Interview of Kathleen Barry ― Resistance Radio

October 26th, 2014

Browse all episodes of Resistance Radio or listen to audio of this interview:

Hi, I’m Derrick Jensen and this is Resistance Radio on the Progressive Radio Network. My guest today is Kathleen Barry. An internationally-recognized human rights activist, she is the author of five books, including Unmaking War: Remaking Men; Female Sexual Slavery; and Prostitution of Sexuality: The Global Exploitation of Women. Today we talk about prostitution.

So first off, thank you for your fabulous work, and thank you for being on the program.

KB: I’m glad to be with you, Derrick.

DJ: So my first question is: Do you consider prostitution to be a human rights violation? And if so, why?

KB: My work is focused on working with and interviewing women who have been in prostitution, and one of the things that we hear over and over again is what customers do when they buy women to use them for sex. And we’re starting to get these stories actually in print now, as many women who’ve been in prostitution are starting to tell their stories and tell what men actually do.

In Female Sexual Slavery I focused on pimps putting women into prostitution. That then becomes sexual slavery, situations they can’t get out of. But in Prostitution of Sexuality I moved further to recognize more deeply how men actually buy women not for sex, but to sexually abuse them. And just the buying is sexual abuse in that it is sexual objectification. They’re not buying a human being, they’re buying an object to put their penises into, in whatever way they choose, and without any protection for the women. Once a woman is picked up by a man who pays her, she can try to exert control, but her control is very limited by the customer’s demand. And he’s invariably stronger and all of those kinds of things.

As I began to look at this, and began to talk more and more with women who’ve been in prostitution, I went back and looked at the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. That’s a United Nations document. This buying of women really turns into a human rights violation, including and especially the right to live free of torture. Because a lot of what goes on is a kind of sexual torture of women, and anybody who’s bought for prostitution. But as we know, it’s primarily women. So that’s how I got around to understanding it as a human rights violation and began work several years ago with UNESCO to address that in developing a new global human rights law. But before I get to that, I know you and I had talked about the Nordic Model and the importance of that in this conversation, in talking about prostitution.

First of all we know that prostitution is being normalized in this society into being called “sex work.” And that’s a trick of the sex industry, which is a global multi-trillion dollar industry of sexual exploitation. And from the sex industry then women who are in prostitution – some women, very few, but some women in prostitution then will be claiming that what they’re doing is work and it’s a job like any other. Well, sexual torture is not a job like any other, nor is it work. And as we have been working on this issue – I’ve been working on this since 1979 when Female Sexual Slavery was published, and as we’ve been working on this issue, the government of Sweden, at the behest of, connected with the feminist movement, feminist women in Sweden, took up the new law in the late 1990’s. Under their Violence Against Women Act, they made the buying of women for prostitution a crime.

So since then, they have been arresting men who buy women and children.

DJ: Can we contrast that with the United States? Isn’t it the women who are criminalized in the United States, for the most part?

KB: Right. The women who are bought are criminalized. The customers legally are criminalized, as are the pimps. But when the arrests are made, it’s the women who are bought that are arrested. Customers are rarely arrested.

Now since this new Swedish law has really taken on, we’re starting to see some change in that. In fact, just this year there was a conference of mayors, mayors from all over the United States meet in a conference, I guess it’s every few years. And they unanimously adopted a resolution to support the criminalizing of customers and taking the laws off of the women. Because if the women are recognized as victims then you don’t criminalize them. And so we have some movement within this country that’s progressive and hopeful on this issue. And the Council of Mayors is not the only place where this has been developed.

What happened then is in Sweden, over a ten-year period, prostitution was reduced by 50% and trafficking was eliminated.

DJ: What is the difference between prostitution and trafficking?

KB: Good point. I like to give as an example, because we’re very used to, we know very well about the slavery of African-Americans in this country, because we all learned about it, we see it, there are stories about it, we read about it, we hear about it all the time. Could you imagine if the enslavement of blacks in the United States was treated as bad only because they were captured in Africa and brought across the ocean? That’s trafficking. It’s moving them from one place to another. But then we just stop. We don’t think about what happens to them after they’re brought to this country. It’s kind of unthinkable. We know that they’re put on plantations. We know all of that history of slave masters’ abuse.

