I need help with my essay

Hello! I'm trying to write a huuge essay which is connected with antropology. I study English just for a while and I would really appreciate any grammar or logical help!

Thanks!

Here is my essay:

Why is turning different parts of bodies and selves into commodities perceived so differently?

To begin with, I would like to say that the meaning of commodity is, as Marx said, “a mysterious thing”. In his work which is called “The Fetishism of the Commodity and the Secret Thereof” he gives an example of turning a simple thing into “mysterious” commodity: he uses the example of wooden template saying that before it will be turned into commodity this thing passes some stages of commodification. Speaking shortly, the final result for this template is a wooden table with converted into money value, i.e. price tag. So, this table becomes a property which can be sold, exchanged or traded. Does the same thing occur with human bodies? I think so. The truth is that the human body has always been a target for commodification during the years of human developing. For instance, once people started to build towns and cities, there was a need in cheap and reliable labor power which will work in fields or do easy tasks like gathering and there the history of slavery begins. It had not happened before because primitives just have no practical purposes to use slaves, there were no profits in owning them. Person could easily become a slave because of unpayable debt, war conflicts and so on. With the further development of humanity there appears a lot of new ways to sell or exchange your whole body or just a part of it. Prostitution, organ transplantations, some cultural rituals, surrogacy, etc. – they are all about body commodification. To answer my theme question, i.e. why they all perceived so differently, I will review some life cases of body commodification and, after that, I will make a conclusion.

I begin with “one of the oldest profession in the world” - prostitution. Sophie Day in her book which is called “Day on the game” writes that “sex, it seems, should not be sold, and prostitution speaks to the transgression of boundaries, where matter is out of place, where the inside is placed outside and the ‘privates’ exposed”. So, it means that prostitute converts her sex services into money value, i.e. places a price tag on it. This profession called “one of the oldest” presumably because of the statement that there will always be a man who pays for sex and women who sell it.

The negative appearance of prostitution, as I think, may be connected with feminine purity and their general identity. In order to sell sex services, women have to “open” themselves to others, have to let economic interests come into their private life and by private life I mean not only body itself but social life also. So, in other words, this profession forces woman to live her private life in public. As Sophie Day says, “in effect, prostitutes are not fully human because they lack both a legitimate private and public self”. To be honest, it is difficult for me to say how society perceive prostitution. I think it depends on the context we put it on. For example, if we place prostitution in one row with drugs, slavery, alcoholism and diseases then, of course, it will be colored in bad context. But if we consider prostitution as a right for women or men to express themselves then, as I think, it would not be that bad. Day in her text mentions that a lot of women enjoys this profession not as the source of money, but also the source of pleasure. I tried to view this problem from the government position, but the views are also controversial. On the one side we have New Zealand which legalized prostitution fully or Netherlands with partly legalization, but on the other one there are other countries including Russia which suggests that prostitution is a crime.

The next body commodification case is surrogacy. It also presents body as a commodity but with different purpose. Berend Zsuzsa in her book “The online World of Surrogacy” says that “surrogates reject accusations of commodification, whether of babies, women, or gestation”. They prefer to say that the child is not a commodity but a gift for intendent parents to make they dream of parenthood come true. Surrogacy is perceived differently because, again, it mixes social aspect (motherhood) and economic interests in one thing. Zsuzsa mentions that to avoid blame or “misunderstanding” from the society, surrogates prefer to substitute price as reimbursements, fees or compensations. They also got really offended by complaining themselves with prostitutions: “Prostitution isn’t priceless . . . having a child is! Any women can be a prostitute . . . but it takes a good person who cares about others to be a surrogate”. A lot of people see surrogacy as a bad thing not because it seems like they just try to make money and cover this as “a gift”, but because they completely destroy the family institute and maternity by selling their “priceless” children to other families. However, many surrogates repeatedly articulate that the money reason is not the main one and, of course, there are many other factors such as motivation, altruism and so on. It is complicated to judge surrogates just because we do not see their true motivation and that is why it could be treated so differently.

For the last case, I want to review a casual working processes through the prism of class and sexuality differences. I think it is applicable to this topic because work is also related to some kind of body exchange, i.e. we exchange or time, body movements, mental activities for the money or other benefits. So what is class? Sherry Ortner in her chapter “Reading America: Preliminary notes on Class and Culture” says that there is no single answer. She suggests that it is, first of all, a split between the social bourgeois theorists and the Marxists. The bourgeois theorists claim that classes are a kind of “stratification”, i.e. a set of differential positions on a scale of social advantage, rather than a set of fundamentally conflictual relations. In contrast, Marxists says that classes are based on the specifically exploitative form of production.

Usually people from lower class are responsible for dirty and low-payable job, middle class workers perform qualified tasks and the upper class do management activities. Sherry Ortner mentions that the perception of women as more “middle class” then men, because usually women work in the office, remain clean throughout the day and associated with management, unlike men who work in the dirty production areas and perform physical tasks. She also says that such this inequality produces conflicts inside families: “wives complain about their social status being too low and exert pressure on them to change their (men) kinds of work, or at least their behavioral styles, in a more ‘middle-class’ direction”.

Why is it so? I can suggest this relates to physical and cultural features of our bodies. For instance, female is usually represented as a weak and vulnerable but smart and beautiful (home keeper), while male relies on brutal force and power (hunter, supplier). My grandmother told me she was joked as she worked as a crane operator because it is a male job. The same situation happens with other professions such as secretary, loader, miner, etc.

To sum up, I would like to say we perceive acts of body commodification differently because of the many factors. The first factor is context or associations. We usually create our associations with something during our life by facing phenomenon in person or by another person’s experience. Thus, because we are all unique, we may natively place something in completely different contexts and perceive it in many ways. Secondly, body commodification involves not only work life but also social life. The ‘moral’ view of prostitution is commonly opposed to toleration from an ‘economic’ perspective and continuing debates in countries that legalized prostitution shows that the body cannot be uniquely commodified. This happens because each person has own morality level and for some part of the society prostitution, surrogacy, etc. is acceptable but another part – it is not. Moreover, government, as a social regulator, plays an important role here also. Some countries allow prostitutes work legally by buying special license, which recognizes sex work and attempts to make it safer, but the surrogacy question is still unsolved. The last but not the least thing I want to mention is class and sexuality inequalities. If the borders between classes become more and more wide, the situation on the sexuality front is opposite. Society slowly changes views on women working alongside with men and more professions transform into sex-independent ones, but, anyway, there is still a dependence between perception and class and sexuality. After all, I strongly believe that motivation plays an important role here also. Of course, we may not see this as we cannot get inside into other person’s head, but knowing why the person does this could really affect our perception in many ways.