Marriage and prostitution

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

This exchange on PEN-L might help to put these questions into sharper relief:

===
Fleck_S wrote:

      >What's different between prostitution and many marriage contracts?
      >1.prostitution is sex for direct payment of money,
      >  marriage is sex for indirect payment of money/financial security.

      I should say that Susie Bright made exactly this point in her radio
      interview with me.

      Doug
===

For all of the revulsion that people like Doug and Harry feel for classical
Marxism, there is an implicit dogmatic Marxist interpretation imbedded here
that needs to be brought to the surface. When Engels wrote about marriage
and prostitution being related, they were making a polemical point that was
very much related to defining the communist political trend. As communists,
we do regard marriage as a reactionary bourgeois institution that oppresses
women. It is based on the cash nexus.

But if Marxists, particularly in the colonial world, can't make elementary
distinctions between marriage and prostitution then we will be laughed out
of the political marketplace. In reality marriage is under assault from all
quarters. Working class people are struggling to maintain marriages in the
face of declining wages that make child-rearing nearly impossible. Most of
them also have an old-fashioned belief that the relationship is voluntary
and based on love, just as they believe in the Catholic Church or Islam.

The sort of analysis that Doug and Harry put forward only has currency in
the imperialist world, among a milieu of highly-educated journalists,
academics and leftists with a solid economic base. In our world, it is
rather daring if not bohemian to speak about free love. We can even point
to leftist whores like Sara Bright, who was in the ISO at one point, and
now writes for Salon Magazine, the perfect venue for this sort of thing.
But for the millions of women who sell their bodies in places like Bangla
Desh or the Philippines, the notion that marriage and prostitution are
somehow equivalent can not possibly hold water.

During the 1980s I had an affair with a women I met at the phone company
who had been a whore in Thailand. (I was working after midnight debugging a
program, she was pushing a vacuum cleaner. This unionized job was the best
she ever had in her life. She had pumped gas, sold popcorn in movie
theaters, etc.) She met a GI who fell in love with her and came back to the
US with her. After he got his MBA, he dumped her. The stories she told me
about being a hooker near an airforce base were unbelievably horrifying.
They were the low point of her life. Her high point was being married to
the GI. When he left her, her life fell apart. As it turned out, she
eventually got married to a computer programmer at the phone company
instead of settling in with me. Best decision she ever made in her life.

Louis Proyect
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