Love for sale : a world history of prostitution

424 Pages·2004·2.7 MB·English

by  Ringdal

LOVE FOR SALE
LOVE FOR SALE
A WORLD HISTORY OF PROSTITUTION
NILS JOHAN RINGDAL
Translated from the Norwegian by
RICHARD DALY
Copyright © 1997, 2004 by Nils Johan Ringdal
Danish edition © 1998 by Tiderne Skifter
Translation copyright © 2004 by Richard Daly Originally published in 1997 in
the Norwegian language by J. W. Cappelens forlag a.s., Oslo, under the title
Verdens vanskeligste yrke: De prostituertes verdenshistone. This English
translation is published by arrangement with Tiderne Skifter, Copenhagen, and
the financial support of NORLA Non-Fiction is gratefully acknowledged.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by
any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval
systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer,
who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational
institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or
publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an
anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway,
New York, NY 10003.
Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ringdal, Nils Johan, 1952
[Verdens vanskeligste yrke]
Love for sale : a world history of prostitution / Nils Johan Ringdal ;
translated from the Norwegian by Richard Daly.
p. cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
eBook ISBN-13: 978-1-55584808-8
1. Prostitution—History. I. Title.
HQ111.R5613 2004
306.74′09—dc22
2003064616
Grove Press
841 Broadway
New York, NY 10003
LOVE FOR SALE
INTRODUCTION
Butterfield 8, with its call-girl heroine working her way down the
alphabet of men from Amherst to Yale, appeared at a very formative
moment in my adolescence and impressed me forever with the persona
of the prostitute, whom I continue to revere. The prostitute is not, as
feminists claim, the victim of men, but rather their conqueror, an outlaw,
who controls the sexual channels between nature and culture.
—Camille Paglia, Vamps and Tramps
The prostitute has traditionally stood as the symbol of sin, but precisely in this
capacity is regarded as a guarantor and stabilizer of morality and matrimony in
the rest of society. In the West, this view of prostitution held sway until the latter
part of the nineteenth century. Men of the upper classes rarely married
prostitutes. Thus, whores posed no threat. If a man paid a visit to such a woman,
it, like his subsequent venereal disease, was a secret protected by the Hippocratic
oath.
Much would change with the Victorian era, not least in Protestant countries
where the individual became much more preoccupied with morality on a purely
personal level. In Asia, this influence would not only convert Christians but also
create a new wave of morality among Hindus, Confucians, and finally even
Communists. In the West, Victorian morality influenced the awakening of both
the women’s and workers’ movements. Finally, even sexuality, family life, and
prostitution tended to become public issues. This tendency toward politicizing
such questions became even stronger in the latter half of the twentieth century.
The new women’s movement, the gay-rights organizations, and the media have
contributed to this in their respective ways.
*
Prostitution, not the family is the theme of this book. But historians and social
scientists have often seen the two institutions as polar opposites, both morally
and culturally.
Relations between the two sexes have varied immensely in primitive cultures,
ancient and modern civilizations, and through many and various historical
periods. Nonetheless, families—nuclear units with a man, one or two women,
periods. Nonetheless, families—nuclear units with a man, one or two women,
and children—have been dominant. Yet family units have been organized in a
number of different ways. Monogamy has alternated with polygamy, purchased
brides and dowry have existed side by side or been cultural disparities; the free
choice of partner or divorce has varied considerably. All these factors have a
structuring impact on family and prostitution. The strength and status of the
family define the status assigned to the prostitutes, as different family structures
provide the men by various acceptance of extramarital sex. In some regions, and
in small societies in particular phases of history, prostitution has almost put the
institution of the family out of play. And every time the emphasis on family has
diminished, this has had significant demographic effects. I have not weighed the
various family or prostitution archetypes systematically against one another. But
where I have discerned clear connections, I have pointed them out.
The conflict between family and prostitution as institutions can be viewed
from a number of perspectives. As one of my favorite teachers once put it: Fixed
and regulated relations between the two sexes have always provided the best
conditions for stable child rearing and the continuation of the family line.
Demographically, the impact of prostitution is easy to detect, since prostitutes
have more sex but fewer children than women in stable families. Prostitutes have
more abortions and venereal diseases and become more easily sterile, but still,
many sex workers complete their terms of pregnancy and give birth to children.
But the conditions are less propitious for rearing children, since there is a higher
rate of infant and child mortality among the offspring of prostitutes.
One might also assess the opposition between family and prostitution in
moral terms. The family obliges the man to feel responsibility for his children.
For women, this may be something nature compels them to do, since very few
women abandon their children, but men do so frequently.
In most societies, a man who takes responsibility for his children is
considered more moral than one who does not. Understood in this way, the
family is a positive servitude, while prostitution is a negative freedom. Moral
