Kate Millet's little known book, 'The Prostitution Papers', was published in 1971, a year after 'Sexual Politics'. Two former prostitutes - 'M' and 'J' - here talk about themselves. 'M' is now a college student and 'J', a Ph.D in psychology. In 'The Prostitution Papers', Kate Millet is no longer the distant, detached and ironic academic, her language is now colloquial, excited and immediate. In the Introduction she tells us that this was a 'liberating transition, exuberant and confirming'. 'The Prostitution Papers' led to a documentary film, 'Three Lives', which explored the biographies of three women.
The people she worked with were encircled 'on all sides, the degradation imposed by the pimp and the patron, the judgement of the law, the contempt of the public'. And, at the same time, through a dynamic common to all outcasts, the corrosive scorn directed from outside is interiorized by its victims.
Millet is no longer researching on women in libraries and writing scholarly articles on them, but directly absorbing the existences of other women. She found it impossible to do her work without imaginatively becoming them and undergoing their pain as well. This was a somewhat traumatic experience and, at the same time, the knowledge of other people's experience placed on her a vast moral responsibility. So she decided to write. Writing, she thought, could be a beginning which might spark interest and lead to discussions. But she also knew that to play missionary would be futile as well as pompous. The first international feminist conference on prostitution was disrupted by a handful of prostitutes who told the organizers and participants ('the straight women') that they were 'judgemental, meddlesome, and ignorant.' Rebuttals like 'we make more money than you chicks!' were heard. So Millet knew her task wasn't easy, but, as she says, 'a writer can only hope'.
This is a conversation among four women, 'J', 'M', 'K' (Kate Millet) and 'L' (Millet's collaborator, Liz Schneider). Millet says that she has tried to capture here the character of the English she has heard spoken by these four women. In the process she has learned 'a great deal about language: to respect the spoken word and to love its rhythms'.
At the beginning we hear 'J's voice. She tells us how she got into prostitution. She was an undergraduate on a scholarship. Her father had no money to send her. She needed money because she didn't want to be poor. So she just went on the street. In a way, something that had happened years ago prepared her for this. Miles Davis was playing in a club, and someone outside wanted to take her in. She agreed because she wanted to see Miles Davis though she knew that if she went in with the man she would have to sleep with him. She thought it was worth it. She just wanted the ticket to get in to see Miles Davis. So when the time came she was ready.
She didn't know how many men she had slept with. They all merge in grey mass, only a few of them stick out. The difference between being a prostitute and being a wife, she says, is the security a wife's got. But it also involves a choice between a lot of men and just one. If one has a lot of men then one isn't dependent on any one since, unlike husbands, customers are easily replaceable. She felt freer of men as a prostitute than she would as a wife or a mistress or a beloved. Some of the clients tried to behave like lovers and most were full of self-pity, the usual line being that their wife didn't understand them etc.. That, however, would be crossing the boundary. Prostitution, after all, is not about love, it's business. One pays for what one gets, one way or another. 'J' made $800 a week while she was in business, but with a Ph.D and ten years' experience of teaching she earned $60 a week.
What the customer buys, however, is power. He wants to be pleased and wants to control. It isn't just sex that he seeks. He often wants to possess the whole being by making unreasonable demands, issuing orders and through irrational jealousy. At the same time, buying a person with money degrades both the buyer and the one bought. Prostitution not only puts down women and men, it also puts down sex. 'J' often didn't understand what the customer got out of this because she felt she gave nothing. She was numb and felt nothing. The argument that prostitution is not psychologically healthy made her angry since people kept silent when one did much worse self-destructive things.
Housewives, 'J' says, are very moralistic people, even though many of them know that while their husbands are cheating on them they are seeing the prostitutes. She doesn't think prostitutes are a threat to housewives. "I wouldn't mind if I had a husband who went to see a whore. It wouldn't bother me. But then, if he had an affair with somebody, that would bother me - if he loved someone, if he got involved, then that would be a threat'. One of things she wanted to do once she got out of it was to get married. But, at the same time, she knew that she's terribly messed as far as sex was concerned, in fact, that was why she became a prostitute. Once she came out of it she couldn't relate to men at all. 'I just can't stand it now when people touch me,' she says.
'M' too agrees that whoring is business, a means to an end. Whoring also feeds a drug habit. One needs drugs to kill the pain of prostitution and prostitution to kill the pain of needing drug. It's a kind of cycle. She was into drugs though she lived the first twenty years of her life around nuns and a convent. She went from the convent to the streets and she felt that they weren't that far apart. She took her first heroin at a point in her life when her family broke into pieces - her father, who was a drinker, and his fifth wife, who couldn't take him anymore, had just separated. She was depressed and upset about the whole thing and felt she was thrown out on the street. She needed drugs to sustain herself, but didn't have enough money for it. So she began to steal and shoplift and she started hanging out in certain places and with a certain kind of people. Nobody, however, ever taught her how to make it on the street, she just did it on her own. She quotes Bob Dylan, 'How does it feel to be on your own/No direction known/Like a rolling stone/Nobody ever taught you how to make it on the street/Now you'll have to get used to it'.
