Porn star. Adult film actress. Stripper. Sex worker. The list goes on (and on and on and on). The language of sex work, of Stormy Daniels’s past and present professions, has become 2018’s sound bite for the latest scandal involving President Donald Trump. According to Stormy Daniels, Donald Trump engaged in an extramarital affair with her in 2006 when he was a reality star (Donald Trump was the host of the reality television program The Apprentice). (Less there be any confusion, the sexual encounter did not involve a financial transaction. The two had a “consensual” sexual relationship. However, the authenticity of her consent is questionable, too, which I will discuss, in detail, later in the essay.) Daniels also claims that during Trump’s presidential run, he and his lawyer, Michael Cohen, attempted to silence her with “hush” money and threats. However salacious the gossip may be, and however giddy anti-Trumpers may be envisaging Trump’s ultimate demise from the likes of a “porn star”—oh, the irony of self-ascribed liberals and progressives and feminists marching for women’s equity one day and then the next day tweeting sensationalist pasquinades of just how deliciously inconceivable it would be for a porn star to bring down the president (because it’s so trite it’s invisible), and in doing so, tacitly reifying the social hierarchies they’re trying to smash—the events leading up to Stormy Daniels’s name being circulated amongst news outlets is not what I’m interested in. I’m interested in how the language used in treatise after treatise shaped the rhetoric, and ultimately, ushered in the denigration of Stormy Daniels.
The ubiquity of “porn star” in tabloid, talk show, newspaper, and magazine headlines has eclipsed the gross power dynamics of the scandal, manifestly bolstering the reductive nature of women’s history of lexicogrammatical derogation and the subsequent social inequity the derogation engenders and perpetuates. The two-word epithet spun the story line from Trump’s abuse of power to the misogynistic paradigm of whorephobia: the hatred, oppression, violence, and/or discrimination of/against sex workers. Whorephobia views women who have sex for money as tainted; they are somehow “less” of a woman. The Stormy Daniels scandal is a microcosm of women’s enduring derogation in a culture dominated by patriarchical structures. Daniels has become a spectacle, a punchline, a joke, a stereotype of women’s subjugation to the male gaze.
A couple months after the story unspooled, Rolling Stone magazine published an article, written by Denver Nicks (a white male), ostensibly portraying Daniels’s persona beyond that of a porn star. In the article, Nicks claims Daniels is “hated by the right, mocked by the left,” but the language of the article belies the purport: the headline reads “One Night with Stormy Daniels, the Hero America Needs”; and the lede starts with “frozen g-strings, squirt guns and hot wax” (Nicks, rollingstone.com). It’s an old trope that sex workers are “women of the night,” skulking around street corners in fishnets and stilettos in search of “Johns.” Nicks is titillating licentious revelers with sexual innuendo all the while mocking Daniels, the woman he’s supposedly profiling as an “American hero.” His attempt at witty iconoclasm maligned Daniels with the very stereotype he was trying to interrupt. The clickbait language hijacked the article’s effort to attenuate the cacophony of Daniels’s appropriation. The first few words appeal to the wanton by explicitly objectifying her and, in doing so, tacitly shaping and manipulating the audience’s opinion by stigmatizing Daniels. Everything I’ve read about Stormy Daniels since the dawn of the scandal has made me ask the question does our language and its usage instruct the derogation of women?
Recently, a friend of mine who is just finishing up her Master of Arts in Forensic Psychology and works at Sanctuary for Families (a nonprofit organization providing services and advocating for survivors of domestic violence, sex trafficking, and related forms of gender-based violence) and I were discussing our semesters and what we were currently working on. I quickly explained my concept for this paper, and she appended that Sanctuary for Families aims to eliminate stigmatizing words like “hooker,” “prostitute,” and “sex worker,” and instead, use such phrases as “trafficked or prostituted person.” The goal being to eliminate operative choice. (Which begs the question, if all sex work—regardless of consent—is a precipitate of patriarchal hegemony, can any form of sex work be considered a “choice”?)