assessments are challenging and often complicated to integrate into social-
scientific or historical analyses. Maternity, love, and security are subjective
entities, while sex can be more easily quantified. Like many others, I believe that
a strict but loving parental couple, kind grandparents, pleasant aunts and uncles,
siblings, and cousins represent optimal conditions for a child’s growth and
happiness. This may be a universal truth, as even the Victorians, whom so many
of us love to hate, believed the same.
In today’s high-tech society, it is easy to sublimate moral questions, because we
are constantly confronted with “new” problems that pass themselves off as moral
questions. Sex and reproduction, happiness and security, have, to an almost
absurd degree, become themes of public debate in Europe and the U.S., though
the discourse is political and not moral. Hypocrisy and ambiguous argument rule
the day. Debaters pretend to argue a global perspective while they fight their
own causes. To me it is a great moral paradox that we live in an overpopulated
world where cross-border adoptions are difficult, but the world’s wealthy
women invest huge sums to fight infertility.
A right is negatively defined by the duty of others to respect it. Every time
someone is offered a right, others must limit their own self-expression. The
eighteenth-century definition of “human rights” to prevent discrimination—or
punishment for beliefs, opinions, sexual preferences, or lifestyle—is
consequently much easier to respect than the new set of positively defined rights
that today is promoted by the selfish men and women of the West.
Informed members of the global society know that our world possesses
neither the economy nor the technology to enable billions of people to enjoy the
“right” to bear children or to have access to unlimited medical care. If this
creates no ethical dilemma for those who champion such things as human rights,
it is because they never intended the rights to apply to other than, let’s say,
Norwegians or Americans. With the whole world in mind, any right to sex or
happiness for the handicapped, landmine victims, or the HIV-positive reveals
itself as tragically naive.
The question of prostitution is equally complicated. Nobody has the right to
sex, either unpaid or in exchange for payment: If nobody wants to sell sex, it is a
crime to force anyone to do so. But when men or women do want to sell their
bodies, they should have that full right without encountering punishment or
discrimination. If the client behaves decently, the relationship between the sex
buyer and the sex seller must be considered a purely private transaction.
Western single, lesbian, and infertile married women regularly maintain that
it is their right to become mothers. The recognition of such a right requires
economic support for biological intervention or adoption. Others argue that the
woman’s right in such cases should be weighed against the child’s right to
happiness and a normal life. I strongly reject this dilemma, because I do not
accept the conceptual framework on which it is based.
But when a woman has already given birth to a child, we are dealing with a
concrete moral problem. Woe to the person who, under the pretext of securing a
child’s happiness, takes it from the mother against her will on the grounds that
child’s happiness, takes it from the mother against her will on the grounds that
she is a lesbian, prostitute, or both. In that case, the mother’s right to an
alternative sexual lifestyle is curtailed.
Much has happened since the Victorian era. But the parallels between old and
new feminism, between media then and now, and between the syphilis and AIDS
debates are nevertheless so striking that it is easy to doubt that the world has
grown any wiser. A basic assumption underlying my text is that the Victorians
are still among us—clad in postmodernism.
It is an adage that prostitution is the world’s oldest profession. Since the
Renaissance, fanciful speculators have maintained that prostitution is universal
and comes into existence all by itself, due to women’s natural responses to
changes in the society.
This wild idea has even been developed into a model distinguishing “natural”
from “hospitable” and “monetary” prostitution. Hospitable prostitution has been
identified with primal foraging bands and sparsely populated societies without
currencies, such as Eskimos/Inuits and Native Americans. But according to this
model, natural prostitution must also be traced among lions and apes. The model
implies that all women with many partners are seen as prostitutes. But a
definition of prostitution that does not distinguish between the sale of sexual
services and free sex with different partners is a contradiction and makes any
concept of profession lose its meaning. Hunter, farmer, housewife, tribal chief
and priest, and some crafts are, in any case, older.
Nineteenth-century evolutionist theory was inspired by biology’s
explanations of higher forms of animal life developing from earlier forms, with
apes and humans as the highest species on top of the evolutionary pyramid.
Johann Jacob Bachofen tried to apply this strange model to sex and gender
through historical time. Bachofen argued that humankind had shifted away from
the promiscuous freedom of the horde, through matriarchy, to patriarchy, a form
of society that he considered to have developed in Mesopotamia, with Jewish,
Egyptian, Roman, Indian, and Chinese variants. Lewis Morgan applied the
construction to anthropology and Friedrich Engels through The Origin of the
Family, Private Property and the State to Communist thought. Bachofen and
Morgan saw primal promiscuity developing into prostitution with the advent of
money and division of labor. Engels spoke of primal promiscuity and group
marriage in original societies, which reached their next level of development
with money, class divisions, and economic disequilibrium; he concluded that