Body, Nature, Gender
Sep. 1st, 2007 11:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
novapsycheThis was the genesis of my very best college paper, which is to say it's dense. You are warned.
October 5, 1997
Body, Nature, Gender:
Toward a Cultural Understanding of Prostitution
INTRODUCTION
One of the worst things for a woman is to be called a prostitute, a slut, a tramp, a whore. Why does this mere insult call into question a woman's moral standing, her inner value, indeed her cultural worth? This paper will attempt to answer this question by exploring particular philosophical premises and certain cultural symbols and values. This is not an answer to why women become prostitutes, why men visit prostitutes, or why prostitution has always existed. Its focus is why Americans view prostitution to be one of the most terrible things a woman can be.
The most obvious bias of this paper is that it deals only with female prostitution. Many of the supporting arguments here deal with cultural views on women and the gender construction of femininity. In this view, male prostitution may very well be a different animal than the one I deal with herein, and as such should be dealt with appropriately in another forum.
MIND VS. BODY, NATURE VS. SOCIETY AND (OTHER) CULTURAL SYMBOLS
One cannot observe American society without noting how Americans continually obsess about the body. From diet strategies to prescribed gender affectations to sodomy laws, the whole of society is based on recognition, assessment, and regulation of the body. Gender is codified with physicality; thus a male is presumed to be a man and a female a woman. This marker provides society a way to classify, to identify, the body.
The body must be controlled, society tells us, because the body represents nature, and as the mind is antithetical to the body, so is nature to civilization. Civilization equals culture and reason, the very things humans strive to attain and further; nature is reckless and chaotic, bringing with it uncertainty, anarchy, death to civilization. As long as the body remains unchecked, the basis of our culture and identity, indeed our very existence, is threatened.
Because it represents such a threat, the body is despised, and particularly hated are our orifices. Orifices are deemphasized in our culture because they remind us that we are animal. Sneezing and coughing are considered at best impolite and at worst dangerous, as diseases can be transmitted in such manners. Dieting has taken on tremendous cultural importance: the stress on reduction of food intake indicating that the mouth must be made invisible; the less people eat, the fewer instances that the main utility of the mouth must be made apparent. Belching and the expulsion of gas are considered major social transgressions in "polite" company, as the sounds or smells of such bring to the fore the unavoidable functions of the body. Urination and defecation take place in private places and are very much private acts—even people who are married often do not interfere (for example, by continuing conversations, or even simple interruptions) with these acts. Menstruation is considered in many religious and cultural beliefs as one of the dirtiest occurrences in human activity. Nocturnal emissions, too, draw a sense of shame and secrecy, an idea that one has done something wrong. Sex, then, becomes entirely suspect, as it can at any given time incorporate all human orifices: mouth, urethra, anus, vagina. Sex, as an act, involves all of our indicators of animality.
One can observe this phenomenon of orifice hatred by examining one of the vestiges of culture: our language, especially what is considered as obscenity. All of these words are of the utmost obscene nature in our language, and all of them involve relations of the body, orifices, or sex: fuck, shit, motherfucker, cocksucker, cunt, piss,1 asshole, and to a lesser degree in contemporary culture, tits and bastard. The only obscenity that does not conform to this list is bitch, which incidentally is used almost exclusively on women and involves the reduction of the woman in question to an animal lower than herself, a female dog. Penis (and related words, such as dick) is not obscene, only an insult; and pussy, a word men use on gender traitors, is seen in mainstream culture as less offensive than cunt.
As society controls the body and speech, the regulation of obscenity in our language falls under society's jurisdiction. Laws governing obscene language have always existed. As Nadine Strossen states, "just as our society tends to view sex itself as inherently dangerous, so too our courts view words or images that describe or depict sex."2 While modern obscenity laws focus almost exclusively on sexual images and words, older laws unquestionably defined what words concerning the body were acceptable in everyday speech. In Roth v. United States, a case brought before the Supreme Court in 1957, the Court ruled that obscene material was that which appealed to the prurient interest. This interest was described as "shameful or morbid interest in nudity, sex or excretion which goes substantially beyond customary limits of candor in description or representation." Nudity is the body itself, sex is the epitomal physical application of that body, and excretion is the neverending natural function of that body. Not only did these obscenity laws demarcate what was disallowed, by necessity it presented what was acceptable. The permitted speech was that devoid of the body—that which concerned the mind, mental activity, and rational pursuits. Law becomes inextricably entangled in the mind-body dichotomy, not just influencing the cultural bias toward the mind but enforcing it, by creating a criminal class of those who do not conform to the prevailing cultural standards of "decency."
