Prostitution researcher Anne Kontula wants reform of feminist ideology

New book released

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By Sampsa Oinaala
     
      Sociologist Anne Kontula, who became known as a researcher into prostitution, is challenging the feminist movement to undergo a transformation in a new book Tästä äiti varoitti (“Mother Warned about This”).
      As Kontula sees it, feminists of the first wave deserve credit for achievements such as extending the right to vote for women. The second wave brought with it the debate over equal wages, gender quotas, and shared parenting. Now is the time for a third wave.
      “Feminism has ground to a halt with the idea that now it is done”, notes Kontula, who sees herself as a conscientious advocate of the cause of women.
     
Kontula’s book comprises seven essays, in which very intimate personal experiences are interwoven with analysis. The sources of the stories are the accounts of 15 women, in which they ponder questions, which they feel are not answered by today’s mainstream feminism.
     The process started almost by accident.
     “I am dealing with sensitive women - they like to talk to me. While talking with friends, I started hearing stories, and similarities began to emerge.”
     
Merging several different stories and analyses into a unified text was a challenge for Kontula. “The analysis part could not be read as an outsider; the thing had to be experienced. I don’t want the experiences to become personalised - there is too much social porn already I want to draw attention to issues.”
     The narrator figure is a 30-year-old sexually active urban woman who has grown amid abundance, and whose mother is also a feminist. This figure is surest to collide with the limits of her mother’s teaching when the issue involves searching for herself sexually.
      Mainstream sex is the sex of a white, educated, middle-aged, and thoroughly middle class woman (...) Feminist correctness has become a strait-jacket, as confining as the norms that it once rose to question.
     
What should a 14-year-old girl think when she notices that she feels sexual desire and passion, when society sees sex as only a threat to children? Why does a mother urge a young woman to drop a rape charge? After all, she went to the man herself and agreed to foreplay.
     Why does rape lead to charges only in two cases out of a thousand, and why is it the victim of the rape who is most likely to be labelled the guilty party?
     A grey zone of feminism also emerges when a woman emphasises her appearance in order to advance in her career, if a woman is sexually stimulated by being made to submit, or if a woman is blindly in love and worships an unattainable man.
     
In her book, Kontula revisits the prostitution issue. In her view, modern feminism, and the rest of society, make the problems linked with prostitution worse by seeing the women as mere victims, and by maintaining that the elimination of prostitution is the only solution.
     Kontula feels that it is no coincidence that human trafficking is seen as prostitution and nothing else, even though the majority of the victims of trafficking in humans work at construction sites, for instance, or as berry pickers. Talk about human trafficking is just a way of avoiding confrontation with the unsolved problems of the rights of immigrants.
      By equating human trafficking and prostitution, women selling sex are pushed to the margins, and efforts to improve their working conditions are made unnecessary; the only solution, after all, is to “rescue” them.
     
A strong leftist current echoes in the background of the whole book.
     The question that it asks is why anyone should count how many women belong to the economic or political elite. Isn’t the idea of equality not to recognise elites at all?
     Kontula, the vice chair of the Pirkanmaa organisation of the Left Alliance, who serves on the Tampere City Council, wants to re-politicise sexuality.
     “We have a strong idea that sexuality is not linked with politics, and still, a minister can be fired for sending text messages. Only sex therapists speak in public about sex. The topic has been medicalised, and the control structures have been hidden away”, Kontula ponders.
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 1.5.2009


Previously in HS International Edition:
  Anna Kontula speaks on behalf of sex workers (7.9.2008)
  Sex service marketing: off streets and online (26.10.2007)

Helsingin Sanomat