The trafficking in women is the only form of human trafficking where we have traditionally developed laws against that, but allowed the ongoing exploitation and criminal acts against women after they have been trafficked into prostitution. The trafficking refers to movement of human beings from one place to another for the purpose of criminally exploiting them. And then, in that place, we then turn to the laws against slavery, the laws against drug abuse, and to all the other laws to stop the consequences of trafficking. Trafficking is only how you get them there. And you brutalize them in the process, so it’s not only criminal, but also a huge violation of human rights.

But it doesn’t stop for women with trafficking into prostitution. It’s only the very beginning. The next thing that happens is they’re put into brothels or they’re controlled by pimps. They’re put out on the streets and controlled by pimps. And even if they can break away from that, which very few can, there is still not a way for them, in most places, to break out of prostitution itself.

I want to go back to the Nordic Model again, because there is one other aspect of that law that’s really important. It not only criminalizes the customer – the pimps are already criminalized, as they have been in most states. It criminalizes the customer and it recognizes the women as victims, but it also provides funding for support services for the women so that shelters are organized and counseling services are provided. Women getting out of prostitution have enormous health problems and tremendous need for counseling and job training and a whole transformation. Housing, a whole safe place to be. And what we have seen now is that that program, that law in Sweden and its success, which is now recognized by the 72% of the people of Sweden who now support this law. This shows us how much a legal change like this can change opinions in the general population. We now have this law in Norway, which has also just released a report on the success of the law there. It has been adopted in Iceland. It is going through the very last stages of approval in France. It’s in process in the legislative process in Ireland, it’s gone through a process in Israel. It has just been adopted, with a slight modification, yesterday in Canada. It needs one more series of votes. It’s been adopted by one house of Parliament and needs another set of votes before it will go into law in Canada.

So we’re taking this now as more than just a trend, but instead as the thing that is about to become worldwide in terms of the shift in prostitution and the recognition of it as a violation of human rights.

DJ: So I have a few directions to possibly go. I want to list a couple of these directions and you can either choose the order or choose which ones you want to go to. One of them is: How would you say women end up prostituted quite often, and then contrast that, if you will, with, say, the “Pretty Woman” movie myth. What does the “Pretty Woman” myth mean? So there’s one area. And another area is that unfortunately, over the last couple of years, I’ve had to read a lot of queer theory to critique it. So I’m wondering, both from a queer theory perspective, which I’m guessing you dislike as much as I do –

KB: (Laughing) Probably. I don’t read it because I can’t read it –

DJ: I totally get you on that. You don’t even have to finish the sentence. But I guess the larger question would be: What are some of the critiques that are thrown at the Nordic Model and then your response to those critiques?

KB: OK. That’s the easy one. But the important question is the first one you asked. So let’s get rid of the easy one. The critique that is thrown at the Nordic Model and thrown at feminists who are campaigning globally for this is that – and this is pure capitalist liberalism, market economy rhetoric. And it’s interesting that it’s coming to us from progressives. And that is that women choose this, and everybody should be able to choose what they want to do. Every woman should be allowed to choose this, let me put it that way. And none of us should interfere with her free choice.

And of course we know that free choice – well, we don’t have it, literally, in the United States. If I had free choice, my life would be so entirely different. So would this country. But what we know is that is the rhetoric that drives the economy. I have free choice to go out and buy. And when I’m not buying, and a lot of us are not buying, we’re being really urged by even our President to get out and buy, because that’s where we’re exercising our choice.

But they are technically selling. So it’s all playing into this free market economy. But what it does, and by the way this is the current position of Amnesty International, globally, which is quite frightening, to think of a major global human rights organization rooted in such deep woman-hating and misogyny. But what this really has ignored is the answer to the first question you asked: how do women get into prostitution?

We know that the percentage range is probably from 85 to 92% of women who have been in prostitution were sexually abused by male adults as children. Now that tells us a lot. It tells us a lot, the effect of the breakdown of human resilience by sexual abuse, by men’s sexual abuse of children. But we also know that when women are steeped in poverty – this is another thing that globs right on to the capitalist framework of our society. Prostitution is a way for women to get their hands on money when they’re closed out of other jobs. They may just be supporting themselves. They may be supporting themselves and their child, or children. They may have run away from an abusive husband. All of these things feed into it. But if they are homeless, if they’re out on the street, if they’re hanging on by a thread, we’ll find that then numbers of women will turn to prostitution just to get their hands on cash, just to get food for their children and themselves, just to pay next month’s rent.

