Re: Marriage and prostitution

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Lou:

>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.

No, an old-fashioned belief that is tragically still current in many
places is that marriage is based upon *duty*, not love.  Hence
community & clerical pressures upon many women to stay in marriage
without love, even when they get beaten, raped, etc. by their
husbands.  Criticisms of familial customs are unfortunately not
luxuries that only Salon writers should indulge in; in fact, such
criticisms are more urgently necessary in the very working class
communities in the Third World where you suggest that they don't
apply.

Besides, "traditional" love of (or filial/parental duty to) family
and prostitution are not antithetical in poor nations.  In fact, more
often than not, the former motivates women to engage in the latter.
For instance:

>Book Review
>
>Renaud, Michelle Lewis. 1997. Women at the Crossroads: A Prostitute
>Community's Response to Aids in Urban Senegal. Amsterdam: Gordon and
>Breach Publishers. 172 pp. $21.00 (paper).
>
>Women at the Crossroads is an interesting story of a community of
>Senegalese women prostitutes who must negotiate between their
>identities as Muslims, mothers, wives, and daughters while
>practicing prostitution in a nation which is ninety percent Muslim.
>These women--often disadvantaged in terms of attaining formal
>education, being forced into marriage at an early age, divorced, or
>widowed--are portrayed as wanting the best for their children and
>for themselves and as having turned to prostitution as one of the
>only economically viable means of survival.

Poor women often resort to prostitution, not simply for their own
survival, but for their *family's survival*.

And quite often, in desperate conditions, it is *parents* who sell
their daughters to brothels.  This has not changed since the
beginning of capitalism.  Here's an example from Japan:

*****   Certainly daughters of economically distressed families made
up most of the workers in the trade.  Inmates of the brothels in
Tokyo, which housed the heaviest population of licensed prostitutes
in the land, came in largest numbers from the capital and from the
poorer agricultural provinces.  Overwhelmingly, girls became
prostitutes because their parents were ill, threatened with loss of
livelihood, or dead -- although since parents had the "right" to sell
their daughters (supposedly with the daughters' permission after
brothel service was made "voluntary"), parental greed landed some
girls in red-light districts.

Although employment agents (keian) recruited large numbers of
prostitutes ostensibly as "maids" or "waitresses," the real
destination of such recruits was not hidden.  Urban employment agents
erected large signs in front of their premises advising, "People
wishing to sell their daughters please inquire within." [28]

[28]  Tsurumi Shunsuke, Hashikawa Bunzo, Imai Seiichi, Matsumoto
Sannosuke, Kamishima Jiro, and Sugai Junichi, eds., _Nihon no
hyakunen (A hundred years of Japan), 10 vols. (Tokyo, 1961-1964), 4:35

(E. Patricia Tsurumi, _Factory Girls: Women in the Thread Mills of
Meiji Japan_, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1990, p. 182)
*****

The same motivation -- love of and filial duty to parents, love of
and parental duty to children, younger siblings, etc. -- is behind
many women's decision to work in sweatshops.

In other words, criticisms of practice of prostitution (and
sweatshops) should go hand in hand with criticisms of the family as
an institution shaped by capitalism, as classical Marxism teaches us.

Yoshie