According to Sonia Ossorio, president of NOW (National Organization for Women) New York, “the only instance where the [New York] Penal Law identifies someone by the crime he or she has allegedly committed is with ‘prostitute’—everyone else is simply a defendant, not a ‘robber’ or ‘murderer.’ It’s not only blatant gender bias, it unnecessarily stigmatizes trafficking victims” (nysatc.weebly.com). Nouns like “porn star” and “prostitute” objectify and generalize women, effectively erasing their agency and identifying them exclusively as highly stigmatized “sex workers.” Stigmas are a mark of shame, a label of deviation from accepted norms. “Stigmas sometimes have totalizing properties, so that any sign of stigmatized attributes or behaviors renders such persons wholly damaged and becomes their ‘master status,’ eclipsing all other characteristics to organize interpersonal interactions” (Benoit, Jansson, Smith, and Flagg).
“Porn star” is merely a red herring distracting readers from the gendered power dynamics of the scandal. Sady Doyle hit the nail on the head in a recent article for Elle magazine: “it’s power, not sex, that is the real issue here. Daniels’ [sic] personality, her sexual history, her looks, and her job are not the point—what matters is whether Trump and his team flouted the law. When we define Daniels exclusively a sex worker, we reduce her. We frame her as a mere sex object and not as a vulnerable human with an inner life, who feels pain and fear […] There’s so, so much terrible conduct on offer here—and none of it is Stormy Daniels’ [sic]. By treating her as trashy or tainted or inherently ridiculous because of her job, we send the message that none of Trump’s flaws are worse than being a ‘porn star’” (Doyle, elle.com)
Daniels is a literal example of women’s double bind, of patriarchy-enhancing (and cognitively dissonant) ideology such as the Madonna-whore complex. In Daniels’s particular case, she is a whore, therefore, she is bad (as the ideology goes). As a woman in the matrix of oppression, Daniels inherently lacks a voice, but her sexual agency snuffed any advancements in women’s equity, including advancements from the recent #MeToo movement—it’s too soon to quantify those advancements, if they can even be quantified at all—emboldening survivors of sexual assault to come forward. Daniels was not assaulted by Trump, but his attempt to silence her—with power, money, and threats—conforms to women’s history of subjugation and silencing. Although #MeToo is putatively intersectional and inclusive, many people have spoken out about their exclusion from the movement: male sexual assault victims; incarcerated women; black and brown women; LGBTQ; disabled women; strippers, and sex workers; the list goes on. It’s become #MeToo (but not you). “Some people who sell sexual services told TIME that they have posted their #MeToo stories anonymously to avoid potential legal repercussions. Others said that they don’t want to speak out publicly because they anticipate they’ll be shamed, or not believed because they aren’t ‘perfect victims’ […] there’s also the damaging notion that sex workers can’t be sexually assaulted” (Cooney, time.com). The stigmatization of sex workers as insensate toys is analogous with the entitlement and exploitative attitudes of patriarchal ideology and the paradox of women’s double bind. Daniels willfully and gainfully exploits her body but, in doing so, she’s disenfranchised from bodily agency. Her exposure, in film and in the media, is erasing her.
Women are enculturated to be submissive to men; to acquiesce in uncomfortable situations so as not to disturb the hierarchies inherent to patriarchy; to remain silent after a man asserts his authority or control over her body as a reminder that this is not her world. It’s a man’s world. Daniels challenged the paternalistic aspect of hostile sexism and was “othered,” isolated, and erased. In Rebecca Solnit’s first book of essays “Men Explain Things to Me” she writes, “At my glummest, I sometimes think women get to choose—between being punished for being unsubjugated and the continual punishment of subjugation. If ideas don’t go back in the box, there’s still been a huge effort to put women back in their place. Or the place misogynists think we belong in, a place of silence and powerlessness” (Solnit, Men Explain Things to me).