We add onto that a glorification of that whole thing of prostitution as a reserve labor force for women, so that the traditional labor force does not have to find ways to accommodate women and to provide jobs.

Built onto that then we have fads that get built where young women going to college finding that they can’t afford the tuition will then pick up on what’s called the “sugar daddy” phenomenon, where there are actually online programs that will hook up women looking for sugar daddies with wealthy men who will keep them in high style and pay their tuition and whatever else in exchange for, kind of dating rights and sexual rights to them. That would be what Julia Roberts was portraying in “Pretty Woman.”

We did see, however, in that movie, which we don’t see anymore, how painful that was for her.

DJ: I watched a – I don’t remember what it was, but I was watching a BBC mystery a couple of weeks ago where one of the characters was a woman who, we later find out, is – one of the protagonists was a woman who was making $10,000 a night, or something. And she had, she lived in a fancy penthouse, etc. And this is something that we sometimes see in the mainstream media, where prostituted women actually end up being at the very least upper middle class. And I’m wondering if you can give me some numbers on – it just seems to me that having driven down East Sprague in Spokane, from one store to another, and seeing women walking on the street, that the media is often misrepresenting what the reality of the circumstances are.

KB: Yeah. They are misrepresenting it. But they’re also doing it to promote it. And that’s where they have their connections to the sex industry. Because if a woman thinks she can make $10,000 a night, or even $10,000 a week, it starts to seem like a possibility, like an alternative for her. We don’t have numbers but we know that it’s a very small percentage. But it is growing. And it’s not $10,000 a night. That’s really very rare. But the sugar daddy phenomenon has been taken up among some college students. I was talking about this in class when I was still teaching, and one of the women got up and walked out of class in the middle, and she came into my office a couple of days later, furious with me about my negative approach to prostitution, and then explained to me that it was the only way she was getting through college. And she defended it, and she railed, and I sat and listened to her. And she kept making the point over and over again that if she wasn’t doing this, she wouldn’t be able to pay her tuition, she wouldn’t be able to buy the books, and books are so expensive now.

And of course this is the way that college becomes more and more for upper class kids. These working class kids are really trying. And so she went on like this and I finally said “I understand. I’m sorry if anything I said to you suggested that I was putting you down, because what I’m doing is going after the men and the institution that’s making this possible.” Well, she said “If they weren’t making it possible, I wouldn’t be able to get this money.” And I said “I understand that. But let me ask you a question. If you had any way to get your tuition other than this, would you still be in prostitution?”

Absolutely not. She would have nothing to do with it. She went from a complete defense of it to, as soon as I opened up the possibility that, the question of, if you had a choice, would you do it? She was out of there. She wasn’t out of prostitution. But it was quite clear that it’s desperation that’s driving a lot of these women.

They put a kind of clever – the young women put this very, kind of chic twist onto it, like they have the Gucci bags and the fancy clothes and they can report back on these wonderful places that they have been to. But they’ve lost something of themselves. And she knew that while we were talking. Every time a customer was buying her, that she was losing something of herself. And I wanted so desperately to be able to offer her something that would provide her the means to get through college without doing that.

So anyway, that’s the kind of – I think that behind all of this glitziness is desperation on the part of most of the women, who are doing it for economic reasons. The women who have been sexually abused previously, often it takes quite a bit of time for them to recognize how being abused, being reduced to an object, being treated as something that could just be taken, having no regard for their person, makes them much more vulnerable to prostitution.

But once they’re out of it, just like women who are abused by their husbands, once they’re out of it they tell a very different story than when they’re in it.

DJ: Okay, before I ask this question I want to be really clear that I am in complete agreement with you on all this. And I’m just trying to articulate distinctions here. One of the arguments is, of course, that this is sex work. And I think you and I would both probably agree that the whole wage economy is set up where people end up doing jobs they don’t like. Most people work jobs they don’t like. And it’s wonderful when people can make a living doing something they love, but that’s not the reality for most people under capitalism. So having said that, there still seems to me to be a – and also I want to be really clear that I would not want to walk down the street and have random people giving me money to sexually use me. So what is the difference between getting a job you don’t like at Walmart, or at any other place, and being prostituted? I really want to shoot down the “sex work” idea. It seems to me that there’s a fundamental difference, that sex is different from flipping burgers.

