A couple of days ago, I wrote about a segment of the Majority Report with Sam Seder which featured a senior legal fellow from the Heritage Foundation characterizing Pride merchandise as satanic. I came upon another Majority Report segment, this one featuring Candace Owens and her insistence that surrogate pregnancy is “demonic.” This theme is ratcheting up in right-wing circles, and we should take notice.
However, my focus is on the manner in which Owens effects this demonization. Throughout the video, Owens coaches (that is, trains) her audience that “there’s something wrong with this, right?” — clearly substituting her own asserting opinion as a broadly held value statement. Just as with the Heritage Foundation video, this is identity management and attitude formation—that is the consent that is being manufactured.
Candace Owens: When you consider surrogacy, especially surrogacy for the sake of surrogacy, there is something demonic about it. Right? When you are doing it not because you can’t have a child, right? Even worse, right? Khloe Kardashian is able to have a child. She has a daughter, True, who she grew inside of her own body. And simply because she wanted for her daughter, True, to have a 100% biological sibling but she was not willing to have sex with this serial cheater, Tristan Thompson… she decided to borrow and purchase some other woman’s body.
And it’s a horrible way of stating it, and I again want to assign her all the credit in the world for speaking out on it, but she’s correct in her assessments that there is something wrong with this, right? That because she is rich, she purchased another woman’s body for ten months. That woman went through the hormones. The woman went through probably so much more than just—and what comes with that, right? That woman went through the cravings. That woman went through feeling that child kick inside of her for probably more than twenty weeks—she probably experienced the first kicks around sixteen weeks, maybe twenty weeks if it’s your first pregnancy—only to give birth, to go through this incredible God moments, right? And then Khloe comes into the hospital and just takes this baby away into the other room.
The insidious way Owens achieves this effect is to allude that surrogacy is just like prostitution: the prospective parents “purchase a woman’s body” for months on end, putting her through bodily strain and struggle, then snatch the resulting baby from her arms just after birth. [Owens, incidentally, was describing the torture that female slaves endured in the Southern slave system where females often were kept purely for breeding, as that was the most profitable: making something (a valuable slave: money) from nothing (a slave, a person not even recognized as such).]
Beyond the slavery angle, Owens not once but twice draws a direct analogy from surrogacy to prostitution. And each time she does, Sam & crew address their own audience; and Emma Vigeland, the only female host on the show, steps in to tell the audience that the real targets of this rhetoric are gay couples, particularly rich ones like Dave Rubin who can afford to pay someone to carry a pregnancy to term for them. Each time the prostitution analogy is brought forward, Vigeland redirects the audience. None of the hosts on set even touch the topic of prostitution. But this is how Owens’s propaganda finds its juice—you can’t negate its charge without defusing the central metaphor. Vigeland just dances all around it. The avoidance is so total that it itself becomes conspicuous.
Interestingly, the hosts have no problem exposing one aspect of Owens’s proposed belief system (or proffered set of attitudes). Owens bemoans the plight of the surrogate, who suffers all the indignities visited upon the body as a consequence of pregnancy without the natural reward of suckling and bonding with that child (and Owens’s description is so explicit that it is pseudopornography), yet in all other instances she is for a woman or female who is pregnant to suffer these same indignities even when that person doesn’t want to endure the pregnancy—that is, when the person wants to regain control over their own body. In that case, Owens has no sympathy. It’s not the suffering of pregnancy, then, that she is decrying.
The similarity here in each scenario is that it is the female who retains autonomy and agency: the surrogate who enters into a contract between two consenting parties, and the female seeking to end her state of pregnancy. In each, the female exercises control.
And this is the underlying similarity, too, with the woman who “sells her body”, though she is in actuality selling her skills and her time.1 She has entered into a contract with another person, a consenting partner, and under the same basis for the analogous situations she retains agency and autonomy (at least in models where prostitution is legalized or possibly, in some areas, even decriminalized; that is, where the woman enters the industry voluntarily).
That’s the tie that binds. It’s one the hosts of the Majority Report won’t touch and in fact laugh nervously as they hopscotch away from the subject, calling the rhetoric choice “silly.” It’s anything but. Owens knows exactly what effect she’s going for.
At one point, near the end, Vigeland finally acknowledges that Candace Owens is trying to evoke a sense of stigma about the practice of surrogacy. But, again, she can’t explore the roots of that stigma because she won’t approach the metaphor. By making “selling your body” somehow representative or symbolic of homosexuality instead of the obvious reference, Vigeland makes it impossible to deconstruct the social construction of prostitution: that it is seen as cut off from human society, that it is secret, dirty, simply unspeakable. None of those things can adequately be explored by examining the surface simulacrum symbol of homosexuals, and rich homosexuals at that. The two populations (female sex workers and gay men) don’t overlap, and so a critique at the symbolic or at the sociological level is closed off.
