Tao Te Ching
Guido Parmiggiani
Prostitution
Why is prostitution almost universally considered "the world's oldest profession?" Why was it reviled and disavowed in some places and times; valued and revered in other cultural contexts and historic periods? And how far do we dare go expanding the definition of a prostitute? For example, could it include both the woman who sells her body for money and the woman who sells her body for a wedding ring; the man who sells his labor—the best years of his life doing what he hates instead of what he loves—for a fancy car, stock market portfolio, and retirement plan?
The differing, biological mandates between the sexes gave women the opportunity to compensate for the male's more common bigger size and strength. In ancient Greece, prostitution became a doorway to freedom, a liberation from the strictures of traditional family life and the highly defined and narrow female role boundaries. The prostitute Aspasia, became knows as "the female Socrates" and became a dramatic influence on Greek politics, philosophy and culture. Influential Athenians even brought their wives to hear her. Prostitution freed women like this from the narrow social roles of their time, permitted more education, and activity outsidae the home—they became the beginning of women's journey toward equality.
In Japan, in the beginning of the 17th century, both male and female prostitution was accepted and widespread. The Tokugawa shogunate—worrying that these popular gathering places would foster political opposition—created official red-light districts that—although burned down, rebuilt, and relocated many times—continued as some of the most popular gathering places and still thrive today.
Although prostitution at times enabled many poor but accomplished women to begin the "women's liberation" path toward equality; the price was high—many lived lives of virtual slavery or indentured servitude; many died from sexually transmitted diseases or failed abortions.
Quotes (56)
“In this was every art, and every charm,
To win the wisest, and the coldest warm:
Fond love, the gentle vow, the gay desire,
The kind deceit, the still reviving fire,
Persuasive speech, and more persuasive sighs,
Silence that spoke, and eloquence of eyes.”
“Every woman born in the country must once in her life go and sit down in the precinct of Venus [Mylitta], and there consort with a stranger…. A woman who has once taken her seat is not allowed to return home till one of the strangers throws a silver coin into her lap, and takes her with him beyond the holy ground…. The silver coin may be of any size….” 
“The woman was dressed in purple and scarlet, and covered with gold ornaments, precious stones, and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and uncleanness of her whoredom. The name written on her forehead was a mystery: babylon the great the mother of prostitutes and of the abominations of the earth.”
“The maiden girl carries her gold as ornaments on her body. Her aim is to attract a gigolo... planning to make her cunt and its coverings common property... The mind of a girl and that of a pig are the same: one will wiggle their ass in front of a boy and the other in front of food.”
“Nor should she deem herself other than venal who weds a rich man rather than a poor, and desires more things in her husband than himself. Assuredly, whomsoever this concupiscence leads into marriage deserves payment rather than affection.”
“She who weds a rich man rather than a poor and desires more things in her husband than he does himself, deserves payment rather than love.”
“She'd been respectable throughout her life,
With five churched husbands bringing joy and strife,
Not counting other company in youth;
But thereof there's no need to speak, in truth.”
“Since I have no mind and no body, I am at home both in the mountains and in the floating world.”
“Good friends of the Dharma, so proud,
But a brothel girl in gold brocade has you beat by a mile.”
“Once a woman parts with her virtue, she loses the esteem even of the man whose vows and tears won her to abandon it.”
“The Buddha sells the doctrine;
The patriarchs sell the Buddha;
She sells her body — That the passions of all beings may be quieted.
Form is emptiness, the passions are enlightenment.”
“expelled without a penny and obliged to continue the abominable occupation which to you men seems so amusing and which to us in nothing but an abyss of misery... Ah! sir, if you could imagine what it is to be forced to caress impartially an old tradesman, a lawyer, a monk, a gondolier, an abbé; to be exposed to every insult and outrage; to be reduced often to borrow a petticoat in order to go and find some disgusting man who will lift it...”
“It is one of the superstitions of mankind to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue.”
“The desire of a man for a woman is not directed at her because she is a human being but because she is a woman. That she is a human being is of no concern to him.”
“Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion.”
“The Harlot’s cry from street to Street
Shall weave Old England’s winding Sheet”
“In London alone there are 80,000 prostitutes... filles de joie, whose lives are as destitute of joy as of honor... human sacrifices offered up on the altar of monogamy... the inevitable set-off to the European lady with here arrogance and pretension.”
“Death is as unexpected in his caprice as a courtesan in her disdain; but death is truer – Death has never forsaken any man”
“The magnet embraces the iron, the animals come together by the difference of sex... Man alone speaks with distrust, irony, and shame of the miracle which takes place simultaneously in his soul and his body. This separation of the spirit from the flesh has necesssitated convents and brothels.”
“almost all civilized nations still retain some traces of such rude habits as the forcible capture of wives. What ancient nation can be named that was originally monogamous?”