KB: Yup. And it’s a very important question. And here I will go back to what I said at the very beginning of this conversation, that what men do to women when they buy them to use them for sex is sexual abuse. So it can involve being beaten and being – when I was doing research I was talking to one woman on the street who took off her sweater and had a kind of very skimpy tank top on and showed me her back, and it was all slashed from a trick, customer the night before. Part of the sex act. But we don’t even need to talk about that kind of abuse. The very sex itself is abusive.

Men will want to urinate on women, defecate on them. Humiliation of the women is the really major part of what men do when they buy them. Over and over again we see the stories of women talking about what they’ve had to go through from a customer. They can talk about rape, they can talk about being beaten. But when they actually get down to what the sex is, it is sexual abuse. It may involve inserting the penis in different places that the woman doesn’t want. Some feminist put up a billboard – they took a photo and put it up on Facebook recently – that said “Qualifications for sex work: Being able to suppress your gag reflex.” When something’s pushed down your throat, you gag. To do prostitution, you need to learn to get over that gag reflex. Having been sexually abused, having been traumatized.

I can refer listeners to a book that’s coming out soon, I think. I have just heard that an American publisher has picked up and is going to be publishing a book by an Irish woman called Paid For: My Journey Through Prostitution. The author is Rachel Moran. She takes the reader on that journey, and I defy anybody to read that book and go through all the things, go through reading all of the things that she experienced in prostitution and see it as any way similar to flipping a hamburger or checking out customers at Walmart or being on a factory line. Those may be dead end jobs but they’re not destroying the lives and putting into trauma. Do you know, this is an interesting fact, that more women in prostitution have post-traumatic stress disorder than men from the military? That’s what this does to them. So, yes. Anyway, I think I’ve made my point. I think I made the point that you were also trying to see really exposed here, and I appreciate you for that.

DJ: Thank you for your answer. I would just like to round this out a little bit more. That even if there is not defecating on someone or even if there is not forcing something down their throat. Even if the customer were not overtly grossly disrespectful, there still seems to me to be a fundamental- even if the sex were relatively – I don’t know how to say this but –

KB: Benign.

DJ: Thank you. It seems to me that there’s still a difference between –

KB: Yes. The difference is that you are still an object that has been bought to be used. You are not a subject who is a human being engaging in something that you want to be doing for your own pleasure and to be able to give pleasure to another person.

One of the acts that is required of women in prostitution is that they perform as if they are happy to be doing this. As if they like these men. As if these men are just the end of their world, one right after another. And that acting is part of what separates them from themselves. It’s part of the deepening of the objectification. “I not only am being used as an object. I have to act as if I like being used as an object.” And this is, as you said – without the urinating on my face, without the slashes on my back. That’s where it goes back to the first question that you asked. That’s where the fundamental violation of human rights begins.

DJ: Thank you for that.

Two things: one is that if you read – there’s a website I’ve gone to some, that is called “Invisible Men” I believe it’s called? Which is basically Consumer Reports by men about their experiences of women, when they buy a woman. It’s very disturbing. And one of the phrases that’s used, one of the acronyms that’s used is “GFE,” which stands for “Girlfriend Experience.” And that’s one of the things that women are supposed to provide. So I’m just validating what you just said. I want to say that, and then I want to mention that years ago, I wrote a novel in which a couple of the characters are prostituted women. And before I wrote the novel, I had a bunch of conversations with Norma Hotaling, who was – she’s now dead – who founded the organization “Standing Against Global Exploitation.”

KB: It’s still going, in San Francisco.

DJ: It’s an organization to help prostituted women out, and also she ran schools, that when men were arrested they had to go to her school. The reason I bring her up is because she said basically, she told me a lot of very important things to put in the novel. And she “Okay, here’s one thing; that I don’t care what else you say and what else you do, but it’s incredibly important that a) these women not fall in love with any of the customers, because it doesn’t happen, and b) it’s really important that these women hate the men who are using them.” That was the thing she focused on.

KB: Let me mention a couple of things here, because you’re really getting to the core of it. You always do, Derrick. Your thinking on these issues is so refreshing to me. I think you’re very much a model for men of what it could be like to not be seeing women as something to exploit.