I posit that prostitution got renewed emphasis as a form of free-floating stigma during the Black Death / Age of Exploration, where sailors finding ports sought their own finding of ports ashore. These women, entrepreneurs of their time, were seen as vectors of disease (when in fact one might call attention to the nature of seafaring and sea trade as facilitators of encountering and concentrating those in port cities, furthering their spread in industrialized society).2
Because these women were seen as the instigators of disease, they were made to stand in for all distress and malady in society. The prostitute became disease; and this was effected by rhetoric, by inculcating attitudes just as Candace Owens is inculcating attitudes, except in the Middle Ages the instruction was coming directly from the pulpit. Always, at least in the Christian tradition, a preacher can fall back on the image of Babylon as a harlot, as a woman of low morals. The image and the flesh-and-blood person become interchangeable in the imagination. And since these parishioners never would encounter a prostitute in real life (or, if so, the occasion would be vanishingly rare), this caricature would stand as though it reflected reality. That image, that symbol, can be used all throughout life as the ultimate negative example, a symbol of what must be cast out if society is to remain pure.3
Surely we can update our own perceptions at this point in history. We are no longer in the Age of Exploration with its seafaring folk. Industrialism has transformed society, and that includes the field of medicine. What once were sexually-restricted diseases that, once contracted, could severely curtail one’s health or even kill, now can be cured with a pill or a cream, for the most part. HIV/AIDS did, in fact, change the calculus in the ‘80s back to a protective, hunched and wary stance with regards to STDs. But, of course, that stigma that attached to gay men during the AIDS devastation was that which ordinarily attaches to prostitutes, to that portion of the population seen as unclean and unworthy. Such are pestilence and anyone who consorts with them will become pestilent themselves—this is an eye-for-an-eye morality of sorts. “By his fruits ye may know him.” “You get what you ask for, what’s coming to you.” This is a version of the Just World, as well as Jungle World (it’s a beastly place; it’s kill or be killed).
However, in industrialized society where we have largely put the death sentence of STDs behind us (with the one major exception noted), we also have progressed in our understanding of the State and thus of the citizen and what rights and duties are afforded to both. The Age of Enlightenment saw people in the West champion the ideal of the individual citizen as agentic and autonomous, and exercise of that autonomy is how that individual experienced freedom. That independence is the basis of personhood. It is this agency that the prostitute who has entered the field willingly and affirmatively is exercising.
This is a class issue, too, as modern-day prostitution is situated directly within socioeconomic realities. Sex work is widely regarded as “unskilled labor” (though in truth much skill may be involved), and in the United States at least unskilled labor is largely uncompensated or barely remunerative. We have the term “the working poor” and we say it without an ounce of shame, though it is a national disgrace that such a condition exists, where someone can work diligently at low-status work and remain in poverty simply due to that low status that is conferred.
In the case of the prostitute, the work may be seen as largely unskilled, but unlike most low-status jobs or careers in the U.S., sex workers can and often do demand competitive compensation or wage for the work. Thus it is precisely “through the body” that the prostitute pursues (economic) freedom. It is through that pursuit that the prostitute can find the fulfillment that one derives from being one’s own boss, an entrepreneur.
It is almost blasphemy to say such words, even in a secular society where capitalism is one of the reigning values. There really should not be any stigma lingering on the prostitute as a hangover from more religious times. But the symbol of the prostitute as anti-society runs so deep that the sense carries over, even though the underlying religious moral buttressing that practical value no longer pertains. The symbol is used so widely in our culture as what is cut off from us in order to make us whole—that which is cast aside and asunder—that it is too useful. It’s the ultimate foil of pure evil. The prostitute is “demonic,” to use Candace Owens’s words. We’ve come full circle.
It’s a shame that Sam & crew could not find the courage to tackle this real symbol, this representation of all that women aren’t and of all that society must fight against. If they explored it, maybe they too would see the underlying similarities between the prostitute, the surrogate, and the pregnant person all attempting to exercise agency and autonomy over the one possession each owns: their own bodies.
1 As Margo St. James and Priscilla Alexander, founders of COYOTE (an advocacy group for prostitutes’ rights founded in 1973), stated in an editorial,
A rather profound misconception that people have about prostitution is that it is “sex for sale,” or that a prostitute is selling her body. In reality, a prostitute is being paid for her time and skill, the price being rather dependent on both variables. To make a great distinction between being paid for an hour’s sexual services, or an hour’s typing, or an hour’s acting on a stage is to make a distinction that is not there. (St. James and Alexander, 1977, as quoted in Valerie Jenness, “From Sex as Sin to Sex as Work,” Social Problems, 1990).
2 The prostitute suffered this treatment even before the era of the bubonic plague. R. I. Moore, in The Formation of a Persecuting Society (1987) notes that in 1213 Robert de Courçon, upon being named papal legate, excommunicated prostitutes, “expelled them from the city and [had them] treated according to the customs that had been applied to lepers—an analogy that had already been suggested by the exclusion of prostitutes from mass at Notre Dame a little before 1200.” Moore astutely states that “[t]he treatment of prostitutes thereafter often resembled that of the Jews.” (p. 91) In medieval Spain, prostitutes were forbidden from wearing the same clothing as other, more distinguished women; this allowed passersby to discern the status of these women on sight.
3 The Black person, too, is too useful of a negative symbol for society to give up. The Black person is a negative object lesson, a walking example; and society must help make the Black person’s (material) condition match the object lesson’s “moral” or message so that each corresponds. The Black person is “mean”; s/he must be made to live in a mean condition. After the Civil War, what was highly prized (slave as asset) became worthless (freed slave as lowest caste), so the fact that Blacks are systematically perpetuated in poverty is right and fitting, a walking reminder of their eternal status (just as slavery itself was renewed in perpetuity matrilineally).
Too useful. That’s where the Black person gains value in society! As a symbol of the lowest, the worst, the mistreated, the mishandled, the poor, the homeless, the addicted, the angry, monstrous, oversexed, undereducated, mentally disturbed, coarse, cruel, despised, demeaned, destructive—so let it be destroyed. That’s where the Black person gains value: in physically embodying what must be sacrificed, continuously sacrificed, as a burnt offering.