever form it took, he became Inanna's consort, sharing "her invaluable fertility power and potency"
(Kramer 1969:57), as well as, to some extent, her divinity and that of her bridegroom Dumuzi. Unfortunately, no text tells us what
happened in the temple's ritual bedroom, not even whether the participants were human beings or statues (Hooks 1985:29).
However, in a persuasive article, Douglas Frayne argues that, at least in early times, the participants were human: the king and the
Nin.Dindir/entu (Frayne 1985:14). In the "Sacred Marriage" material, the female participant is always called Inanna (Sefati
1998:305), so her human identity is obscured. That is not surprising, for I suspect that, during the ritual, the only female present was
Inanna. What I am suggesting is that the Nin.Dindir/entu was a medium. Through talent and training, she went into a trance and
allowed Inanna to take over her body. Then the goddess could actually be present during the ritual. To a greater or lesser degree, the
king could similarly have embodied the god Dumuzi. A medium is "… a social functionary whose body only, the person's awareness
suppressed while in an ecstatic state, serves as a means for spirits to assist and/or communicate with members of the medium's
group in a positive manner" (Paper 1995:87). The "witch of Endor" in the Hebrew Bible (I Samuel 28:7-25) was likely a medium, and
other ancient examples include the oracular priestesses through whom Apollo spoke at Delphi and the Maenad devotees of Dionysus
(Kraemer 1989:49). Today mediums function in many religions: for instance, Chinese, Korean, African, and African-Christian of the
Americas (Paper 1997:95,104-107,222-226,303; Sered 1994:181-193). Interestingly, the majority of contemporary mediums are
female (Paper 1997:95). Ancient Mesopotamia, like most other cultures, had its prophets and seers (Westenholz 2004:295). A
number of them probably worked through trance. Indeed, "… ecstatic religious functionaries, that is, those whose religious
functioning involves trance, are virtually ubiquitous in human cultures" (Paper forthcoming). So it would not surprise me to discover
that the Inanna of the "Sacred Marriage" rite was actually properly named, for the goddess was using the body of a willing and
devout ecstatic and priestess, who was certainly not a "cult prostitute." On the contrary, she would have had extremely high status
and have been deeply revered, for she was chosen of the goddess. Finally, then, the identity of the human female participant in the
ritual is irrelevant. She was Inanna! "Tragically," says one contemporary scholar, " scholarship suffered from scholars
being unable to imagine any cultic role for women in antiquity that did not involve sexual intercourse "
(Gruber 1986:138). However, recent scholars are fast setting the record straight. Even if ancient priestesses were involved in ritual
sex, even if they received offerings for their temples, they were not prostitutes but devotees worshipping their deity.