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Harriet Jacobs on Marginalization, Subsistence, and Denial in "Grey Area" Prostitution and Pimping Culture

Sat, 2010-02-06 01:44 — figleaf

Harriet Jacobs of Fugitivus again, this time on an extremely prickly subject I’ve discussed previously: the blurred boundary between subsistence and dependency at the real margins of society. In this case the difference between assistance and exploitation or… well… she puts it rather pithily (emphasis mine.)

I had a social worker friend who once described a conversation she’d had with a female client who was trying to get back on her feet. She had met a new guy that she was very excited about. Oh, sure, there were problems, but who doesn’t have problems? Anyway, he was so committed to her, so committed to working out everything. The woman brushed off the few times he’d encouraged her to have sex with his friends as times that they were all just sooooooo drunk, but it totally strengthened their relationship because they’re not even the jealous types. And, of course, there were all the times that she was just trying to “help him out” on a drug deal. And then those times that she had “cheated” when a friend of his came by and locked her in the bedroom. At the end of her description, the social worker had to try and explain that this woman didn’t have a relationship, or a boyfriend: she had a pimp.

She said it here.

You wouldn’t think this kind of denial could happen. It could.

What’s really harsh, by the way, is that since in circumstances like this the pimp “boyfriend” may be trading his partner for favors or status or cargo rather than cash he may not, strictly speaking, recognize that he’s being a pimp either. Although mostly I’m guessing he’s pretty clear about he’s doing he still might not think of it as pimping.

That would be another problem with stereotypes, especially for those living really marginal lives.

As I said in my own post a couple of years ago

speaking for myself, even though I was sometimes sleeping under overpasses, in cars, or “crashing” at other people’s apartments, and even though my diet was so meager I developed nutritional deficiency diseases, it wasn’t until the 1980s that I realized I’d been homeless. And it wasn’t till very recently that I realized the people we thought of at the time as “in some kind of hot water” probably qualified as trafficked or pimped. So I’m guessing the same is true for a lot of people still in those situations. And not because they’re not there but because there’s there’s so much overlap between the aspirations and difficulties of migration/transience, smuggling, and trafficking that sometimes it’s hard to tell even when you’re in it, let alone from the outside.

I said it here: Between Transience and Trafficking, a Personal Perspective

This isn’t by the way even remotely anything like an excuse. It’s a complication in any scheme to legalize prostitution, which I would still like to see. Or to keep it illegal, which many more people would evidently like to see. Which means, at least to me, that no matter how the pro/anti activism turns out this particular issue will probably need to be addressed by separate policy initiatives.

I don’t have much else to say about it. Except maybe that I think it could be distinguished pretty unambiguously in a page, or even a sidebar, in a comprehensive sex-education curriculum. And so if anyone’s listening I’d really like to lobby for its inclusion. Of course it would also be nice if we could count on students receiving comprehensive sex education in the first place…

I’ll just reiterate that I think Jacobs writes powerful stuff.

Incidentally she closes her post this way…

it’s impossible to ignore rape culture when it calls and makes an appointment, in a whisper and obviously hiding in a closet. When it arrives late on the bus, alone and lost. When it walks in the front door, comes over to your desk, and whispers on the verge of tears, “I need, um, I need, I need the thing.” It’s hard to ignore when it’s curled up in your lobby, unresponsive and unwilling to come back, to interact with you or any representative of the world. It’s hard to ignore when it’s made manifest in a real live girl, a real live girl who has been stripped of the right to disallow strangers access to everything from the waist down. I am acutely aware that many of these girls have been violated, and that I constitute a further violation; my presence announces to them that not only are they not allowed to choose when and with whom they have sex, but they are not allowed to choose how to deal with the consequences of being abused. All I did was pass a job interview, and I am temporarily LordGodKing of her uterus. All she did was own the uterus; why should she get to decide what to do with it? It’s not like she can type up the paperwork. She doesn’t even have a desk.

Again, she said it here.

Powerful stuff.

Sun, 2010-02-07 00:28 — Holly Pervocracy (not verified) #permalink

Thanks for getting me reading Fugitivus, it’s a really fascinating blog.

And I know what you mean. Not personally for the most part (although I do look back on some of the crap my mom did and realize that incidents I’d though of as “I was bad and I was punished” were somewhere between terrible parenting and outright abuse—apparently most parents actually don’t march you outside naked and yell “now everyone will see your vagina!” if you don’t drink your milk), but through my job, tons. Abused women defend their abusers not because they’re brainwashed but because they believe—often not totally wrongly—that to lose their abuser would be to lose their whole way of life.

I’ve been to a women’s shelter, and frankly, it kind of sucked. The staff really cared and the facility was warm and safe, but it was no one’s idea of home. There was no space or privacy, you couldn’t bring your friends there, you couldn’t drink or smoke or get high there (so, yeah, try going through all that and withdrawal), and you sure as hell couldn’t see your abuser there even if he was the closest thing you had to love.

Sure, a women’s shelter is better than being abused—but is it better than every comfortable and familiar part of your entire life? That, I think, is a lot of the reason I take so many women to the hospital after they “just fell down.”

[Eeeyup. A very good friend of my dad’s from very rural Appalachia explained that she’d stayed with this total deadbeat husband for 30 years because unlike her previous (also deadbeat!) husbands and boyfriends he never ever beat her. Also yeeks about your mom’s idea of discipline! And finally, yeah, Fugitivus kind of rocks! Thanks, Holly. —fl]

Sun, 2010-02-07 15:25 — Holly Pervocracy (not verified) #permalink

The really weird thing is that even now, with all my awesome sex-blogger insight, I still have a relationship with my mom. I haven’t even talked to her about stuff like slapping me in the face at my highschool graduation or getting me up in the middle of the night to scream at me for hours, because:

A) Those conversations seem to end in me apologizing, because I did make her angry after all, that was bad of me. And here I am accusing her of abuse, that’s bad of me right now, don’t you know that false accusations of abuse are the worst thing you can do to a person.

