If she does preserve her integrity, she may nonetheless fear that her husband will be compromised in her lover’s consciousness. Even a woman is quick to imagine that in sleeping with a man—if only once, in haste, on a sofa—she has gained a certain superiority over the legitimate spouse; a man who believes he possesses a mistress thinks, with even more reason, that he has trumped her husband. This is why the woman is careful to choose her lover from a lower social class in Bataille’s Tenderness or Kessel’s Belle de nuit,* she seeks sexual satisfaction from him, but she does not want to give him an advantage over her respected husband. In Man’s Fate, Malraux shows us a couple where man and woman make a pact for reciprocal freedom: yet when May tells Kyo she has slept with a friend, he grieves over the fact that this man thinks he “had” her; he chooses to respect her independence because he knows very well that one never has anyone; but the complaisant ideas held by another man hurt and humiliate him through May. Society confuses the free woman and the loose woman; the lover himself may not recognize the freedom from which he profits; he would rather believe his mistress has yielded, let herself go, that he has conquered her, seduced her. A proud woman might personally come to terms with her partner’s vanity; but it would be detestable for her that her esteemed husband should stand such arrogance. For as long as this equality is not universally recognized and concretely realized, it is very difficult for a woman to act as an equal to a man.
In any case, adultery, friendships, and social life are but diversions within married life; they can help its constraints to be endured, but they do not break them. They are only artificial escapes that in no way authentically allow the woman to take her destiny into her own hands.
1. See Volume I. Homosexuals are an exception as they specifically grasp themselves as sexual objects; dandies also, who must be studied separately. Today, in particular, the “zoot-suitism” of the American blacks who dress in light-colored, noticeable suits is explained with very complex reasons.
2. See Volume I, Part Three, “Myths,” Chapter 1.
3. Sandor, whose case Krafft-Ebing detailed, adored well-dressed women but did not “dress up.”
4. In a film set last century—and a rather stupid one—Bette Davis created a scandal by wearing a red dress to the ball whereas white was de rigueur until marriage. Her act was considered a rebellion against the established order.
5. By Irmgard Keun.
6. According to recent studies, however, it seems that women’s gymnasiums in France are almost empty; it was especially between 1920 and 1940 that French women indulged in physical culture. Household problems weigh too heavy on them at this time.
7. Playing a Losing Game.
8. “The Lovely Eva.” [The real title of this short story is “The Lovely Leave.”—TRANS.]
9. Le képi (The Kepi).
10. Tolstoy, War and Peace.
11. Frigidity in Woman.
* Origin of the Family.—TRANS.
12. Obsessions and Psychasthenia.
13. I am speaking here of marriage. We will see that the attitude of the couple is reversed in a love affair.
* The correct title is Belle de jour.—TRANS.
| CHAPTER 8 |
Prostitutes and Hetaeras
Marriage, as we have seen, has an immediate corollary in prostitution.1“Hetaerism,” says Morgan, “follows mankind in civilization as a dark shadow upon the family.” Man, out of prudence, destines his wife to chastity, but he does not derive satisfaction from the regime he imposes on her.
Montaigne says:
The kings of Persia used to invite their wives to join them at their feasts; but when the wine began to heat them in good earnest and they had to give completely free rein to sensuality, they sent them back to their private rooms, so as not to make them participants in their immoderate appetites, and sent for other women in their place, to whom they did not have this obligation of respect.*
Sewers are necessary to guarantee the sanitation of palaces, said the Church Fathers. And Mandeville, in a very popular book, said: “It is obvious that some women must be sacrificed to save others and to prevent an even more abject filth.” One of the arguments of American slaveholders and defenders of slavery is that, released from slavish drudgery, Southern whites could establish the most democratic and refined relations with each other; likewise, the existence of a caste of “lost women” makes it possible to treat “the virtuous woman” with the most chivalric respect. The prostitute is a scapegoat; man unloads his turpitude onto her, and he repudiates her. Whether a legal status puts her under police surveillance or she works clandestinely, she is in any case treated as a pariah.
From the economic point of view, her situation is symmetrical to the married woman’s. “Between those who sell themselves through prostitution and those who sell themselves through marriage, the only difference resides in the price and length of the contract,” says Marro.2
For both, the sexual act is a service; the latter is engaged for life by one man; the former has several clients who pay her per item. One male against all the others protects the former; the latter is defended by all against the exclusive tyranny of each one. In any case, the advantages they derive from giving their bodies are limited by competition; the husband knows he could have had another wife: the accomplishment of his “conjugal duties” is not a favor; it is the execution of a contract. In prostitution, masculine desire can be satisfied on any body as it is specific and not individual. Wives or courtesans do not succeed in exploiting man unless they wield a singular power over him. The main difference between them is that the legitimate woman, oppressed as a married woman, is respected as a human person; this respect begins seriously to bring a halt to oppression. However, the prostitute does not have the rights of a person; she is the sum of all types of feminine slavery at once.
