objects, undoing many of the gains women have made over the past century. Others detect in this attitude a strain of neo-Victorianism, a condescending belief that prostitutes don't know what they're doing and need somebody with more education to protect them. Some women, these dissenters point out, actually choose the profession. Feminists who question the antiprostitution radicals also point out that Dworkin and MacKinnon sometimes sound eerily like their nemeses on the religious right. Phyllis Schlafly, a rabid family-values crusader, has even cited Dworkin in her antipornography promotional materials. This kind of thing has not improved the radicals' image among feminists. At the other extreme from Dworkin and MacKinnon are sex-radical feminists like Susie Bright and Pat Califia. They argue that sex work can be a good thing: a bold form of liberation for women, a way for some to take control of their lives. The problem there, though, is that the life of a prostitute is often more Leaving Las Vegas than Pretty Woman (see "Pop Tarts"). Many feminists fall somewhere in between the rad-fem and sex-radical poles. Wendy Chapkis, professor of sociology and women's studies at the University of Southern Maine and the author of the Live Sex Acts: Women Performing Erotic Labor (Routledge, 1997), is one of them. For nine years, Chapkis studied prostitution in California and the Netherlands, as well as in Britain and Finland, and conducted interviews with 50 sex workers. Chapkis says she sees the profession as it is: many of her interviews confirmed much of the ugliness that radical feminists abhor,...