GENDER CONSTRUCTION, DICHOTOMIES, AND VIEWS ABOUT WOMEN
Along with the idea of mind-body duality is the cultural notion that women represent nature, here nature understood as sexuality. Sexuality must be held in tight restraint. Because sex is one of the few remaining ways in which humans must admit to their animality, it must be suppressed in order to maintain civilization. Sex is inextricably tied to the human body, and the body must be transcended in order to expand civilization, the collective construction of human knowledge. Sex is seen as the enemy of society, not in spite of its promise of pleasure, but because of it.
As woman serves as the progenitor of the species, she is seen to symbolize humans' continued link to nature; she is seen as nature herself. As such, she is to be controlled. Sexual women represent a double threat, since at any time if a man succumbs to woman, to sex, he risks capitulating himself to the labyrinth of the body and becoming so lost in nature that he may never find his way out. Women become doubly confined: sexual nature is of the body, and the body must be regulated. If woman is nature, and if woman is sex, then the cultural conflict becomes society against woman. Also, if woman is nature and is sex, then woman becomes the universal Body. If woman is the Body, then man, as her polar opposite, must be the Mind.
Gender enters the argument first and most significantly in the analogy of man is to reason as woman is to nature. In Western thought, much if not most of this idea can be traced back to the Biblical myth of Adam and Eve. Much deconstruction of this myth has been done in other fora, so much time will not be spent on this subject. However, two things can be highlighted, both of which are intertwined. The first is the cultural assignment of the masculine found in Adam and the feminine in Eve. Eve succumbed to the advances of the Serpent and ate of the apple, here the symbol of raw sexuality. In turn, she took this knowledge and seduced Adam with her "feminine wiles." As Sallie Tisdale states, Eve "is always, merely, eternally, a woman. Adam is always, apologetically, eternally, the man."3 Eve represents Woman, the creature who not only came into sexual knowledge but assertively used this knowledge to seduce. Adam represents Man, the creature who was distracted by Woman's sensuality; the being who came into sexual knowledge unwillingly, or at least unwittingly.
The second point of note is the current cultural significance of this act. In American slang, one is never too far removed from this myth, for it manifests itself in one very observable part of the male anatomy: the Adam's apple. On the surface, it conveys its dictionary meaning, which is the enlarged part of the larynx most often noticed in the male. In cultural context, however, the Adam's apple represents the most significant difference between Man and Woman. The apple, the cause of the Fall, was never completely consumed by Adam; in fact, it has permanently lodged in his throat, forever caught between his mind and his body. Thus man never entirely succumbed to the pleasures of the flesh, as Woman did. Because of this escape of enslavement to the flesh, Man can transcend the ties connecting the body and the mind; this transcendence allows him to divorce his mind from his body (something Woman can never do, as she is literally bound to the birthing process—she is always in her body, she is always the body) and permits him to represent Culture and Civilization.
Adam and Eve, then, are the archetypes of gender, with gender seen as the construction of identity. In American patriarchal society the markers of the masculine, that gender associated with males, are almost always the converse of the signals for the feminine. Gender enables an invisible policing of human interaction, as it necessarily divides the whole of society into two easily recognizable, categorizable segments and allows the regulation of people by group instead of by individual. In addition, it allows men, the empowered, dominant group, to govern and control the activities of the other group, women, because women are so easily distinguishable from men. A man can be assured that when he encounters a woman he has the power to both protect and restrict her. His gender construction and identity allows that freedom. The gender for women, on the other hand, means curtailment.