“That girls should not marry for money we are all agreed. A lady who can sell herself for a title or an estate, for an income or a set of family diamonds, treats herself as a farmer treats his sheep and oxen — makes hardly more of herself, of her own inner self, in which are comprised a mind and soul, than the poor wretch of her own sex who earns her bread in the lowest stage of degradation.”
“Our bourgeois, not content with having the wives and daughters of their proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other's wives.”
“Marriage is so unlike everything else. There is something even awful in the nearness it brings. Even if we loved someone else better than—better than those we were married to, it would be no use... marriage drinks up all our power of giving or getting any blessedness in that sort of love... it may very dear, but it murders our marriage, and then the marriage stays with us like a murder, and everything else is gone”
“Singing the Song of prostitutes... Singing the song of procreation... singing what, to the soul, entirely redeem'd her, the faithful one, even the prostitute, who detain'd me when I went to the city”
“Prostitution degrades, among women, only the unfortunate ones to whose lot it falls, and even these not at all to the extent that is commonly believed. On the other hand, it degrades the character of the whole world of men.”
“The community of women is a condition which belongs entirely to bourgeois society and which today finds its complete expression in prostitution. But prostitution is based on private property and falls with it. Thus, communist society, instead of introducing community of women, in fact abolishes it.”
“Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love; it is the faithless who know love's tragedies.”
“I have known more men destroyed by the desire to have wife and child and to keep them in comfort than I have seen destroyed by drink and harlots.”
“If prostitutes themselves attract us so little, it is not because they are less beautiful than other women, but because they are ready and waiting; because they already offer us precisely what we seek to attain; it is because they are not conquests.”
“The charms of the passing woman are usually in direct ratio to the speed of her passing.”
“Prostitution has been perennial and universal, from the state-regulated brothels of Assyria to the 'night clubs' of West-European and American cities today.”
“Man is secretly and ravenously polygamous... and yet the earlier the love, the fresher and deeper it must be; no man can love after 30 with the ardor and self-abandonment of youth... if we could find a way to restore marriage to its natural age, we should at one stroke reduce by half the prostitution, the venereal disease, the fruitless celibacy, the morbid chastity, and the experimental perversions that stigmatize our contemporary life.”
“In evolutionary theory, those organisms that felt the strongest urge to mingle their seed bred most abundantly, so that, in the course of the generations, the sexual instinct grew to an intensity surpassed only in the quest for food... Nature is mad about reproduction and makes the individual a tool and moment in the continuance of the species.”
“Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and the beholder.”
“The shaman's relation with the Spirit is represented as a kind of love-affair. One is, of course, vaguely reminded of temple prostitutes in the Near East, and of devadasi and Krishna's relations with the adoring cow-girls in India.”
“Most young men who keep themselves strictly chase find themselves visited by sexual fantasies and torturing longings which are worse for them than occasional visits to the flower-houses.”
“The culture of Victorian England—a culture of the most elegant lasciviousness—offers a striking example of this religious prurience. Extreme modesty and prudishness in the home so heightened the fascination of sex that prostitution, even for the upper classes, flourished.”
“Incompetent amateurs have given prostitution a bad name... the feminist analysis of prostitution says that men are using money as power over women. I'd say, yes, that's all that men have. The money is a confession of weakness. They have to buy women's attention. It's not a sign of power; it's a sign of weakness.”
“Francis Bacon kept the famine imagery but turned it to rather different ends. He described nature as a 'common harlot' who needed to be 'tortured' in order to make her yield her secrets.”
“An interesting feature of Buddhism is that courtesans are recorded as faithfully observing all the precepts – evidently because their occupation was an accepted one, their professional behavior was not classified as sexual misconduct.”
“one way to ensure that male infidelity doesn't lead to desertion is to confine it to, well, whores... few Victorian men sat at the breakfast table daydreaming about leaving their wives for the prostitute they had enjoyed the night before.”
“When struck by the desire arrow, all our common sense… go out the window, we… might even find a streetwalking hippopotamus sexy, even as a beautiful girl loyally waits at home.”
“Even from a prostitute and a hunter’s mouth, if what is coming out is something to do with compassion and wisdom then why not take it?”
“My choice early in life was either to be a piano-player in a whorehouse or a politician. And to tell the truth there's hardly any difference.”
“Sex workers are the original feminists. Often seen as merely subject to others' whims, in fact, sex workers have shaped and contributed to social movements across the world.”
“Half the world regulates sex work by criminalizing everyone involved. But if you’re forced to choose between obeying the law and feeding yourself or your family, you’re going to do the work anyway, and take the risk... The law forces you to keep selling sex, which is the exact opposite of its intended effect... prohibiting the sex industry actually exacerbates every harm that sex workers are vulnerable to.”
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