It is naive to wonder what motives drive a woman to prostitution; Lombroso’s theory that assimilated prostitutes with criminals and that saw them both as degenerates is no longer accepted; it is possible, as the statistics show, that in general prostitutes have a slightly below-average mental level and that some are clearly retarded: women with fewer mental faculties readily choose jobs that do not demand of them any specialization; but most are normal and some very intelligent. No hereditary fate, no physiological defect, weighs on them. In reality, as soon as a profession opens in a world where misery and unemployment are rife, there are people to enter it; as long as there are police and prostitution, there will be policemen and prostitutes. Especially because these professions are, on average, more lucrative than many others. It is very hypocritical to be surprised by the supply masculine demand creates; this is a rudimentary and universal economic process. “Of all the causes of prostitution,” wrote Parent-Duchâtelet in his study in 1857, “none is more active than the lack of work and the misery that is the inevitable consequence of inadequate salaries.”* Right-thinking moralists respond sneeringly that the pitiful accounts of prostitutes are just stories for the naive client. It is true that in many cases a prostitute could earn her living in a different way: that the living she has chosen does not seem the worst to her does not prove she has this vice in her blood; rather, it condemns a society where this profession is still one that seems the least repellent to many women. One asks, why did she choose it? The question should be: Why should she not choose it? It has been noted that, among other things, many “girls” were once servants; this is what Parent-Duchâtelet established for all countries, what Lily Braun noted in Germany and Ryckère in Belgium. About 50 percent of prostitutes were first servants. One look at “maids’ rooms” is enough to explain this fact. Exploited, enslaved, treated as an object rather than as a person, the maid or chambermaid cannot look forward to any improvement of her lot; sometimes she has to submit to the whims of the master of the house: from domestic slavery and sexual subordination to the master, she slides into a slavery that could not be more degrading and that she dreams will be better. In addition, women in domestic
service are very often uprooted; it is estimated that 80 percent of Parisian prostitutes come from the provinces or the countryside. Proximity to one’s family and concern for one’s reputation are thought to prevent a woman from turning to a generally discredited profession; but if she is lost in a big city, no longer integrated into society, the abstract idea of “morality” does not provide any obstacle. While the bourgeoisie invests the sexual act—and above all virginity—with daunting taboos, the working class and peasantry treat it with indifference. Numerous studies agree on this point: many girls let themselves be deflowered by the first comer and then find it natural to give themselves to anyone who comes along. In a study of one hundred prostitutes, Dr. Bizard recorded the following facts: one had been deflowered at eleven, two at twelve, two at thirteen, six at fourteen, seven at fifteen, twenty-one at sixteen, nineteen at seventeen, seventeen at eighteen, six at nineteen; the others, after twenty-one. There were thus 5 percent who had been raped before puberty. More than half said they gave themselves out of love; the others consented out of ignorance. The first seducer is often young. Usually it is someone from the workshop, an office colleague, a childhood friend; then come soldiers, foremen, valets, and students; Dr. Bizard’s list also included two lawyers, an architect, a doctor, and a pharmacist. It is rather rare, as legend has it, for the employer himself to play this initiating role: but often it is his son or nephew or one of his friends. Commenge, in his study, also reports on forty-five girls from twelve to seventeen who were deflowered by strangers whom they never saw again; they had consented with indifference, and without experiencing pleasure. Dr. Bizard recorded the following, more detailed cases, among others:
Mlle G. de Bordeaux, leaving the convent at eighteen, is persuaded, out of curiosity and without thinking of any danger, to follow a stranger from the fair into his caravan, where she is deflowered.
Without thinking, a thirteen-year-old child gives herself to a man she has met in the street, whom she does not know and whom she will never see again.
M.… tells us explicitly that she was deflowered at seventeen by a young man she did not know … she let it happen out of total ignorance.
R.…, deflowered at seventeen and a half by a young man she had never seen whom she had met by chance at the doctor’s, where she had gone to get the doctor for her sick sister; he brought her back by car so that she could get home more quickly, but in fact he left her in the middle of the street after getting what he wanted from her.
B.… deflowered at fifteen and a half “without thinking about what she was doing,” in our client’s words, by a young man she never saw again; nine months later, she gave birth to a healthy boy.
S.…, deflowered at fourteen by a young man who drew her to his house under the pretext that he wanted her to meet his sister. The young man in reality did not have a sister, but he had syphilis and contaminated the girl.
R.… deflowered at eighteen in an old trench from the front by a married cousin with whom she was visiting the battlefields; he got her pregnant and made her leave her family.
C.… at seventeen, deflowered on the beach one summer evening by a young man whom she had just met at the hotel and at a hundred meters from their two mothers, who were talking about trifles. Contaminated with gonorrhea.
