Being and Being Bought: Prostitution, Surrogacy and the Split Self
Grounded in the reality of the violence and abuse inherent in prostitution—and reeling from the death of a friend to prostitution in Spain—Kajsa Ekis Ekman exposes the many lies in the ‘sex work’ scenario. Trade unions aren’t trade unions. Groups for prostituted women are simultaneously groups for brothel owners. And prostitution is always presented from a woman’s point of view. The men who buy sex are left out.
Drawing on Marxist and feminist analyses, Ekis Ekman argues that the Self must be split from the body to make it possible to sell your body without selling yourself. The body becomes sex. Sex becomes a service. The story of the sex worker says: the Split Self is not only possible, it is the ideal.
Turning to the practice of surrogate motherhood, Kajsa Ekis Ekman identifies the same components: that the woman is neither connected to her own body nor to the child she grows in her body and gives birth to. Surrogacy becomes an extended form of prostitution. In this capitalist creation story, the parent is the one who pays. The product sold is not sex but a baby. Ekis Ekman asks: why should this not be called child trafficking?
This brilliant exposé is written with a razor-sharp intellect and disarming wit and will make us look at prostitution and surrogacy and the parallels between them in a new way.
2013 | 9781742198767 | Paperback | 221 x 137 mm | 223 pp
REPRINT UNDER CONSIDERATION | EBOOK AVAILABLE
Table of Contents
The Struggle for the Woman
The Buyer’s Dilemma
The Postmodern Story: A False Dialectic
The Way Out
PART II Surrogate Motherhood
Chapter Four: The Reality of Surrogacy
Background
The Buyers and the Bearers of the Bought
Chapter Five: The Story of the Happy Breeder
Happy Families
A ‘Revolutionary Act’
The ‘Feminist’ Arguments
Prostitution
Child Trafficking
Sold with Fatal Relativism
Turning the Law of Demand and Supply into a Human Right
On the Term ‘Surrogate Mother’
The Capitalist Creation Myth
‘For a Friend’s Sake’ – About Altruistic Surrogacy
Chapter Six: Inside the Surrogacy Industry
Uterus Pimps – About the Agencies
The Most Surrogacy-Friendly Courts in the World
“They are sad for a few weeks, but it passes quickly”
The Ultimate Reification
The Virgin Mary in the Marketplace
Women who Change their Minds: “I am not a surrogate; I am a mother”
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Index
Contents
Preface
PART I Prostitution
Chapter One: The Story of the Sex Worker or How Prostitution Became the World’s Most Modern Profession
The ‘Sex Worker’ and the Feminist Sexual Orientation
The Victim and the Subject
A Slippery Slope: From the Independent Escort …
… to Human Trafficking …
… and Children
The Invulnerable Person
The Narrator
The Cult of the Whore
The World’s Oldest Profession: Regulation
The Drainage Model
Chapter Two: An Industry is Born–1970 to present
The 1970s: The Sex Industry Expands—and Gets Into Trouble
The 1980s: Holland Takes Up the Thread
The 1990s: HIV/AIDS—Money Comes Through
The New Millennium: ‘Unions for Sex Workers’
The International Union of Sex Workers—Pimps
Les Putes/STRASS—The Men
The International Committee of the Rights of Sex Workers in Europe —The Researchers
Ámbit Dóna—The Social Workers
The Industry
False Façades
Rhetoric from the Left—Money from the Right
Power Transformed—The Legacy of 1968
Chapter Three: The Self and the Commodity in the Sex Industry
“My body is not my Self”
“Sex is not the body”
Reification—When Sexuality becomes a Commodity
Reviews
Being and Being Bought is a riveting analysis of prostitution and surrogacy that shatters the great wall of lies about these two institutions. Brilliantly analysing the parallels, Kajsa Ekis Ekman wages a multi-pronged attack on sexism and classism that leaves the reader with hope for change. If you've ever wondered how to respond to those who say there are no victims in prostitution or what to say when someone proposes surrogacy as a solution to childlessness - this book is a must-read.
—Melissa Farley, Executive Director of Prostitution Research & Education, San Francisco.
It may seem outrageous to many of the proponents of commercial surrogacy that we might compare the position of the prostitute to that of the surrogate, but Ekman does an effective job of explaining the very real parallels.
—Grazyna Zajdow, Arena Magazine
Ekman has to be commended for the many convictions she shakes in Being and Being Bought. It is rare to find a text exploring issues that affect women that genuinely challenges preconceptions.
—Jazz Croft, NZ Booklovers
Underneath the romanticized narrative of the empowered prostitute and the benevolent surrogate lies the simple truth that these acts exploit and commercialize not only women’s bodies, but their very being.
—Pauline Cooper-Ioelu, MercatorNet
Being and Being Bought gives an incisive portrayal, not only of the sex and surrogacy industries, but also of the arguments used to justify them both, arguments that Kajsa Ekis Ekman skilfully and comprehensively pulverises. Her work is overflowing with humanity and empathy for some of the most downtrodden women and girls in the world.
—Laura Fitzgerald, Irish Socialist Party
Her final chapter, 'Inside the surrogacy industry' is chilling.
—Beverley Kingston, Jessie Street National Women's Library Newsletter