DJ: Thank you.

KB: A couple of things to mention, of resources. One is there’s a Danish woman named Tanja Rahm. I suggest to your listeners that they Google her for the statement that she made to, that she has made to customers about what women who are being bought experience. It’s very much along the lines of what Norma Hotaling told you. She’s just written a kind of declaration. “You think we’re doing this? Well, this is what we’re really doing.” It’s short and it’s a very, very powerful statement.

Also, if you don’t mind, I want to jump back to the beginning of this interview where we talked about prostitution as a violation of human rights. In my book Prostitution of Sexuality I’ve made the argument for prostitution being a violation of human rights. But also I worked with UNESCO to develop new international human rights law that would recognize prostitution as a violation of human rights and include all of the aspects. For example, the law in Sweden. But it would address all forms of sexual exploitation, which would include everything from female genital mutilation to buying women for prostitution to rape to the whole works. And that would be to recognize sexual exploitation as a violation of human rights.

I am now working with some groups and organizations toward getting that introduced into the United Nations, because even though we’re going state by state, and there’s a parallel to this, to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Back in ‘64, when racism in the South is as severe as it’s starting to get again today. We could not rely on southern states adopting civil rights legislation. And so we went to the federal government and got the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which not only addressed racism but also sexism and made it a law of the land. We’re doing a similar thing with this convention. We can’t rely on every state in the world to adopt the laws that Sweden and Norway and other countries have adopted or are adopting. We need an overall treaty, which is what this would be. A treaty that the United Nations would make with every state in the world that they could get to sign on to it, which would then involve that the state change its laws in conformity to that treaty.

So it’s the global version of what we had as a federal law in this country. Have I made that more confusing, or is that clear?

DJ: It seems very clear to me.

So I guess you’ve kind of answered this question. In fact, I think you’ve kind of answered this question with the whole interview. But if you were suddenly to get your wish list of what you could put in place – if somebody made you dictator, or Director General of all things associated with this issue, what would be your wish list? You’d want the Nordic Model emplaced, and are there other things that you would want?

KB: I would want men to stand up, as you are doing, and really take on this issue. To make sure that the next generation of boys growing up do not carry into manhood with them the kind of misogyny that allows men today to think that they can buy women to use them for sex. Or take them and rape them, or any other thing. I would really, really like to see a massive movement of men. And we’ve been doing this as women for decades. And we’re still doing it. But until men actually change the way that they behave toward women, so that it will affect the next generation of boys growing up into becoming men, all over the world, this is going to continue. Because this kind of objectification on the part of men unfortunately, as you well know, is still considered manly, and is still considered a privilege for men to take up.

Work such as I have done, and other women like myself, is too often ridiculed by men as being “Ah, you just don’t like sex.” Telling us exactly what sex is for them. So that’s where I’d see it going. If I had a world with a Nordic Model, I’d have the programs for helping women get out and get their lives back together. But I would have a world where men would not touch any human being to sexually abuse and exploit them. Where, in fact, any human being would not touch any human being to sexually abuse them and exploit them. So that would be my biggest wish.

DJ: Well that’s great. It reminds me of a couple-three things. One of them is that, like a year ago I was watching one of those 20-20 Dateline programs, or something with my mom. And some guy had made a ton of money in Silicon Valley or somewhere, and he then was buying for sex these women who, like one of them was a Playboy Playmate or something. And the point of my bringing this up is there was a line in there that completely blew me away. The narrator, who was a male, said that this guy was living every man’s dream. And let’s leave off for a second the notion that every man’s dream is having sex with lots of stereotypically beautiful women. Let’s just leave that off. But he’s buying them. Even if we grant them that maybe it is “every guy’s dream” to have sex with lots of “beautiful women,” which I’m not going to grant, but let’s grant that for a second – he’s still having to pay for them. That’s extraordinary, that he called – that’s really ordinary, is the unfortunate thing – he called that “every man’s dream.” That’s exactly – I think that’s part of what you’re talking about right here, is that statement right there is a sign of how messed up things are.

KB: Yup. That’s what I mean by the title of my book, The Prostitution of Sexuality. Men have actually turned sexuality itself into a prostituted thing. And for that, we can thank the widespread profusion of pornography, where it can be brought right into the home. Where, by the way, those who are used in pornography are prostituted people.

