The Home for the Literarily Bent
Scholarly Works
Daughters of Joy, Sisters of Misery: Prostitutes in the American West, 1865-90
01 year ago
Front cover for Daughters of Joy, Sisters of Misery
By Anne M. Butler
Published in 1987 by the University of Illinois Press
Butler’s Daughters of Joy, Sisters of Misery survey of Old West prostitution begins by examining the prostitutes themselves. Who were the women who became prostitutes? The short answer to this question is much the same then as now: poor women without reliable friend or family networks.
The book continues by examining prostitutes’ cohorts such as colleagues and family. Contrary to the popular notion of prostitutes forming a tight sisterhood, Butler paints a portrait of prostitutes as being almost singularly selfish. While a casual observer might expect prostitutes to band together to improve their lives collectively, given the poverty and chaos that marked prostitutes’ lives it is hardly surprising that they valued short term interests instead of long term thinking.
Butler continues her analysis by examining the complex and contradictory relationships prostitutes had with police officials, the court system, and the US military. These officials often tolerated, if not actively encouraged, the practice of prostitution while simultaneously forcing prostitutes to live on the haggard existences on the fringes of society.
My only lament is that there was not enough information about non-prostitutes to allow for any sort of comparative analysis. Nor does Butler give any time to discuss how societal attitudes have changed over time. By failing to consider prostitutes’ status and place in society was not the result of prejudices against the poor, women, or particularly poor women, it is difficult, if not impossible to conclude that the difficulties prostitutes faced were not the result of those biases.
For instance Butler mentions that rapes of prostitutes were rarely prosecuted. Since Butler did not supply more information about society as a whole, I was left to wonder how often rape was prosecuted regardless of the victim’s social, economic, or occupational status. Were rapes more likely to be prosecuted if the victim was affluent? Simply poor but not a prostitute? A resident of a big city in the northeastern US? While Butler devotes lots of time to the awkward relationship that prostitutes had with police and governmental officials, she does not stop to examine if prostitutes simply did not report the crime of rape to officials.
In a similar vein, it is difficult to discern whether the difficulties prostitutes endured in the Old West were the result of their occupation or a general animosity towards poor women.
Despite this shortcoming, the book serves as an interesting spotlight into the Old West generally as well as the prostitutes of the time.
A Defense of Masochism
02 years ago
by Todd
in Scholarly Works
A Defense of Masochism front cover
by Anita Phillips
Published in 1998 by St. Martin’s Press
A scholarly survey of psychology, history, feminism, literature, and art, Anita Phillips attempts to rescue masochism from its negative popular understanding by asserting that masochism is a core component of the human experience.
While the dense and often tortured prose demonstrates that she worked very hard to prove to the reader how smart she is, she spends so much time doing so that she rarely manages to say anything of much substance. Often after finishing a passage in the book, I found a line from a Dead Kennedys song reverberating in my head, “Brain death, blind desk, school damage…”
As a dedicated fan of what is sometimes maligned as low culture, some of my disappointment with this book is the author’s near obsessive dedication to high culture. In discussing the relationship between art, expression, and masochism, Phillips frequently cites obscure canonical art and literature. Unfortunately, the appeal of such works is largely limited to the ivory tower inhabitants of academia. She then asserts that the “beauty” of the work stems from the creator’s keen understanding of masochism. If masochism truly is as universal as Phillips insists, one wonders why the she did not find its beauty in mainstream or popular art and literature? Curiously, when Phillips does stray from the classics she turns to then-current films of minimal cinematic, cultural, or artistic importance.
While I contemplated the prospect that a masochistic harmony with the world allowed for the creation of art and literature in touch with the essence of human experience, I wondered: do masochists create bad art? My struggle to answer this question led me to another of the book’s faults: whatever masochism might be is never concisely defined. While there is much discussion about what is and what is not masochism, pinning down a concise, consistent definition in this tome is impossible. My guess is that failing to truly pin down what a masochist is allows Phillips enough wiggle room to suggest that if one produced bad art they were not “truly” a masochist. The trouble is that if you never meaningfully define what masochism is, how can you evaluate its defense?
Another annoyance was her analysis of the word masochism itself. Tracing the term’s origin to Krafft-Ebing’s “Psychopathia Sexualis,” Phillips rightly takes issue with the earliest descriptions of masochism deftly pointing out Krafft-Ebing’s many misunderstandings. Yet, she wholly supports his explanation of sadism wholesale. The passage so thoroughly frustrated me that I wished Phillips were nearby so that I might throttle her and good (in a completely non-consensual, non-sensual way lest she enjoy it).
In the spirit of fairness, I lent this book to a masochistic friend. I refrained from telling her my opinion of the book lest it influence hers. Given that my friend is not only a masochist, but also a student of psychology and fan of literature, I thought that she might see some virtue in the book that I overlooked. To my profound amusement, her comments about the book were far more vitriolic than my own. She went so far as to accuse me of meanness for passing the book along.
Masochists are among my favorite people. While I don’t believe for a moment that they require any defense, they certainly deserve a much better one than Phillips provides.
Update: I wrote this review a while ago and is always the case in life things have changed. The aforementioned friend is now my slave and wife. She still thinks the book is crap.