Sex us a totally natural, biological function. Every living species practices it in some way or another. We humans are hard wired to like sex. There is a biochemical cascade at work in our brains that compels a response to anything akin to sexual stimulation. Additional insight on our sexually tuned brain chemistry can be found in a book I reviewed in this blog. The book, titled The Compass of Pleasure, presents what neuro-researchers have learned more recently about the brain's role in human sexuality. Bottom line; sex is a perfectly normal biological function. Moreover, for humans, it can be a source of a lovely, intoxicating brand of physical pleasure.
Unfortunately, in America, our natural sexual instinct has long been stifled by religious stricture. The article below addresses the perverse way normal human sexual instinct is undermined by the American brand of morality.
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Fantasies of White Sexual
Slavery: How Our Nation's History of Sexual Oppression Is Still With Us
December 31,
2014
For anyone
willing to look right in the face of America’s sexual repression, sexist
assumptions, and racist fears, Policing Sexuality: The Mann Act and The
Making of the FBI by Jessica R. Pliley, is at once a magnifying glass and
flashlight. It is an indispensable history of all the American anxieties, hang
ups, and priggish obsessions in one neat, little package.
Pliley is a
Women’s History Professor at Texas State University, and she writes with the
predictable detachment of most academics. Her linguistic restraint is likely
the result of Olympian self-discipline, given the sheer insanity of what she
summarizes and scrutinizes in Policing Sexuality.
In the late
nineteenth century and early twentieth century, prostitution was not only legal
in America, but widely available in any major city, and even most small cities.
Pliley writes that, at that point in American history, “women’s citizenship was
defined through her sexual contract with her husband (the marriage contract),
and U.S. policy towards women generally emphasized women’s reproductive service
to the nation.”
Prostitution,
as historian Thaddues Russell often explains, was actually the first model of
independent, even feminist, citizenship and life in the United States. Many
prostitutes lived according to their own income and accord, wore makeup, and
eventually became business owners.
Because it was
subversive to the subservience of women to men, and because of its obvious
violation of strict social and sexual mores, prostitution became the target of
a religious and progressive reformer campaign for regulation, and later,
criminalization. The alignment of religious conservatives and feminist liberals
on issues of sexual policing is one of the most fascinating stories in American
history and contemporary politics. It is one, however, that most people refuse
to acknowledge. Pliley’s piles of evidence make it impossible to ignore.
Suffragists and
“social hygienists”, whether motivated by Christianity or paternalist
“protection” of young women, used a crowbar to enter into mainstream discourse,
and advocate for the prosecution of prostitution. Their crowbar was what Pliley
calls, “the American myth of white slavery.”
Even though
prostitution by coercion, assault, or threat of violence – sex slavery –
accounted for less than ten percent of sex worker cases in America during the
early twentieth century, the idea of “white slavery” spread like a contagion
across the body politic. Millions of people came to believe that young,
innocent, virginal white women were victims of abduction and assault, and
forced to prostitute themselves for the enrichment of their immigrant pimps.
Because black and non-white immigrant women had no inherent value or innate
dignity – essentially, they weren’t human – they could not become part of the
“white slavery” myth, and were, therefore, unworthy of protection. In response
to an actual case of rape against a young, black woman, the U.S. attorney of
Arkansas said that in his state it would be impossible to secure a conviction
in a case “where any colored people are connected either as subject of victim.”
Raping black
women was pretty much legal, and common, but white slavery was a scourge in
need of destruction. One can’t help but wonder how different American history
would have turned out if politicians and lawmakers spent a fraction of the time
fighting actual slavery as they did combating nearly non-existent white
slavery, but rationality and race rarely coalesce in the American story. The
Mann Act of 1910 made it illegal to transport women across state lines for
prostitution, debauchery, and in the especially dangerous language of the law,
“any other immoral purposes.”