The restriction of the movements and the very thoughts of women is done almost exclusively, if not entirely, through the construction and enforcement of gender and gender differences between men and women. As the holders of societal power and as the gender opposite of women, men in patriarchal societies can ignore the moratorium on sex and pursue it rigorously; women, as the mother (primordial and nuclear) of the species, must maintain virtue and deny men that which would destroy them. In this dichotomous view of the preservation of society, women who transgress gender norms, especially sexual gender norms, are considered untrustworthy and must be punished. They are seen, essentially, as traitors of human civilization.
CLEANLINESS VS. DIRT, SOCIETY VS. LAWLESSNESS, AND THE FOCUS ON PROSTITUTION
Here, in order to attempt to answer the initial question of why most Americans view prostitution negatively, I must first present a working, cultural definition of prostitute. This is primarily to avoid confusion, but also it is to show, part by part, how the prostitute embodies and encompasses all of the above issues. For Americans, a prostitute is a woman who, in one sense or another, has given her body to men sexually in exchange for explicit monetary reward. She has translated, or is willing to translate, her body into cash. And despite her similarities to the cultural Wife, who traditionally gives her body to a man into monogamy in exchange for economic security, the Prostitute is denigrated, despised, rejected and hated, even (or especially) by those to whom she caters, despite the fact that she, too, trades her body for financial security.
The prostitute, first and perhaps foremost, accepts her depiction as the Body. She accentuates her body, wearing clothes that emphasizes her flesh, particularly those body parts that have become elements of the cultural erotic script for male arousal: breast (and shoulders, the more modest symbol of the breast), buttocks, and legs. Lips are stressed as well, almost always lipsticked in order to symbolize the reddened, "ready" lips of the vagina. Other make-up strategies are employed, such as the application of rouge. Rouge, or artificial blush, has historically been used by prostitutes as both an indicator of their sexual availability and as an imitation of the body's hot flush, a phenomenon often occurring during sexual intercourse as a sign of arousal. As the Body, the prostitute completely relinquishes any claim of Mind, of mental capability; she uses her body to sway men impulsively instead of using her faculties to reason with them.
Also, as the Body, the prostitute embraces what has made, or reduced, her to such: her sexuality. She is the woman of sex, the essence of sex. She is not fearful of her orifices; she does not hide them—she in fact openly presents them. She uses her mouth not to kiss (which is a gesture of relationship and commitment), but to stimulate. She makes her vagina available and, in some cases, her anus as well. Into these she willingly accepts the penis; the man's ejaculate, usually a source of shame for the man, is received without objection. She uncomplainingly accepts all orifices, both of the man's and her own.
The prostitute, in her acceptance of the body, is not seen as celebrating her sexuality; instead she is seen as flaunting it. This sexual aggression is a transgression of the primary gender boundary for women, as women must be the mothers of society and maintainers of societal restraint. Women should also be passive, since they embody the opposite of masculinity—men are active, women are acted upon. Her sexual aggression thus threatens on multiple levels. She represents the fall of civilization, as she tempts men away from their rational pursuits and causes them to surrender to the flesh; she renders rigid gender constructs ambiguous, since activity, even sexual activity, is circumscribed only within the masculine cultural script; and she upsets the current patriarchal structure, which rewards women with monogamous marriage for their purity and docility—the prostitute seduces men away from their "good, honest" wives.
As the wife represents what is good and honest and pure, the prostitute, necessary for the creation and continuation of a dichotomy, is the opposite of these: she is cast as bad, deceitful, and dirty, because she is the embodiment of sex. Sex is seen as dirty, and as the prostitute is reduced to her sexual anatomy, she is equated with dirt. Andrea Dworkin says that woman "is dirt and what she touches is dirt because she contaminates, makes unclean . . . defiling whatever she touches."4 The prostitute makes herself unclean by openly acknowledging and affirming (her) sexuality; she makes the married man unclean by defiling the sanctity of the marital conjugal vows; and she makes the cultural idea of Woman unclean, for to demonstrate to Man that she too can participate in rational pursuits, Woman must suppress her sexuality at all times.
