ProstitutionProstitutionQuestion 6: ProstitutionMost feminists believe that prostitution exploits and objectifies women. Simultaneously, both Simone de Beauvoir and Andrea Dworkin felt that the institution of marriage was also a form of prostitution. They both agreed that both marriage and prostitution are extremely oppressive and dangerous for women. In Simon de Beauvoir’s Prostitutes and Hetairas, she said, “The only difference between prostitution and those who sell themselves into marriage, is in the price and length of the contract (de Beavoir, pg. 555).” In Feminism: An Agenda, Andrea Dworkin said that in marriage women lose rights over their own bodies. “You must have sex with your husband when he wants. That is his legal right and your obligation.” She went on to say that “In marriage you only have to make a deal with one man (Dworkin, pg. 146).”
Both feminists seemed to agree that as long as we live in a predominantly patriarchal society, many women will be economically dependent on men, and there will always be those forced to use their body as a commodity. Dworkin said that “The economic exploitation of women as a class (unequal pay for the same work as men) means that we have to sell sex and that makes us, as a class, not irrationally viewed as prostitutes by men whether they call us a prostitute or not (Dworkin, pg. 146).”
This is the very reason why egotistical rich men think they can buy trophy wives, and in many cases they are right. Many women perpetuate the idea that women can be bought; they marry solely for money and become financially dependent on a man.
Beauvoir mentioned how some people believe prostitutes must exist in order for other women to be treated respectfully in society. In both Prostitutes and Hetairas, and Feminism: An Agenda, the authors listed unemployment, poverty, incest and sexual abuse as factors influential in a woman’s decision to take up prostitution. These conditions are usually rampant in ethnically diverse neighborhoods. In Dworkin’s The Night and Danger, the author mentions that the United States’ distinctly racist character manipulates the fear of the dark. From this she believes that people associate the dark night, with danger, and therefore also associate a dark man as danger. She says that the stereotypical rapist is a black man. Just as the black men become scapegoats, so too do the black women. “In the urban United States, the prostitute population is disproportionately made up of black women, streetwalkers who inhabit the night, prototypical female figures, again scapegoats… (Dworkin, pg. 15).”
In Prostitutes and Hetairas, the author describes the high-class hetaira as slightly better-off than the common prostitute because she could become a public celebrity of sorts, and also she was skilled, and free to gather with poets and philosophers. However, she did not condone their behavior as she thought they also objectified women. In Dworkin’s Feminism: An Agenda, she mentions that the porn industry is closely related to prostitution. She essentially said that porn actresses were high-class prostitutes. She too could not condone these women or the pornography industry for that matter. Dworkin felt that pornography was hate propaganda of women, and that rapes and sexual abuse of women stemmed from pornography.
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No other women had been treated equally with the power and power to kill with violence, because they were free to act upon sexual preferences that only they were allowed to express. As she wrote, “All women should be judged from the standpoint of their individual nature by our own bodies,” so “sexual and reproductive rights which were guaranteed by the law of the land or those rights which have been secured by laws are nothing but the property of their bodies. Therefore it would be a waste of the laws; we would then be victims of the very human law upon which our bodies are built. We, then, would suffer for the crime committed by some women; the more the law abandons such principles, the more must it be for women who, who are in power at the present day, are the victims of one law and one sexual revolution.”
This belief that the male dominated sex organ and the more intimate parts of the sex act were not subject to equal treatment was the reason for the unequal status of women under the law in the seventeenth century and the nineteenth century. The law was based on equality of the sexes and would not be based upon any objective test of power. It had to do much more to ensure equitable treatment under the law, including greater access to and representation by women and other men, and more control of sex, and women’s ability to express their own ideas and feelings.
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I was a prostitute all my life. A little older and still married, I was just as strong while also working as a prostitute. I saw my sex organs in men’s eyes even though my husbands had taken pains to change this. I felt my sex organs as if they were some part of me they were not, no matter who my wife was.
It’s this fact that will drive many to believe that there was no such thing as a man who didn’t want to have sex with his wife. For the first time I felt that the fact of having sex with a woman was not something to be taken lightly or respected.
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While Simone de Beauvoir discussed how women could free themselves from their objectification and transcend a patriarchal society by making creative and significant contributions, Dworkin didn’t explain a specific way in which women could overcome this economic exploitation and eliminate the need to sell themselves. She did say that promoting feminism