In addition to women being conditioned to relinquish their body to men who will take what they want from it (with or without consent), women experience pain and discomfort in romantic sexual encounters, too. Women’s pain is the cost of men’s pleasure. What men and women define as “bad sex” fall on opposite sides of the spectrum. For women, “bad sex” usually means coercion, emotional discomfort, or physical pain. For men, “bad sex” is a sexual experience that is less satisfying than what was expected, never harmful or damaging. “An 8 on a man’s Bad Sex scale is like a 1 on a woman’s. This tendency for men and women to use the same term—bad sex—to describe experiences an objective observer would characterize as vastly different is the flip side of a known psychological phenomenon called ‘relative deprivation,’ by which disenfranchised groups, having been trained to expect little, tend paradoxically to report the same levels of satisfaction as their better-treated, more privileged peers” (Loofbourow, theweek.com). In Stormy Daniels’s case, she may have consented to sex with Donald Trump but only as a penalty of her perceived foolishness. “Women often internalize [a] sense of responsibility for men’s needs. Stormy Daniels felt so responsible for coming to a stranger’s hotel room in 2006 that she felt obliged to provide the sex he wanted and she didn’t. She told Anderson Cooper [in an interview for 60 minutes about her sexual encounter with Donald Trump], ‘I had it coming for making a bad decision for going to someone’s room alone and I just heard the voice in my head, well, you put yourself in a bad situation and bad things happen, so you deserve this.’ (It’s worth noting that she classified having sex with Donald Trump as ‘bad things happen’ and the sense in that she deserved it was a punitive one.) His desires must be met. Hers didn’t count” (Solnit, lithub.com)
Muriel Schulz’s essay “The Semantic Derogation of Woman” examines the breadth of man’s influencing role in the creation and usage (and subsequent derogation) of the English language. Schulz borrows and extrapolates on Stuart Flexner’s writings concerning the origins of American words and expressions, i.e., men, who had a larger, more primary role in English-speaking cultures, created our art, literature, science, philosophy, and education, as well as having a dominant role in the development of the language which defines and exploits these areas of culture. Schulz focuses on the language used by men to discuss and describe women, specifically the semantic metamorphosis of a neutral or positive word into a pejoration. In total, Schulz found roughly 1,000 words and phrases to describe women in sexually derogatory ways, and nothing close to that number for men (I must note, too, that this study was conducted in 1975; what other words have been altered or created to debase women, especially since the advent of the Internet?) Although Schulz admits to not knowing the extent to which language influences the people who use it, she firmly believes the proliferation of dysphemistic words not only reflects, but allows and perpetuates, derogatory attitudes toward women. “Words which are highly charged with emotion, taboo, or distaste do not only reflect the culture which uses them. They teach and perpetuate the attitudes which created them. To make the name of God taboo is to perpetuate the mystery, power, and awesomeness of the divine. To surround a concept with euphemisms, as Americans have done with the idea of death, is to render the reality of the concept virtually invisible. And to brand a class of persons obscene is to taint them to the users of the language. As Mariana Birnbaum points out, prejudicial language ‘always mirror[s] generalized tabloid thinking which contains prejudices and thus perpetuates discrimination” (Schulz, 90).
In Dale Spender’s essay “Language and Reality: Who Made the World” she posits that language is neither neutral nor objective, but rather partial and arbitrary: “Language is not neutral. It is not merely a vehicle which carries ideas. It is itself a shaper of ideas, it is the programme for mental activity. In this context it is nothing short of ludicrous to conceive of human beings as capable of grasping things as they really are, of being impartial recorders of their world. For they themselves, or some of them, at least, have created or constructed the world and they have reflected themselves within it” (Spender, 145). The brain, which can neither see nor hear, relies on “pulses of bio-electrical activity pumped along bundles of nerve fibres from the external source of the body, its interface with the environment” (F. Smith, qt. in Spender) to organize, interpret, and describe the universe. And the program for encoding and decoding sensory input is set up by the language we possess: we view the world as it is demarcated by our language. “Reality” is formed through fallible human processes and rules. Spender suggests that when sexist principles of language are available and encoded, implications for a sexist reality are perpetuated and reinforced. Spender illuminates the paradox of language: it has the capacity to be both an imaginative and inhibitive medium for creating the world we live in. While language is imaginative in its infinite potential to generate and shape words, language is inhibitive by sexist “traps” hammered into the foundation of linguistic form: “Undoubtedly our own meanings are partially hidden from us and it is difficult to have access to them. We may use the English language our whole lives without ever noticing the distortions and omissions” (Spender, 148).