This serves to explain why many feminists, especially the radical feminists, have been reluctant at best and repellent at worst concerning the acceptance of female prostitutes into the feminist ranks. One would think that feminists would embrace these women, as they represent the most marginalized and objectified women in public view. On the contrary, most of these feminists have chosen to shunt these women to the side, just as men have for centuries. Prostitutes are seen as cultural filth. To embrace them would be to sully feminism's otherwise pure cause. Also, prostitution is the one prominent activity that reinforces the notion that women command with the body instead of the mind. For this, the prostitute must be made invisible in order to promote the positive idea that women are the intellectual equals of men. The prostitute is again marginalized, even in the struggle to bring all women's experiences to light.
CONCLUSION
Our present philosophical bases are constructed around dichotomies, systems in which no variations from the opposites are allowed. This is problematic, particularly in the case of humans, who more often than not refuse to fall neatly into prescribed social roles. Our philosophies of the mind-body and nature-society dualisms, along with the masculine-feminine gender dichotomy, define and restrict what is deemed to be "bad": the chaotic, the unknown, the untrustworthy. All of these beliefs culminate into the cultural construct of the prostitute, the woman who symbolizes everything society stands against.
This paper is by no way a complete treatise on the cultural understanding of prostitution. Though I briefly brought up the topic of economies, I did not present an in-depth argument of such. An interesting take on the subject would involve Marxism and the cultural (and masculine) resistance to the conversion of the sexual body from use-value to exchange-value. I also did not discuss the idea of the prostitute as pornography personified, as the woman always ready for sex and never denying sexual access. How much of prostitution is fueled by the depiction of the male fantasy; how interlocked are these two industries? Lastly, I acknowledge that one area that needs coverage is that of the heterosexism pervading female prostitution. How does compulsory heterosexuality fit into this schema, and vice-versa? More examination of our culture is needed in order to provide a fuller, more inclusive view of all women and their conditions in our society.
_________
1 These words, plus tits, constitute the notorious "seven dirty words" that cannot be said over any broadcast medium. For more information, see FCC v. Pacifica Foundation in its entirety at http://www.aclu.org/courts/pacifica.html.
2 Strossen, Nadine. Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for Women's Rights, p. 51.
3 Tisdale, Sallie. Talk Dirty to Me, p. 30.
4 Dworkin, Andrea. Intercourse, p. 184.
October 5, 1997
Toward a Cultural Understanding of Prostitution
INTRODUCTION
One of the worst things for a woman is to be called a prostitute, a slut, a tramp, a whore. Why does this mere insult call into question a woman's moral standing, her inner value, indeed her cultural worth? This paper will attempt to answer this question by exploring particular philosophical premises and certain cultural symbols and values. This is not an answer to why women become prostitutes, why men visit prostitutes, or why prostitution has always existed. Its focus is why Americans view prostitution to be one of the most terrible things a woman can be.
The most obvious bias of this paper is that it deals only with female prostitution. Many of the supporting arguments here deal with cultural views on women and the gender construction of femininity. In this view, male prostitution may very well be a different animal than the one I deal with herein, and as such should be dealt with appropriately in another forum.
MIND VS. BODY, NATURE VS. SOCIETY AND (OTHER) CULTURAL SYMBOLS
One cannot observe American society without noting how Americans continually obsess about the body. From diet strategies to prescribed gender affectations to sodomy laws, the whole of society is based on recognition, assessment, and regulation of the body. Gender is codified with physicality; thus a male is presumed to be a man and a female a woman. This marker provides society a way to classify, to identify, the body.
The body must be controlled, society tells us, because the body represents nature, and as the mind is antithetical to the body, so is nature to civilization. Civilization equals culture and reason, the very things humans strive to attain and further; nature is reckless and chaotic, bringing with it uncertainty, anarchy, death to civilization. As long as the body remains unchecked, the basis of our culture and identity, indeed our very existence, is threatened.
