Professional Girlfriends: a letter

Dr. Hoefinger:

The results of your seven years of research as summed in your article “A Woman’s Work” left me rather disappointed. I recently read said article in Southeast Asia Globe Magazine, and what disturbed me was how thoroughly saturated it is in Patriarchy.

I am not necessarily pro or anti-prostitution or systems related to it (transactional sex and so on), but I do question any cultural system which homogenizes an individual’s identity based on “lump categories” like ethnicity, gender, age, etc., which is exactly what prostitution, bar work, and karaoke-singing in Cambodia do. It also functions within and perpetuates Patriarchy. I am compelled to question a situation (be it career, school, family-related, etc.) wherein a group of people is conspicuously absent or present. I find bar work in Phnom Penh troubling precisely because it is all young, economically disadvantaged Cambodian girls and women.

Your article highlights several young women who chose to go to the city for bar work. Opening with a discussion with one professional girlfriend about the benefits of her work, I was immediately overwhelmed by a sense that her identity and values were shaped around high-profile consumption, that she is fixated on consumerism and the associated prestige. As you introduce and quote a few more women, a world of hyperconsumption emerges: individual women are themselves being consumed, even as they struggle for means to further their own consumption. (On a brief tangent, does any person “subscribe” to capitalism, as you say, or aren’t we all just born into it?) On the one hand, a very shallow picture is painted of greedy women preoccupied with make-up, clothing, gold jewelry. On the other, we’re told they are “virtuous” as they provide for their families back home and take care of themselves. Either way they are fulfilling the opposite but equally stereotypical expectations of the Patriarchy.

This representation of ‘virtue’ further irritates my feminist sensibilities, particularly as how it connects to the family. Within the traditional (some would say ‘ideal’) Patriarchal Khmer family, women are constantly relegated to lower positions than their male counterparts. The expectation exists that females will provide for the family in ways which compliment male contributions, but which often become exploitative. The ‘freedom’ and ‘adventure’ bar workers experience perhaps offsets this exploitation to a degree, but still at the risk of harmful stigmatization. The burden of family honor placed on young (particularly marriageable) women is as much an item of Patriarchy as is the consumption of female sexuality. This is the shortcoming I see in affirmatory studies and articles on sex workers, bar workers, and karaoke workers again and again: simply approving of the ‘chosen careers’ of such women does little to ground their ‘choices’ in reality.

One might ask how real a ‘choice’ it is to opt for the ‘freedom’ of bar work over work in the provinces. Thus is it necessarily a gendered choice; we see no boys pimping or sexually commodifying themselves in order to attain material security, prestige, or just to get by (indeed they exist, but the point is we don’t see them). Yet women who commodify their own sexuality to fulfill male sexual pleasure, stigmatized as they are, are highly visible and are in high demand. Here is the aspect of bar work that I felt your article failed to address: how is sexual commodification (here in the form of bar work, professional girlfriendry, and transactional sex) a gendered phenomenon, and how does it affect the overall sociocultural status of Cambodian women? Indeed, of all women?

Part of me thinks your article was merely written to appeal to the masses– with sex appeal, quite obviously. Even the title of your article degrades the potential seriousness of the subject, while simultaneously upholding the Patriarchal standard: “A Woman’s Work”, really? It seems to be a most disappointing subscription to Patriarchal norms.

I appreciate your intimate use of participant observation. But the problem with this research method is that it can become too personal; I wonder if it didn’t for you? Being too close to a situation or subject can blind us to a broader, deeper context. Perhaps in your effort to portray such women as self-reliant, capable, and career-oriented, you allowed yourself to overlook the more desperate aspects both of their individual situations and the situation of women in Cambodia in general.

This you did not do in your article, “In This Place, We Are Kin” (which really only reaffirms my thoughts about mass appeal); in “A Woman’s Work”, you make no mention of the potential long term outcomes of transactional sex and bar work. You give a very detailed account of one such worker in “In This Place”, however, and I think it would have edified SEAGlobe readers to have read about her. Whereas bar work once allotted her personal freedom and stability, it ultimately does not provide realistic long-term support, and after encountering economic hardship she feels obligated to marry someone she does not love in order to survive. Her chosen career path may seem like a far cry from the textile workers and farmers in the provinces, but the end result is very much the same: unable to support themselves and their families (through no fault of their own), they are forced into relationships which are, verily, exchanges of sex for security– transactional sex, as someone would say.