The construction and influencing principles of sexism encoding our reality were not invented out of nowhere: sexist symbols and language were envisaged by men—the dominant group—to legitimate and ordain their primacy. Women, as a muted group, have no record of thought. Women’s subordination to men is not a byproduct of sexist language, it is the aspiration that breathes life into the lungs of patriarchal hegemony. “It has been male subjectivity which has been the source of those meanings, including the meaning that their own subjectivity is objectivity. Says Dorothy Smith: ‘women have largely been excluded from the work of producing forms of thought and the images and symbols in which thought is expressed and realised’ and feminists would state unequivocally that this has been no accident” (Spender, 147). Or, as James Baldwin articulated, in his 1979 essay “If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me, What is?” for the New York Times, on the role of language:
The argument concerning the use, or the status, or the reality, of black English is rooted in American history and has absolutely nothing to do with the question the argument supposes itself to be posing. The argument has nothing to do with language itself but with the role of language. Language, incontestably, reveals the speaker. Language, also, far more dubiously, is meant to define the other—and, in this case, the other is refusing to be defined by a language that has never been able to recognize him. People evolve a language in order to describe and thus control their circumstances, or in order not to be submerged by a reality that they cannot articulate. (And, if they cannot articulate it, they are submerged)” (Baldwin).
Women are submerged in a language created by and for men. Submerged as we are with pejorative language, reductive epithets become the polarized lens of our blinded reality. The male glance has struck our vision from the full humanity of women, obliterating their interior life without so much as a shrug. To exist as a woman in a male-dominated world is to exist as an aberration.
Works Cited
Baldwin, J. (1979) “If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?” in the New York Times, nytimes.com, online, <https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/03/29/specials/baldwin-english.html?_r=1>
Benoit, C., S. Mikael Jansson, Smith, M., Flagg, J. (2018) “Prostitution Stigma and Its Effect on the Working Conditions, Personal Lives, and Health of Sex Workers,” The Journal of Sex Research, 55:4-5, 457-471.
Cooney, S. (2018) “’They Don’t Want to Include Women Like Me.’ Sex Workers Say They’re Being Left Out of the #MeToo Movement” in Time, time.com, online, <http://time.com/5104951/sex-workers-me-too-movement/>
Doyle, S. (2018) “Stormy Daniels Is Not a Punchline” in Elle, http://www.elle.com, online, < https://www.elle.com/culture/career-politics/a19183457/stormy-daniels-is-not-a-punchline/>
Loofbourow, L. (2018) “The female price of male pleasure” in the Week, http://www.theweek.com, online, < http://theweek.com/articles/749978/female-price-male-pleasure>
Nicks, D. (2018) “One Night with Stormy Daniels, the Hero America Needs” in Rolling Stone, rollingstone.com, online, <https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/features/one-night-with-stormy-daniels-the-hero-america-needs-w517692>
NY State Anti-trafficking Coalition legislation information retrieved from < http://nysatc.weebly.com/legislation.html>
Schulz, M.R. (1975) “The Semantic Derogation of Woman,” in the Routledge Language and Cultural Theory Reader, New Fetter Lane, London: Routledge, 2000, pp. 82-91
Solnit, R. (2014) Men Explain Things to Me. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books. Kindle edition.
Solnit, R. (2018) “Whose Story (and Country) Is This?” in Literary Hub, lithub.com, online, <https://lithub.com/rebecca-solnit-the-myth-of-real-america-just-wont-go-away/>
Spender, D. (1980) “Language and Reality: Who Made the World?” in the Routledge Language and Cultural Theory Reader, New Fetter Lane, London: Routledge, 2000, pp. 145-153
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