Because it represents such a threat, the body is despised, and particularly hated are our orifices. Orifices are deemphasized in our culture because they remind us that we are animal. Sneezing and coughing are considered at best impolite and at worst dangerous, as diseases can be transmitted in such manners. Dieting has taken on tremendous cultural importance: the stress on reduction of food intake indicating that the mouth must be made invisible; the less people eat, the fewer instances that the main utility of the mouth must be made apparent. Belching and the expulsion of gas are considered major social transgressions in "polite" company, as the sounds or smells of such bring to the fore the unavoidable functions of the body. Urination and defecation take place in private places and are very much private acts—even people who are married often do not interfere (for example, by continuing conversations, or even simple interruptions) with these acts. Menstruation is considered in many religious and cultural beliefs as one of the dirtiest occurrences in human activity. Nocturnal emissions, too, draw a sense of shame and secrecy, an idea that one has done something wrong. Sex, then, becomes entirely suspect, as it can at any given time incorporate all human orifices: mouth, urethra, anus, vagina. Sex, as an act, involves all of our indicators of animality.
One can observe this phenomenon of orifice hatred by examining one of the vestiges of culture: our language, especially what is considered as obscenity. All of these words are of the utmost obscene nature in our language, and all of them involve relations of the body, orifices, or sex: fuck, shit, motherfucker, cocksucker, cunt, piss,1 asshole, and to a lesser degree in contemporary culture, tits and bastard. The only obscenity that does not conform to this list is bitch, which incidentally is used almost exclusively on women and involves the reduction of the woman in question to an animal lower than herself, a female dog. Penis (and related words, such as dick) is not obscene, only an insult; and pussy, a word men use on gender traitors, is seen in mainstream culture as less offensive than cunt.
As society controls the body and speech, the regulation of obscenity in our language falls under society's jurisdiction. Laws governing obscene language have always existed. As Nadine Strossen states, "just as our society tends to view sex itself as inherently dangerous, so too our courts view words or images that describe or depict sex."2 While modern obscenity laws focus almost exclusively on sexual images and words, older laws unquestionably defined what words concerning the body were acceptable in everyday speech. In Roth v. United States, a case brought before the Supreme Court in 1957, the Court ruled that obscene material was that which appealed to the prurient interest. This interest was described as "shameful or morbid interest in nudity, sex or excretion which goes substantially beyond customary limits of candor in description or representation." Nudity is the body itself, sex is the epitomal physical application of that body, and excretion is the neverending natural function of that body. Not only did these obscenity laws demarcate what was disallowed, by necessity it presented what was acceptable. The permitted speech was that devoid of the body—that which concerned the mind, mental activity, and rational pursuits. Law becomes inextricably entangled in the mind-body dichotomy, not just influencing the cultural bias toward the mind but enforcing it, by creating a criminal class of those who do not conform to the prevailing cultural standards of "decency."
GENDER CONSTRUCTION, DICHOTOMIES, AND VIEWS ABOUT WOMEN
Along with the idea of mind-body duality is the cultural notion that women represent nature, here nature understood as sexuality. Sexuality must be held in tight restraint. Because sex is one of the few remaining ways in which humans must admit to their animality, it must be suppressed in order to maintain civilization. Sex is inextricably tied to the human body, and the body must be transcended in order to expand civilization, the collective construction of human knowledge. Sex is seen as the enemy of society, not in spite of its promise of pleasure, but because of it.
As woman serves as the progenitor of the species, she is seen to symbolize humans' continued link to nature; she is seen as nature herself. As such, she is to be controlled. Sexual women represent a double threat, since at any time if a man succumbs to woman, to sex, he risks capitulating himself to the labyrinth of the body and becoming so lost in nature that he may never find his way out. Women become doubly confined: sexual nature is of the body, and the body must be regulated. If woman is nature, and if woman is sex, then the cultural conflict becomes society against woman. Also, if woman is nature and is sex, then woman becomes the universal Body. If woman is the Body, then man, as her polar opposite, must be the Mind.
Gender enters the argument first and most significantly in the analogy of man is to reason as woman is to nature. In Western thought, much if not most of this idea can be traced back to the Biblical myth of Adam and Eve. Much deconstruction of this myth has been done in other fora, so much time will not be spent on this subject. However, two things can be highlighted, both of which are intertwined. The first is the cultural assignment of the masculine found in Adam and the feminine in Eve. Eve succumbed to the advances of the Serpent and ate of the apple, here the symbol of raw sexuality. In turn, she took this knowledge and seduced Adam with her "feminine wiles." As Sallie Tisdale states, Eve "is always, merely, eternally, a woman. Adam is always, apologetically, eternally, the man."3 Eve represents Woman, the creature who not only came into sexual knowledge but assertively used this knowledge to seduce. Adam represents Man, the creature who was distracted by Woman's sensuality; the being who came into sexual knowledge unwillingly, or at least unwittingly.