Even if cases
of coercion and force in regards to prostitution were uncommon, aggressively
mobilizing law enforcement resources to prevent and punish them was a good
idea. It turns out, however, that the Bureau of Investigation (The FBI in its
infancy) used the vague and threatening phrasing of the Mann Act to vigorously
and viciously persecute adultery, seduction cases, and anything with the slight
hint of miscegenation. “Policing domesticity” is a useful phrase that Pliley
employs in her analysis of The Mann Act, making it clear and incontrovertible, that
the federal government and local law enforcement agencies, along with an army
of volunteers, collaborated to enforce traditional morality against women – to
keep them in their place, the home, and in the meantime, to keep the races
romantically segregated, and to keep the sanctity of marriage synonymous with
positive citizenship.
Promiscuity,
even among single women, quickly became a substitution for prostitution.
Legislators and police officers believed that the promiscuous woman, because
she was more likely to contract a venereal disease, threatened the health of
married men who might step outside their marriages for sexual adventure. The
men, naturally, almost never faced arrest or prosecution. Meanwhile, white men
sexually assaulting black women was not a crime, at least in the response it
elicited from law enforcement, but consensual sex between black men and white
women, was a prosecutable offense.
Such an
ambitious enterprise of moral regulation required significant personnel and
funding, and when Congress continued to increase the budget for the fledging
Bureau of Investigation, it gave birth to the FBI and the surveillance state.
The Immigration Bureau and the Bureau of Investigation moved into nineteen
cities, and enlisted a “white slavery squad” – men of moral repute who
voluntarily went undercover into brothels, vice districts, and other places of
prostitution, to monitor, track, and create a record of sex workers. It seems
that the worst assumptions modern critics of State power can make about law
enforcement and surveillance don’t go nearly far enough. The rise of the FBI
and State sanctioned spying – in its methodology, its practice, and its reason
for existence – is inseparable from misogyny, racism, sexual repression, and
bizarre, Christian notions of moral purity.
Follow the
genesis of the FBI and the surveillance state, through the Red Scare,
McCarthyism, COINTELPRO, and the political war against dissent in the 1960s,
the assassination of Fred Hampton, and the imprisonment of Assata Shakur, and
the warnings of Edward Snowden become even more urgent, important, and
frightening. From J. Edgar Hoover to the data mining of the NSA, short of wearing
eyeglasses upside down and plastering tin foil over the windows, there is no
such thing as paranoia in the face of the American State.
Policing
Sexuality is
irreplaceable in any library of American history, but also in the effort to
gain an understanding of an increasingly regressive form of domestic politics.
Immigrants don’t just constitute a threat to the health and safety of America
right now. They were a danger to the virginal bliss and innocence of women and
American families in the early twentieth century. Unarmed black men are not
just now a menace worthy of police execution. They were ready to rape, kill,
and pimp white women a long time ago. Women’s sexuality is not up for
negotiation and discipline just because they want their health insurance policy
to cover contraception, they’ve always been subversive sluts.
Tolerance of
the State policing the consensual sexual activities of adults, just because the
exchange of money is involved, is not only ironic in a nation always priding
itself on freedom, but deeply cruel considering that, as Pliley demonstrates in
her conclusion, “Laws intended to police sex trafficking rarely benefit those
who have been trafficked; instead these laws mark women as bodies to be
policed.”
Sex positive
feminist Carol Queen has coined the term “absexual”, to describe people who
“get off complaining about sex,” and find their stimulation through the moral
imposition of their mores on the adventurous and open minded, whose source of
pleasure fascinates and frightens them. It doesn’t require the insight of
Sigmund Freud to see how absexuality plays a fundamental role in the shaping
America’s sexual norms, from the condemnations of puritanical Christians to the
concerns of paternalistic feminists. The absexual finds the whiff of what he or
she ridicules too alluring to stay away completely, but too scary to actually
practice.
Policing
Sexuality offers a sad
and absurd glimpse into the troubled psyche of a nation that never developed a
healthy, sophisticated, and adult sense of sexuality. The punishment it inflicted on
prostitutes, promiscuous women, and interracial couples a century ago is a
great shame and real sin. The pain it produces in the lives of sex workers
right now is nothing short of depraved and barbaric.
It is that very
depravity and barbarism that conceived and nurtures American law enforcement
and the modern surveillance state.
Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/gender/fantasies-white-sexual-slavery-how-our-nations-history-sexual-oppression-still-us
