The Game and its dynamic

Feminist theory has often uncomfortably touching on the issue of prostitution: whether it should be legal or not legal; whether the men and women who participate in it should have benefits, health care coverage, and the like.

Those who are pro-legalization within the feminist spectrum see it as an analogy to the abortion issue: if it is not legal, it is not safe for women to engage in. But prostitution becomes more controversial because it represents an active choice, usually based on circumstances of class, race, or gender.

Illegal prostitution in the United States works in a system of “pimps and hos.” After observing behavioral patterns in the film, “American Pimp,” the most probable question raised encompasses why women stand to serve a man to simply “take care of her” with the given risks of beatings, disease, pregnancy, exposure to drugs, and or death–why she would not simply keep all the money for herself and minimize risks. This is all due to a network and a familial-structured dynamic that empowers lower-class women.

Picture the 1950s suburban middle-class family. The man leaves for work all day, transferring his allowance and authority to his wife for household purchases and maintenance for him and his entitlements (his children). The wife cooks, cleans, and if the husband is laid off, she gets a small job to make due.

In the present day pimp/prostitute relationship, two lower-class and often interracial people come together–the woman working all day alleviating her allowance to her pimp to take care of her own entitlements–this being herself. Meanwhile, the Black male (the pimp) becomes empowered through the White male’s power points: 1) economic fulfillment, and 2) sexual fulfillment.

Both become empowered through segways into suburban society through distorted contradictions of it, and thus both become financially successful.