The second point of note is the current cultural significance of this act. In American slang, one is never too far removed from this myth, for it manifests itself in one very observable part of the male anatomy: the Adam's apple. On the surface, it conveys its dictionary meaning, which is the enlarged part of the larynx most often noticed in the male. In cultural context, however, the Adam's apple represents the most significant difference between Man and Woman. The apple, the cause of the Fall, was never completely consumed by Adam; in fact, it has permanently lodged in his throat, forever caught between his mind and his body. Thus man never entirely succumbed to the pleasures of the flesh, as Woman did. Because of this escape of enslavement to the flesh, Man can transcend the ties connecting the body and the mind; this transcendence allows him to divorce his mind from his body (something Woman can never do, as she is literally bound to the birthing process—she is always in her body, she is always the body) and permits him to represent Culture and Civilization.
Adam and Eve, then, are the archetypes of gender, with gender seen as the construction of identity. In American patriarchal society the markers of the masculine, that gender associated with males, are almost always the converse of the signals for the feminine. Gender enables an invisible policing of human interaction, as it necessarily divides the whole of society into two easily recognizable, categorizable segments and allows the regulation of people by group instead of by individual. In addition, it allows men, the empowered, dominant group, to govern and control the activities of the other group, women, because women are so easily distinguishable from men. A man can be assured that when he encounters a woman he has the power to both protect and restrict her. His gender construction and identity allows that freedom. The gender for women, on the other hand, means curtailment.
The restriction of the movements and the very thoughts of women is done almost exclusively, if not entirely, through the construction and enforcement of gender and gender differences between men and women. As the holders of societal power and as the gender opposite of women, men in patriarchal societies can ignore the moratorium on sex and pursue it rigorously; women, as the mother (primordial and nuclear) of the species, must maintain virtue and deny men that which would destroy them. In this dichotomous view of the preservation of society, women who transgress gender norms, especially sexual gender norms, are considered untrustworthy and must be punished. They are seen, essentially, as traitors of human civilization.
CLEANLINESS VS. DIRT, SOCIETY VS. LAWLESSNESS, AND THE FOCUS ON PROSTITUTION
Here, in order to attempt to answer the initial question of why most Americans view prostitution negatively, I must first present a working, cultural definition of prostitute. This is primarily to avoid confusion, but also it is to show, part by part, how the prostitute embodies and encompasses all of the above issues. For Americans, a prostitute is a woman who, in one sense or another, has given her body to men sexually in exchange for explicit monetary reward. She has translated, or is willing to translate, her body into cash. And despite her similarities to the cultural Wife, who traditionally gives her body to a man into monogamy in exchange for economic security, the Prostitute is denigrated, despised, rejected and hated, even (or especially) by those to whom she caters, despite the fact that she, too, trades her body for financial security.
The prostitute, first and perhaps foremost, accepts her depiction as the Body. She accentuates her body, wearing clothes that emphasizes her flesh, particularly those body parts that have become elements of the cultural erotic script for male arousal: breast (and shoulders, the more modest symbol of the breast), buttocks, and legs. Lips are stressed as well, almost always lipsticked in order to symbolize the reddened, "ready" lips of the vagina. Other make-up strategies are employed, such as the application of rouge. Rouge, or artificial blush, has historically been used by prostitutes as both an indicator of their sexual availability and as an imitation of the body's hot flush, a phenomenon often occurring during sexual intercourse as a sign of arousal. As the Body, the prostitute completely relinquishes any claim of Mind, of mental capability; she uses her body to sway men impulsively instead of using her faculties to reason with them.