L.… deflowered at thirteen by her uncle while listening to the radio at the same time as her aunt, who liked to go to bed early, was sleeping quietly in the next room.*
We can be sure that these girls who gave in passively nevertheless suffered the trauma of defloration; one would like to know what psychological influence this brutal experience had on their future; but “girls” are not psychoanalyzed, they are inarticulate in describing themselves and take refuge behind clichés. For some, the facility of giving themselves to the first comer can be explained by the existence of prostitution fantasies about which we have spoken: out of family resentment, horror of their budding sexuality, the desire to act grown-up, some young girls imitate prostitutes; they use harsh makeup, see boys, act flirtatiously and provocatively; they who are still infantile, asexual, and cold think they can play with fire with impunity; one day a man takes them at their word, and they slip from dreams to acts.
“When a door has been broken open, it is then hard to keep it closed,” said one fourteen-year-old prostitute.3
However, the girl rarely decides to be a streetwalker immediately following her defloration. In some cases, she remains attached to her first lover and continues to live with him; she takes an “honest” job; when the lover abandons her, another consoles her; since she no longer belongs to one man, she decides she can give herself to all; sometimes it is the lover—the first, the second—who suggests this means of earning money. There are also many girls who are prostituted by their parents: in some families, like the famous American family the Jukes, all the women are doomed to this job. Among young female vagabonds, there are also many girls abandoned by their families who begin by begging and slip from there to the streets. In 1857, out of 5,000 prostitutes, Parent-Duchâtelet found that 1,441 were influenced by poverty, 1,425 seduced and abandoned, 1,255 abandoned and left penniless by their parents.* Contemporary studies suggest approximately the same conclusions. Illness often leads to prostitution as the woman has become unable to hold down a real job or has lost her place; it destroys her precarious budget, it forces the woman to come up with new resources quickly. So it is with the birth of a child. More than half the women of Saint-Lazare had at least one child; many raised from three to six children; Dr. Bizard points out one who brought fourteen into the world, of whom eight were still living when he knew her. Few of them, he says, abandon their children; and sometimes the unwed mother becomes a prostitute in order to feed the child. He cites this case, among others:
Deflowered in the provinces, at nineteen, by a sixty-year-old director while she was still living at home, she had to leave her family, as she was pregnant, and she gave birth to a healthy girl that she brought up well. After nursing, she went to Paris, found a job as a nanny, and began to carouse at the age of twenty-nine. She has been a prostitute for thirty-three years. Weak and exhausted, she is now asking to be hospitalized in Saint-Lazare.
It is well-known that there is an increase of prostitution in wars and the crises of their aftermath.
The author of The Life of a Prostitute, published in part in Les Temps Modernes,4 tells of her beginnings:
I got married at sixteen to a man thirteen years older than I. I did it to get out of my parents’ house. My husband only thought of making me have kids. “Like that, you’ll stay at home, you won’t go out,” he said. He wouldn’t let me wear makeup, didn’t want to take me to the movies. I had to stand my mother-in-law, who came to the house every day and always took the side of her bastardly son. My first child was a boy, Jacques; fourteen months later, I gave birth to another, Pierre … As I was very bored, I took courses in nursing, which I liked a lot … I got work at a hospital on the outskirts of Paris, working with women. A nurse who was just a girl taught me things I hadn’t known about before. Sleeping with my husband was mostly a chore. As for men, I didn’t have a fling with anyone for six months. Then one day, a real tough guy, a cad but good-looking, came into my own room. He convinced me I could change my life, that I could go with him to Paris, that I wouldn’t work anymore … He knew how to fool me … I decided to go off with him … I was really happy for a month … One day he brought along a well-dressed, chic woman, saying: “So here, this one does all right for herself.” At the beginning, I didn’t go along with it. I even found a job as a nurse in a local hospital to show him that I didn’t want to walk the streets, but I couldn’t carry on for long. He would say: “You don’t love me. When you love a man, you work for him.” I cried. At the hospital, I was sad. Finally, I was persuaded to go to the hairdresser’s … I began to turn tricks! Julot followed me to see if I was doing well and to be able to warn me if the cops were onto me.*
In some ways, this story is the classic
one of the girl doomed to the street by a pimp. This role might also be played by the husband. And sometimes, by a woman as well. L. Faivre made a study in 1931 of 510 young prostitutes; he found that 284 of them lived alone, 132 with a male friend, and 94 with a female friend with whom they usually had homosexual ties.5 He cites (with their spelling)* extracts of the following letters:
Suzanne, seventeen. I gave myself to prostitution, especially with women prostitutes. One of them who kept me for a long time was very jealous, and so I left that street.
Andrée, fifteen and a half. I left my parents to live with a friend I met at a dance, I understood right away that she wanted to love me like a man, I stayed with her four months, then …
Jeanne, fourteen. My poor sweet papa’s name was X.… he died in the hospital from war wounds in 1922. My mother got married again. I was going to school to get my primary school diploma, then having got it, I went to study sewing … then as I earned very little, the fights with my stepfather began … I had to be placed as a maid at Mme X.’s, on X. street … I was alone with a girl who was probably twenty-five for about ten days; I noticed a very big change in her. Then one day, just like a boy, she admitted her great love. I hesitated, then afraid of being let go, I finally gave in; I understood then certain things … I worked, then finding myself without a job, I had to go to the Bois, where I continued with women. I met a very generous lady, and so forth.
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