DJ: Right. And I guess the other comment I wanted to make was do you know Charlotte Watson?

KB: I don’t think so.

DJ: Okay. She used to run the domestic violence program for the State of New York. And now she’s a women’s advocate in the New York court system. She’s fabulous. An old friend of mine. And one of the things she does, is she’s relentless. She basically asks every man she sees: “What will it take for men to stop beating on women?” Seriously. I’ve gotten in a taxi cab with her and she’ll say “Can you take us to Central Park?” And then she’ll ask the man “What will it take for men to stop beating on women?”

KB: Oh! I’ve heard about her.

DJ: She’s fabulous.

KB: Somebody else told me exactly that story very recently.

DJ: Maybe somebody else knows her.

KB: Yeah.

DJ: This is what she does. She’s relentless. And my point in bringing her up is that her answer is that “we, women, can’t do it by ourselves. What it will take is we women working and then in addition, it takes men acting in solidarity.” And the example she gives is some guy saying to another guy “I’m sorry, I can’t play basketball with you anymore because I heard you call your girlfriend a bitch. Until you apologize and until you no longer do that, I will not play basketball with you.”

KB: I was on a Facebook group yesterday where they were putting up a thing on Monica Lewinsky, ridiculing her and calling her a “cunt.” And I inserted that perhaps if their dicks, if photos of their dicks put next to photos of their faces were perverted and put up on Facebook, maybe they would get a sense of what that’s like for women when we see something like that.

The response I got was not “Oh, gee. I’ve never thought about it that way.” It was “Well, I guess we have somebody on this thread who has no sense of humor.”

DJ: We’re running out of time, but that reminds me of something else that happened that I just found so horrible. There is some BBC program, I don’t remember the name of it. It’s a comedy about two gay men living together who snipe at each other. And I read a comment on IMDb, one of the comments was “I started to watch it and I quit when they made a rape joke, when they made a joke about how some woman was too ugly to rape.” The point is, after that there were probably 150 comments – that’s all the woman said, is “I didn’t want to watch this because I found it offensive. And I found it triggering.” And there were probably 100-150 comments below that attacking her, saying she has no sense of humor, saying “how dare you try to censor men,” going on and on and on. I found it extraordinary – once again, ordinary – that the level of hatred for her simply bringing this up.

KB: Yup. That’s what we’re dealing with. And it has gotten so much worse in the last ten years. I’ll link this to, I think, the fact that we are in a state of ongoing war now. This has reverted women’s status all over the world significantly, and has privileged men’s power over women and particularly men’s sexual abuse of women. We’re seeing that as a kind of overall condition of our society right now, because this is worse than what we were fighting back in the 60’s when the women’s movement first started. And that was coming from point zero, where there was no consciousness of feminism. We were creating feminism brand new and there was no consciousness of it.

I’m seeing the privileging that men have for sexual abuse and sexual exploitation now as worse than it was at that time. But I’m also seeing, I think, some of the racism that’s coming out to us as doing the same kind of thing.

DJ: Right, right.

KB: We’re in a very bad regression and if we don’t really stand up and fight this we’re in bad, bad shape. And then I want to say how much I appreciate your consciousness on these issues, Derrick, because I think that the more that you can talk about this, the more you are going to give the reason and encouragement to other men to take this up. And that could become something very important.

DJ: Well thank you so much for saying that. I want to extend the same compliment to you, and I guess my last question here is you’ve said what you want from men, to act in solidarity with women. Can you say what you would like from women listening to this interview, what would you want for them to do, to help with all this?

KB: To stand up to every form of sexual exploitation, every form of being put down for being a woman that comes your way. You’re going to feel a lot better if you tell them to, excuse me, eff off, than if you just take it or just smile and walk away because you don’t want people to think that you’re being too negative. You’re going to be defending yourself. You’re going to be supporting yourself in your own humanity. Stand up to it wherever it occurs, whenever it occurs, and get yourself to a safe place.

DJ: Thank you so much for everything you’ve had to say. And I would like to thank listeners for listening. My guest today has been Kathleen Barry. This is Derrick Jensen for Resistance Radio on the Progressive Radio Network.

Filed in Interviews by Derrick Jensen