Re: Marriage and prostitution

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Yoshie:
>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.

This is not in question. What is in question is the notion that marriage
and prostitution are somehow equivalent. This argument can only be put
forward on a very high level of abstraction and can not address the
determination of revolutionary societies to eradicate prostitution. Would
we say that the Cuban revolution was somehow amiss when it did not target
marriage as well? We can say that it is important for such societies to
educate men against abusive and sexist treatment of their partners. This
was the goal of the great Cuban film trilogy "Lucia". But if marriage and
prostitution are somehow equivalent, then why not work to rid prostitution
of its more glaring abuses? Why not set up socialist whorehouses with
madams who had read "Origins of the Family"? I think the answer is obvious.
Sex for sale is qualitatively more degrading than marriage or picking sugar
cane. I think this notion of emancipated prostitution is an innovation of
the radical milieu of the 1980s and 90s. Speaking as an old fogey, I still
identify with Fanon's "Wretched of the Earth" and those scenes in "Battle
of Algiers" when the FLN cleaned up the casbah, prostitution included.



Louis Proyect
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