Prostitution: The Enconomics of Sex and Power Dynamics in El Saadawi’s Woman At Point Zero, Adimora-Ezeigbo’s Trafficked and Unigwe’s On Black Sisters Street
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Many feminist writers and critics have projected female prostitution as a radical and aggressive strategy aimed at undermining patriarchal values and wresting power and subjectivity from men. Many have argued that through prostitution women revolt against the traditional double standards which on one hand grant men license to be sexually adventurous, promiscuous and unfaithful to their partners, and on the other hand legislate and enforce grave moral and social sanctions against women who engage in the same acts. Such critics aver that women move from the position of passive sex objects designed for men’s sexual pleasures to the position of agency and subjectivity that enable them express their sexuality, and more importantly use their bodies to turn men to objects of sexual and economic exploitation. But this paper argues that sex is a huge industry ultimately controlled by men. The three African novels studied here reveal that from sex tourism, ownership and management of hotels and brothels, to the mafia-like transnational business of trafficking in women, men control the sex industry, and that prostitution, by objectifying and commodifying the woman’s body, makes women (female prostitutes to be specific) objects of sexual and economic exploitation and victims of modern day slavery.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".