I do intend to read your book when it comes out next year. You must still be writing it; if it is more of “A Woman’s Work”, expect more pejorative letters. If you decide to give a less single-minded account of the experience Cambodian bar workers, I might even buy it.

Best,

Lee Solomon

p.s. One could really go on, too, about the abysmal absence of aspects of sexual violence, but we can save that for another time.

“The ‘Process-Oriented’ Virgin”: a letter

Dear Mz Blank:

I am what you would call a “process-oriented virgin”, though I, myself, would reject that label. I was so angry reading through your essay “The Process-Oriented Virgin” as included in Yes Means Yes that I could barely finish it before reacting to it.

I’m not surprised that you (or anyone else) is or was at some point shocked at the notion that virginity is subjective and that “sexually active” human beings can decide for themselves at what point they are no longer “virginal”. I grew up in a very Christian town that still buys into the “scientific” definition of virginity as “loss of the hymen” (obviously men don’t have a hymen, therefore men need not bother with the concept of virginity). But I did not expect such a small-minded view of the subject from a fellow feminist. Then again, I have long refrained from calling myself “feminist” because so many people who label themselves as such are in fact objectifying, racist, classist, ableist, stereotyping, gender/heteronormative and hypersexualizing persons that I felt I had nothing in common with this so-called feminist movement. Compared with the content caliber of the others essays in Yes Means Yes, I’m a little disappointed that your 18th century perspective was included.

Here is why.

First is your label of the “process-oriented” virgin: it is inherently pejorative. Your diction makes it obvious that you find the notion of choice (“process orientation”) self-serving and revisionist– which you actually go on to admit to in your essay, even so far as to call it “arrogant”. Forgive us for desiring autonomy and agency over and within our sexual selves. Supposedly you’ve repented of your ignorance, but your choice of words shows that your are still ingrained in the Patriarchy. It would detract from the importance, credibility and necessity of recognizing virginity as subjective and that reclaiming one’s own sexuality begins with a reflective analysis of previous sexual activity (most people don’t reclaim their sexuality before they start having sex/engaging in sexual activity, unfortunately, which is why your so-called “process” is so necessarily healing and empowering). Moreover you put process-oriented in quotations: highlighting irony, or “using scare quotes advisedly”? Either way you are (consciously or unconsciously) denying credibility to the concept. You might have invented a cutesy, armchair, ironical name for it, but the concept is real.

You also refer to “the virgin” as “herself”: maybe you didn’t even catch that during your revision and editing process. This is so blatantly Patriarchal that I’m surprised you haven’t put out an apology note retracting this ugly use of gendered pronouns. Similarly: “Way to raise the bar, ladies.”?? Rather than congratulating a few women on doing something they have already taken for granted, perhaps you should recognize that you are late to jump on the bandwagon? Because you have, for most of your professional career, “unwittingly [?] bought into the patriarchal conceit…[which is] at least broadly congruent with the traditional (misogynist, patriarchal) definitions I had been studying and writing about for so long” [emphasis mine].  You blame “culturally-ingrained notions” for your ignorance. I’m here to tell you that that’s not good enough; accountability within the feminist community is key to the eradication of Patriarchy. Moreover, you are assuming that male-identified persons (and genderqueer persons, for that matter) are not participating in the same self-exploratory historical revision. That is profoundly “unfeminist” in my book.

To jab a flag into the Land of the Process-Oriented Virgin as the “potentially feminist act” you believe it to be is unwelcome and unwarranted. You would need permission from each individual that your “study” and “analysis” exploits to call their personal choices “feminist”; they might be completely offended by this label. Some of them would be offended because their (perhaps not yet or ever-to-be self-identified) feminist standards make yours look Victorian. It’s not your right to label someone else’s personal revolutions and realizations as Feminist or not. It’s theirs, if they choose to do so or not. You also assume that their sex history revision is “fundamentally derived from feminist sex-reform philosophy”, rather than the other way around. You put the cart before the horse, in other words. Which is why you say these persons were doing so “intuitively” seems nonsensical; are you saying they have an inherent sense of feminist philosophy? Wouldn’t it make more sense to say that their “intuition” and revolution about their own definitions and standards has informed feminism?