Her first experience with prostitution was in a whorehouse where she was taken by some old woman who herself was a prostitute and who taught her how to be a prostitute. She was the one who took money from the clients and paid 'M' only half of it. Often she would gamble the money away and not pay 'M' anything. So 'M' realized that if she was going to whore she needed protection - a man's protection. But soon she found out that pimps were women-haters and they also cheated. Like whores they too were in business. They just wanted money and were not interested in sex.
'M' was always aware of a certain amount guilt because of the way she grew up. She was scared and guilty, but got a kick out of it too. Finally one day she and her friend burned down the whorehouse. Like a movie, they set the fire and called the fire department. and then got arrested.
Like most educated women, the prostitute was familiar to Kate Millet through literature. She had done some reading on prostitution with her students in the experimental college where she taught. But everything she had read about it, 'the statistical approach of sociologists, the cheerful rationalizations of popular accounts, the romanticized versions of literature', pissed her off. She realized that a tremendous moral and sociological confusion surrounded the entire issue which was a direct result of a 'monumental' sexual repression and hypocrisy within our culture where the victim, the prostitute, rather than the institutions that victimized, were condemned. Ironically, we prosecute those who are forced, economically or psychologically, to offer themselves for sale and condone the acts of the buying person. Whoring is seen as voluntary servitude. Recently some had hailed this enslavement of women as 'sexual freedom'. This is to subvert the promise of sexual liberation into a license to exploit women even further.
The woman as a whore is also a literary archetype. Millet finds the literary man's impressions of prostitution particularly annoying. The glorification of the golden-hearted whore is a cheap and easy stunt. She says, '...the liberal fellow is still fucking the whore while congratulating himself on noticing her misery'. She mentions Baudelaire here.
Both she and her collaborator, Liz Schneider, initially felt presumptuous as well as ignorant about the subject and thought they had no real right even to speak about it. But, at the same time, they thought there was an information blank since most accounts were limited to male sources. There was no honest account from the subjects themselves. For Kate Millet, it began with the friendship with a few of them. With her growing commitment to and ultimate identification with a group of women she realized that prostitution existed as an object lesson to all women. She says, '...we were women talking about things that physically happened to these two women, yet in a sense, psychically happen to all of us'. The watered-down character of their own prostitution occurred to her and Liz the moment they remembered dates and dinners. It seemed to her that prostitution was somehow paradigmatic, somehow the very core of the female's social condition. Men had traded in women throughout most of human history and regarded her as currency in societies where no monetary currency existed. Unsurprisingly, the origins of prostitution were in temples converted from fertility rites to the cult of patriarchy.
In prostitution there is a crucial element quite beyond the economic. It might be described as a kind of psychological addiction to self-denigration. An addiction, Kate Millet feels, all women are socially conditioned to accept. A Marxist analysis here is quite inadequate, as it fails to take the psychological factors into account. Seeing it all she decides that prostitutes are our political prisoners - in jail for just being female. 'That's sexual politics, the stone core of it,' she concludes.
When Liz Schneider, Millet's collaborator, first started to write about prostitution, the distance that she felt between the prostitute's condition and her own seemed enormous. Some very basic woman's part deep within her refused to see whoring simply as business. 'It's as degrading for them as it is for me to sleep with someone I don't care about and wake up in the morning next to him,' she says. But she later realized that her expectations were very different from those of a woman who was selling herself. Because for the prostitute nothing would ever meet those expectations of intimacy the act presupposed and that made it very different. The prostitute wouldn't be disappointed in the way Schneider would be.
When it was understood that she was one of the women who wished to work with prostitutes everyone assured her that she would fail. 'You'll never be able to relate to them. How could they want to give up when they make so much money? How could you ever talk to them?' they said. She, however, thought there must be a solidarity that could break through this resistance.
Schneider worked with the Vera Institute of Justice trying to provide civil right counsel for the prostitutes in the courts. What frightened her was the nexus between the police, the judges, the clerks and the lawyers. Prostitutes suffered for the supposed crimes of other people, yet the guilt and shame are part of their life. Some of them have been arrested for years and year - thirty-five, forty arrests in a year, may be. There was one defence lawyer who made all his money off women. In the courts the women concentrated their attention on judges, on police and on lawyers - the men who would decide their fate, men at whose mercy they were. Only in the cages in the basement of the building they were together as women which was in stark contrast to the way they ignored each other upstairs in the court. They related to each other in a silly kind of camaraderie. It was in the pens that Schneider got attention or response from the women she was trying work with.
She tried to come on as straight, as direct, and as open as she could. She didn't begin by announcing that she was in the movement or tried to relate to them as sisters. She talked about their lives, if they were married, if they had kids and where the kids were. She talked about things that concerned women, things women had to undergo, and strong feelings of closeness, concern, and strength. A shared experience spontaneously emerged out of these talks. It was, however, not easy to talk when they were behind bars while she was in front.
Prostitutes are the greatest spectacle and the chosen entertainment in the courts. They are picked up for some people to make money and they are set free only to be picked up again. The whole system bleed them sexually and economically. Public decorum is satisfied because prostitutes are arrested. This is the justice men bestow on women.
Many of the things said in this book may seem obvious and self-evident today. But it's useful to remember that it was written nearly forty years ago during the so-called 'second wave' of the feminist movement. Many of the current concerns of the feminist movement began with the third wave in the nineties.
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