Reflections on the Whore Stigma

What puts the term stigma at the center of prostitution debates is exactly what puts sex work at the center of feminism. It is the disqualification, often criminalization, of women for self-possession. Although many women have gained a significant modicum of independence over the last century, their autonomy is still construed as a series of rights to be demanded, defended, and earned, a sharp contrast with the automatic entitlements of the men in their communities. The social asymmetry between those struggling for rights and those accustomed to entitlements leans on a branding only of the oppressed. Female gender stigmas reinforce subordination, divide women among themselves, and leave men untarnished. The whore stigma is the most fraught of female gender stigmas since it publicly invokes the sex work, both obligatory and forbidden, at the core of the sex class system.My reflections on stigma as a political weapon evolved over fifty years of feminist activism, research, and psychotherapy. In California during the 1970s, I participated in consciousness-raising groups alongside my university studies in social psychology and grassroots training in Radical Feminist Therapy.1 At the university, I encountered a descriptive elaboration of the concept of stigma as "a general feature of social life,"and I scientifically demonstrated how the stigma of a female name biases women's judgments of women artists.2 The most fertile ground for understanding the consequences of both internalized and institutionalized branding of women, however, was outside the academy in feminist consciousness-raising and radical therapy groups. By comparing notes, we women realized how the mark of our sex had limited our life options, undermined our confidence, and exposed us to violent reprimand for acting like free (male) agents. I do not recall how often we used the word stigma, but I remember countless stories of the insults and attacks we endured or anticipated for transgressive independence.It soon became clear that we were stigmatized not merely as women but as this or that kind of woman. We realized that each woman-kind was assigned a function, evaluated for its performance, and threatened with punishment for having a mind of her own. Certain wary feminist organizations of the seventies tried in vain to avoid stigma by disassociating from their sisters, for example when they warned against a lesbian lavender menace or when they banned women in the sex trades from the premises of rape crisis centers.3 Dykes and whores were feminists' bad girls. Sexual and financial independence was their crime.While we were united in resistance to male domination, we were divided by historical antagonisms along racist, classist, and colonial lines. Clearly, women's liberation depended on joining forces against all oppressions, and feminist solidarity meant following the lead of the most rightless among us. I have been doing so ever since. In 1975, I was invited to the Netherlands to train Dutch feminists in Radical Feminist Therapy.4 Once again encountering the tension of opposing social positions, those workshops inspired me to partner with women living in the Netherlands, many from former Dutch colonies (Indonesia and Suriname), to constitute study groups of women self-identified as Black or White, Jewish or non-Jewish, and lesbian or heterosexual. This "Feminist Alliance Project" aimed to dislodge the racism, anti-Semitism, classism, and heterosexism we had internalized, be it as targets or agents of oppression.5 Given the rigidity, conflict, and anxiety enmeshed in power relations, psychodynamic tools proved useful in transforming psychic defense into political resistance against intersecting systems of domination.6A few years later, with one foot in Europe and the other back in North America, the alliance model inspired my partnerships with sex workers, especially with the pioneering activist Margo St. James. In 1984, we began a group of prostitutes, ex-prostitutes, and nonprostitutes, soon to be called "Bad Girl Rap Groups for any woman who has ever been stigmatized as bad by her work, color, class, sexuality, history of abuse or just plain gender."7 Animated by sex workers and attended by a wide array of this or that kind of woman accused of impropriety, those groups revealed that any woman was prey to sexist assault once accused of acting "like a whore." I took a leave from the university at this time to write an essay on the whore stigma as a pervasive instrument of social control.8 Meanwhile, us bad girls built alliances across the globe to resist hypocrisy and injustice in and out of the sex trades. The World Whores' Congresses in Europe in 1985 and 1986 were highlights of this mobilization.9Not all feminists were quick to identify with sex workers. I vividly remember a confrontation between women working in the sex industry and their feminist allies at an international conference in the Philippines in 1988 with participation from ten Asian countries. When asked to identify the major problem facing prostitutes, feminists with no direct experience in the sex trades said poverty. The sex workers themselves from the same countries unanimously said stigma: "We share poverty with our sisters, but stigma robs us even of community support."10 The meeting was both heated and instructive, as whore-identified women accused their would-be allies of naivete in thinking that sex workers were poorer and more oppressed than women without the revenue of prostitution. They accused feminists of reinforcing the stigma that delegitimized their work, independence, and claim to civil rights.The feminists at that event listened to their whore mentors and probably became more respectful allies. Over the past half century, sex workers have achieved recognition from enlightened activists for their political acuity and righteous struggle. What makes them the "street fighters"11 of women's liberation movements, however, is not their specificity but their wearing of the whore stigma for us all. That stigma is a badge of women's common cause against the designations, treatments, threats, and punishments reserved for our sex.