B) If I cut off my mom, if I refused to speak to her or visit her, I wouldn’t have a mom. I’m too old and she’s too far away for her to hurt me much at this point. And sometimes she does really nice things for me. I don’t want to not have a mommy. Then I’d have a shitty childhood and no mom, and what would that get me?

C) If I admit mom was sorta abusey, that sticks the big ol’ label of Abused Child on my forehead, and those people are damaged and needy and make normal people feel weird. I want to be a cool girl, a funny sexy girl that people like to hang out with, and that means I mustn’t take on the victim label.

Sorry. I don’t mean to make this into Holly’s Mommy Issue Therapy Hour. I was just reading more Fugitivus and it was stirring up a lot of really weird issues for me—like, maybe when your abuser tells you that wasn’t abuse, abuse is only if it breaks bones or something, that was maybe a parenting mistake at worst, the abuser isn’t the most reliable source here—and yeah.

[Actually I think this is pretty on-point: I’m pretty sure there are a lot of people who, like your mom, can’t imagine what they do could be mistaken for abuse because, yeah, no broken bones or whatever. Just like there are guys who are simon-simple purely sure what they do isn’t rape because they don’t jump out of bushes or use a knife. There are certainly victims who are equally unsure.

Where it gets tricky, by the way, is that there really is a completely separate “victim” element that doesn’t come in to play unless, well, it gets brought in. Sort of like “we didn’t know we were poor, we just didn’t have as much food as other people.” For me, learning that what had happened to me as a little kid and, later, as an early teen was sexual assault made a big difference, and obviously the actual experiences did as well. But by the time I figured it out I had a whole set of adult tools to deal with it that I wouldn’t have had if I’d really understood what was happening at the time. The good thing is that while reading Jacobs might have opened a box that can’t be unopened you’ve got adult tools for dealing with it too. And you have access to lots more if you need or even just want to. Let me know if you want to talk about it, Holly. I’m guessing you’ve got other people to talk about it with too though. —fl]

Sun, 2010-02-07 02:37 — nekobawt (not verified) #permalink

it’s pretty easy to be in denial if you think of whatever you’re in denial about as “something that happens to other people.” failed marriage, alcoholism, drug abuse, emotional abuse, rape, you name it, those things happen to other people, and you’re not “other people,” you’re YOU! so it couldn’t be… (etc etc etc).

[That too, Nekobawt. Thanks. —fl]

Sun, 2010-02-07 16:28 — Red (not verified) #permalink

I spent a quarter of a century honest-to-God believing that in order for somebody to be a “real” alcoholic that there had to be severe (emergency room with horrible injuries) level child abuse, children going without food because the parent drank all the money, and/or the “drunk” had to be sleeping under a bridge.

I had no idea that it was possible for a respectable lawyer who never missed a day of work, was never even late for work, never hit his wife or kids, and never ran the family to destitution could possibly be an alcoholic, even despite constant concerns that he drank too much and caused embarrassing situations while drunk. Even if the amount of alcoholic he consumed was more than twice enough to be considered shamefully high by Russian standards (and I’ve traveled in Russia). I thought that the very term “functional alcoholic” was invented by a bunch of whiners who just wanted to joined the victimized sob sister club.

I assumed that in order to be a so-called “adult child of an alcoholic” one had to have a history that involved having been beaten severely, left for dead with injuries that a parent left with a baseball bat, having had cigarette burns as a child, and having missed meals as a regular experience.

It was a strange thing to have other people telling one at the age of 29, that you “qualify” as an “adult child of an alcoholic”, thinking that any such thing would involve a whole mass of experience as removed for what I grew up with as any war zone. Friends in this situation will attribute any reluctance to accept this as “denial” especially if they’ve spent some time in Al-Anon and such. But often it truly is a case of misinformation.

Sun, 2010-02-07 21:51 — colorlessblue (not verified) #permalink

Ahhh denial and rationalization. Harriet has a post somewhere in the archives about a study made with rapists in jail. It seems most of them don’t really think what they did was rape, even if you ask them to describe what rape is and they give a description that matches what they did. Somehow they knew that in their particular case the victim wanted it.
I found Fugitivus a few months ago and spent about a week of December reading the archives almost randomly. I found her in the process of dealing with my own denial. Sometimes I still can’t believe that I’m a grown up who knows all the definitions and all, and still didn’t get why the room got silent after I told some stories. I’d always think that my friends were misunderstanding and overreacting, and oh, come on, I barely remember that, it wasn’t that bad.
The irony is that I started to understand when I told some friends about how I felt assaulted because a technician hacked into my computer and accessed my pics while pretending to fix a hardware problem, and then everybody told me I was overreacting and minimizing assault. Then I started to read a few blogs here and there and saw so many experiences like mine being called by the right names and oh. So that’s not just annoying stuff that happens, like rain at the time you have to get the bus?

[Amazing what comes up that we sort of buffer ourselves from. What seems tricky to me is that “denial” is the same mechanism we have for coping with all manner of realities, which is pretty handy considering all the stuff we deal with all the time. (Or, 100 years ago, really horrible stuff like near-certainty that if you had four children one of them would die before reaching adulthood!) It’s like if we didn’t have some capacity for denial we’d live in despair. It’s just not so good when it’s used against us, or we use it against ourselves to make us just cope with what we could be doing something about. Thanks, Colorlessblue. —fl]

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