PROSTITUTION
Prostitution, as I stated in a previous chapter is one of the results
of the overthrowing of sex by the ego. The craving for food and power
triumphs over all the sexual cravings and compels one individual to
pursue apparently sexual goals which are no longer sexual as far
as that individual is concerned. The female prostitute lends her
sexual organs to many men for money (food, power), not for her own
gratification or to reproduce her species.
That phenomenon is very complex and cannot be dealt with in detail
within the limits of this book. I shall confine myself to pointing
out some of the psychological problems which have to be elucidated
before the causes, nature and results of prostitution can be clearly
understood.
=Economic Factors.= Certain radicals simplify a little too much the
problem of prostitution by considering it solely as a by-product of the
competitive system which would disappear as soon as a more equitable
system of production and distribution was introduced into the modern
world.
No one can deny that under our social system, woman, burdened as she
is, by many physical and social handicaps, is easily driven to the wall
in times of stress and compelled to sell her body. Nor is there any
doubt that under a system assuring every one a livelihood, regardless
of business conditions, many women would be saved from adopting such a
disgusting form of labor.
At the same time, the radical interpretation fails to explain why, when
submitted to a practically identical pressure, some women do not become
prostitutes but either kill themselves or beg or steal.
=Lombroso's Theory.= Very unsatisfactory also is Lombroso's attitude to
prostitution.
He finds a constant coincidence between prostitution and crime and
states that the female offender _is_ a prostitute, one of the varieties
of the "reo nato," of the born criminal.
The female offender is not always a prostitute and modern research
makes the theory of "congenital criminality" untenable.
Kurt Schneider in his exhaustive study of seventy prostitutes brings
out interesting details of their biography which throw a clearer light
upon the psychology of prostitution.
There were certain characteristics which all of those seventy women
exhibited. They were all unwilling to work. They all were very
grasping, altho, at the same time, very extravagant spenders when
it came to personal adornment. Eroticism seemed to play a very
insignificant part in their choice of a livelihood. Most of them were
frigid, many homosexual, the majority of them sadistic.
Fifteen of them had been punished for larceny (money and clothes).
Many of them kept a pimp or cadet.
Most of them were unhappy, dissatisfied types.
All of them were greatly attached to children.
Many of them were drunkards.
One half of them were weak minded.
Seven per cent of them had been brought up in institutions.
We have there a striking picture of inferiority. An endocrinological
examination of those unfortunates, similar to those which have been
conducted recently at St. Elizabeth Hospital, Washington, D. C., would
have probably revealed back of their unwillingness to work and of their
thirst for money, weak thyroids and poor adrenals, not to mention
unbalanced pituitary glands. The fires of the body burnt slow in them,
producing and consuming little energy, a condition which, causing an
obscure unconscious fear of the future, compelled those women to seek
easy ways of gathering money, the only protection they could think of.
Their inferiority complex revealed itself in their craving for personal
adornment, to which they sacrificed their protective earnings.
=Sensuality.= All the rant of the purity prophets to the contrary
notwithstanding, it is not sensuality which "lures" women into a "life
of shame."
If the prostitute sought in her means of livelihood mere gratification
of "vicious" instincts, why would she so often submit to the whims
of a pimp who despoils her of her earnings. The prostitute hates the
men who can compel her thru their financial superiority to submit to
their sexual desires. The pimp, whom she keeps and who depends upon her
bounty, is her inferior and the more she degrades him, the less she
feels her own degradation.
The prostitute, like all inferiors, is dissatisfied, but so are the man
of genius, the inventor and the artist. The genius is the dissatisfied
individual who organically is able to compensate for his feeling
of inferiority by creating a more pleasant environment, physical
or mental, and derives therefrom credit, praise, rewards, small as
those rewards may be. The prostitute, too weak organically to find
a suitable, socially valuable, form of compensation, flees from a
reality which is unpleasant to her. Alcohol and drugs supply her with a
convenient form of escape from reality, the more acceptable to her as
her intelligence is the more limited.
=Father Fixation.= Kurt Schneider found that fifty per cent of the
prostitutes he examined were weak minded. The Chicago Vice report
published a few years ago revealed the fact that fifty per cent of the
prostitutes examined by the vice investigators were the victims of a
violent father fixation.
One half of them, when asked by whom they had been seduced,
incriminated their fathers. To a psychoanalyst such an answer is an
obvious morbid wish fulfilment.
All of the women probably experienced unconscious incestuous cravings
at some time or other, and in the minds of the weak minded, (fifty per
cent of them according to Schneider), those cravings had produced an
absolute delusion. Whether the incest was real or imaginary, the fact
remains that those unfortunates either believed in it or considered it
as a plausible explanation and scapegoat. A lie, when accepted as a
part of our biography, often affects us as mightily as tho it were an
actual fact. For, after all, every lie we tell is a fact unconsciously
acceptable to us and which affords our ego a certain protection.
The woman with a father fixation is usually frigid. She either never
marries or is a prey to prostitution fancies, until analysis has
freed her of her unconscious incest fear or has led her to accept her
incestuous cravings as a part of her personality.
=Prostitution is a neurosis=, affecting mostly the hypothyroid,
hypoadrenal female of low culture and low intelligence.
Psychoanalysis, which requires a certain grade of mental development on
the part of the patient, is rather impotent in the majority of cases
of prostitution when the woman has crossed the line which separates
fancies from practice.
There are male prostitutes also, of the normal sexual type. I do not
allude here to the homosexual males whose mentality shall be considered
in another chapter. By male prostitutes, I mean men who consort with
women, in or out of wedlock, for purely sordid considerations.
=The Pimp= who exploits some prostitute is a prostitute himself, but so
is the man who marries for money or power a woman who does not attract
him sexually. The male prostitute is, if anything, ethically inferior
to the female prostitute.
=Prevention=, rather than any form of cure, may some day solve
the problem of prostitution. Repressive measures are, of course,
a dishonest farce which deceives no one and benefits no one. The
prostitute cannot be reeducated or adapted, for she is a weakling and
the modern world offers to her no equivalent for what she would have
to give up in order to reform. Female children, on the other hand, if
trained properly and made independent, mentally and financially, could
grow up free from the handicaps and the fears which, at the present
day, drive too many girls into adopting the "easiest way."
=Prostitution has no redeeming grace.= It may have saved many
young men from impotence but it has made quite as many impotent thru
venereal infection. Some claim that it has saved many pure wives and
daughters from temptation but it has contributed also thru infection to
making thousands of innocent women sexual invalids.
Prostitution is a maladjustment whose worst sin is perhaps the
maladjustment of married life which it occasions in thousands of cases.
Too many young men, who acquired their sexual experience with
prostitutes solely, imagine that they know and understand women, and
they proceed to treat their life mates as tho the latter were only
slightly different from the unfortunate neurotics they hired to relieve
their sexual cravings. To that sort of experience we owe the horrible
type of the "typical husband" who never misses an opportunity of
reminding his wife of the fact that "she is only a woman."