And finally, as to your ideas on why YOUR “‘process-oriented’ virginity” is not “the ultimate answer to the problem” of virginity: there may or may not be a “thing” called virginity, but that is for an individual to decide. Virginity and nonvirginity may be two states between which a person transitions back and forth. Perhaps some individuals never experience virginity or nonvirginity. And perhaps still others see it not as a two-point spectrum, but as a radial continuum, across, through, around, and within which we can navigate and exist. Your “emotional and interpersonal train wrecks” that supposedly derive from “substantial sexual experience” coupled with a “claim [of] virginity” (hysteria, what what?) seem to imply that women aren’t or perhaps more accurately should not be engaging in sex in which they are not emotionally invested. What about having sex with a mutually consenting partner which is not about emotional connection, but is just about feeling good? Well, that would just be manly and unfeminine– unnatural, really. Further, you assume that people attribute some kind of qualitative moral status (“good”, “bad”) to virginity, versus the view that many persons merely think of it as a “thing” that is neither good nor bad, desirable or undesirable, right or wrong– but nevertheless important. And the idea that a person with complete self-direction and autonomous control of their sexuality (including the “virginity”, “nonvirginity”, or “avirginity” aspect(s) of it) would be any more likely than a “normal” person to have a “medical [or] infectious-disease mishap” is utterly misguided. Such a person would be far more likely, given the thought and analysis with which they’ve approach the subject of virginity, specifically, and sexuality, generally, to take seriously or place value on knowing a sexual partner’s history. They would also be much less likely to lie about their own “status”, being that they would find value in sharing their “revisionist history” in all its detail. These factors would greatly reduce the risk of a “mishap” resulting in an STI.

Your initial impression of “‘p-o’ virginity” was that it was self-serving revisionism. But that is also your last impression, according to the essay: if you really understood both the concept and the persons thinking critically about said concept, you wouldn’t have included this paragraph in your essay. I will reiterate what I said above: sexual transparency is more likely be of great value to a person questioning the concept of virginity in the aforementioned ways than to a “normal” person whose default assumption, if they are female, is to claim virginity for fear of stigma, or if male, to claim nonvirginity for the same reason. Either way these claims are lies and disguise the real nature of a person’s sexuality and sexual history. You also assume that the “process-oriented approach to virginity is…profoundly unconscious”. In fact, it is not unconscious/intuitive so much as that you are just trivializing the experience and intimate metamorphoses through which the persons you are analyzing are going. That is, you are objectifying them. And since you readily admit that your evidence is anecdotal, why not try listening to your “subjects” as real, live, decision-making persons, rather than bupkins who are so ignorant in the ways of your feminism that they couldn’t possibly have come up with this idea on their own, through their own experiences. There may be greater self-sought intellectual, psychic, academic, and emotional transformation and theorization happening than for which you give credit. I would claim this as a valid description of my own process of reconstructing and redefining body, sexuality, virginity, consent, among other concepts which are all intimately connected. And I didn’t require a degree in women’s studies to do it. For all your talk of “‘p-o’ virginity” as “arrogant”, you don’t seem to notice that as a reflection of yourself.

I will agree with you on one crucial point, however: “It would be a massive step in very much the right direction…if it became a cultural constant that “losing your virginity” was a subjective, not an objective, transition.” And that massive step starts with individuals, like you and me. I would tell you the title of the book I’m going to write about subjective virginity, but I wouldn’t want you to steal it.

So sorry if this email was a little hostile, but I do feel so much better now. Please consider it directed only partially at you, and more at the overarching Patriarchal hegemony which guides much of how most of the world thinks. Maybe we’re all getting swept along in it, but now that you know there’s an “it” which you’re “in”, you have the responsibility to pull yourself and others out.

Best,
Lee

After some more reflection, I think I figured out another, more deeply-rooted reason why Blank’s essay rubbed me the wrong way: it is intrinsically academically paternalistic. That is, her diction, tone, and anecdotes are strongly reminiscent of the Othering language used by historians, anthropologies, sociologists, psychologists, and others in academe to observe, analyze, describe, and summarize their “subjects”: take Malinowski and his islanders (or should I say savages?) as an example. In other words, Blank is the kid with the magnifying glass and we (or her subjects) are the ants… We couldn’t possibly comprehend the magnifying glass, let alone her bizarrely patriarchal feminism.