Also, as the Body, the prostitute embraces what has made, or reduced, her to such: her sexuality. She is the woman of sex, the essence of sex. She is not fearful of her orifices; she does not hide them—she in fact openly presents them. She uses her mouth not to kiss (which is a gesture of relationship and commitment), but to stimulate. She makes her vagina available and, in some cases, her anus as well. Into these she willingly accepts the penis; the man's ejaculate, usually a source of shame for the man, is received without objection. She uncomplainingly accepts all orifices, both of the man's and her own.
The prostitute, in her acceptance of the body, is not seen as celebrating her sexuality; instead she is seen as flaunting it. This sexual aggression is a transgression of the primary gender boundary for women, as women must be the mothers of society and maintainers of societal restraint. Women should also be passive, since they embody the opposite of masculinity—men are active, women are acted upon. Her sexual aggression thus threatens on multiple levels. She represents the fall of civilization, as she tempts men away from their rational pursuits and causes them to surrender to the flesh; she renders rigid gender constructs ambiguous, since activity, even sexual activity, is circumscribed only within the masculine cultural script; and she upsets the current patriarchal structure, which rewards women with monogamous marriage for their purity and docility—the prostitute seduces men away from their "good, honest" wives.
As the wife represents what is good and honest and pure, the prostitute, necessary for the creation and continuation of a dichotomy, is the opposite of these: she is cast as bad, deceitful, and dirty, because she is the embodiment of sex. Sex is seen as dirty, and as the prostitute is reduced to her sexual anatomy, she is equated with dirt. Andrea Dworkin says that woman "is dirt and what she touches is dirt because she contaminates, makes unclean . . . defiling whatever she touches."4 The prostitute makes herself unclean by openly acknowledging and affirming (her) sexuality; she makes the married man unclean by defiling the sanctity of the marital conjugal vows; and she makes the cultural idea of Woman unclean, for to demonstrate to Man that she too can participate in rational pursuits, Woman must suppress her sexuality at all times.
This serves to explain why many feminists, especially the radical feminists, have been reluctant at best and repellent at worst concerning the acceptance of female prostitutes into the feminist ranks. One would think that feminists would embrace these women, as they represent the most marginalized and objectified women in public view. On the contrary, most of these feminists have chosen to shunt these women to the side, just as men have for centuries. Prostitutes are seen as cultural filth. To embrace them would be to sully feminism's otherwise pure cause. Also, prostitution is the one prominent activity that reinforces the notion that women command with the body instead of the mind. For this, the prostitute must be made invisible in order to promote the positive idea that women are the intellectual equals of men. The prostitute is again marginalized, even in the struggle to bring all women's experiences to light.
CONCLUSION
Our present philosophical bases are constructed around dichotomies, systems in which no variations from the opposites are allowed. This is problematic, particularly in the case of humans, who more often than not refuse to fall neatly into prescribed social roles. Our philosophies of the mind-body and nature-society dualisms, along with the masculine-feminine gender dichotomy, define and restrict what is deemed to be "bad": the chaotic, the unknown, the untrustworthy. All of these beliefs culminate into the cultural construct of the prostitute, the woman who symbolizes everything society stands against.
This paper is by no way a complete treatise on the cultural understanding of prostitution. Though I briefly brought up the topic of economies, I did not present an in-depth argument of such. An interesting take on the subject would involve Marxism and the cultural (and masculine) resistance to the conversion of the sexual body from use-value to exchange-value. I also did not discuss the idea of the prostitute as pornography personified, as the woman always ready for sex and never denying sexual access. How much of prostitution is fueled by the depiction of the male fantasy; how interlocked are these two industries? Lastly, I acknowledge that one area that needs coverage is that of the heterosexism pervading female prostitution. How does compulsory heterosexuality fit into this schema, and vice-versa? More examination of our culture is needed in order to provide a fuller, more inclusive view of all women and their conditions in our society.
_________
1 These words, plus tits, constitute the notorious "seven dirty words" that cannot be said over any broadcast medium. For more information, see FCC v. Pacifica Foundation in its entirety at http://www.aclu.org/courts/pacifica.html.
2 Strossen, Nadine. Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for Women's Rights, p. 51.
3 Tisdale, Sallie. Talk Dirty to Me, p. 30.
4 Dworkin, Andrea. Intercourse, p. 184.