#5: On Revolutionaries, Redeemers, and the Sex Wars
February 12, 2024
Cambridge
Heavens to Betsy – Complicated
[Content heads-up that this week discusses sex work/prosecution.]
Sorry for the week off—I wrapped up several big projects and now feel much lighter, so your patience is very much appreciated. And thank you if you take the time to read!
In class earlier today, we talked about the “sex wars”—a fierce debate among different schools of feminism over (among other things) prostitution/sex work. On one extreme of the debate is someone like Andrea Dworkin. See “Prostitution and Male Supremacy,” in Life and Death (1997). She doesn’t care about the premises of the feminism that comes out of the academy, she cares about what the prostituted woman knows, that prostitution is not an idea, it is the mouth, the vagina, the rectum, penetrated… by one man and then another and then another and then another and then another. In prostitution, no woman stays whole and no woman gets whole again later, after, because too much is taken away when the invasion is inside you, when the brutality is inside your skin.
On the other extreme is someone like Martha Nussbaum: All of us, with the exception of the independently wealthy, take money for the use of our body. … Some are socially stigmatized, and some are not. See “Whether from Reason or Prejudice: Taking Money For Bodily Services” (1998). What is important to Nussbaum is why sex work is stigmatized, and whether those reasons are good or bad. She concludes that they’re mostly bad: beliefs about the evil character of female sexuality and the rapacious character of male sexuality. She accepts that concerns about women’s subordination are credible, but concludes that those worries aren’t actually about prostitution, but about poor women’s lack of choice. We just need to enhance the economic autonomy and the personal dignity of poor women in general, not to vilify or condemn prostitution itself. (She also entertains a variety of amusing-but-not-persuasive hypothetical comparisons in service of this point, including the exactly-what-it-sounds-like profession of “Colonoscopy Artist”).
Each side takes the other for a fool. The abolish-prostitution camp thinks the legalize-sex-work camp is naively extorting sex from women for men; the legalize-sex-work camp thinks the abolish-prostitution camp is just reenacting Puritan fictions about what sex means. Each has its own strange bedfellows—radical feminists with conservative Christians, liberal feminists with the porn industry. Whatever side you’re on, the debate is divisive and messy in a way that inhibits progress: one side wants condemnation and the other liberalization, so it’s not possible to move forward with unilateral support.
It doesn’t need to be this way. The prostitution debate is a helpful illustration of a larger idea that I’ve been toying with recently. In movements against oppression, two general perspectives often emerge. Call the people who support them Revolutionaries and Redeemers. Revolutionaries are pessimists. They emphasize that the suffering of oppressed people is total, inescapable, and permanent, a fact of our social universe. On their account, the only hope of oppressed people is to destroy the current order and those who enact it. Redeemers are optimists. They look for the resistance, dignity, and perseverance that oppressed people exhibit, especially in the most hopeless moments. On their account, oppression is based on the lie of one group’s superiority over the other, and the right way forward is to reject that lie and recognize—both intellectually and in real life—the two groups’ true equality.
For example, think of Stokely Carmichael (revolutionary) and James Baldwin (redeemer).
In Black Power, Carmichael writes: The black community has been the creation of, and dominated by, a combination of oppressive forces and special interests in the white community. The groups which have access to the necessary resources and the ability to effect change benefit politically and economically from the continued subordinate status of the black community. … Whenever black demands for change become loud and strong, indifference is replaced by active opposition based on fear and self-interest.
On the other hand, in Letter to My Nephew, Baldwin writes: The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept [white people]…. You must accept them and accept them with love, for these innocent people have no other hope. They are in effect still trapped in a history which they do not understand and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it. They have had to believe for many years, and for innumerable reasons, that black men are inferior to white men. … In this case the danger in the minds and hearts of most white Americans is the loss of their identity. … We with love shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it.
As with the sex wars, these two offer opposite diagnoses and opposite prescriptions, and as with the sex wars, people on each side accuse those on the other side of being naive and self-hating.
But the tension between Revolutionaries and Redeemers goes away if you understand who they're trying to reach and what they're trying to communicate. Understanding and resisting oppression is a practice over time, not a one-off, either-this-or-that question. The Revolutionary is like a doctor who informs her patient of an illness—persuading him that it is real, that it could be fatal, that it requires an immediate response. The Redeemer is like a good friend who sits with him afterward—listening to him as he looks for room to breathe and the will to go on.
These messages ought to be different. You want a doctor who will tell it like it is, and you want a friend who will listen. Just as it would be inappropriate for a doctor to counsel hope in a hopeless situation, it would be inappropriate for a friend to constantly remind you of your dire prognosis. Revolutionaries are concerned for people who do not know the reality of their condition; Redeemers are concerned for people who do.
The point isn’t that Revolutionaries and Redeemers are all good people. It’s that they’re both right, and in fact, they both agree.