Prostitution, as I stated in a previous chapter is one of the results of the overthrowing of sex by the ego. The craving for food and power triumphs over all the sexual cravings and compels one individual to pursue apparently sexual goals which are no longer sexual as far as that individual is concerned. The female prostitute lends her sexual organs to many men for money (food, power), not for her own gratification or to reproduce her species. That phenomenon is very complex and cannot be dealt with in detail within the limits of this book. I shall confine myself to pointing out some of the psychological problems which have to be elucidated before the causes, nature and results of prostitution can be clearly understood.
Economic Factors. Certain radicals simplify a little too much the problem of prostitution by considering it solely as a by-product of the competitive system which would disappear as soon as a more[Pg 105] equitable system of production and distribution was introduced into the modern world.
No one can deny that under our social system, woman, burdened as she is, by many physical and social handicaps, is easily driven to the wall in times of stress and compelled to sell her body. Nor is there any doubt that under a system assuring every one a livelihood, regardless of business conditions, many women would be saved from adopting such a disgusting form of labor.
At the same time, the radical interpretation fails to explain why, when submitted to a practically identical pressure, some women do not become prostitutes but either kill themselves or beg or steal.
Lombroso's Theory. Very unsatisfactory also is Lombroso's attitude to prostitution.
He finds a constant coincidence between prostitution and crime and states that the female offender is a prostitute, one of the varieties of the "reo nato," of the born criminal.
The female offender is not always a prostitute and modern research makes the theory of "congenital criminality" untenable.
Kurt Schneider in his exhaustive study of seventy prostitutes brings out interesting details of their[Pg 106] biography which throw a clearer light upon the psychology of prostitution.
There were certain characteristics which all of those seventy women exhibited. They were all unwilling to work. They all were very grasping, altho, at the same time, very extravagant spenders when it came to personal adornment. Eroticism seemed to play a very insignificant part in their choice of a livelihood. Most of them were frigid, many homosexual, the majority of them sadistic.
Fifteen of them had been punished for larceny (money and clothes).
Many of them kept a pimp or cadet.
Most of them were unhappy, dissatisfied types.
All of them were greatly attached to children.
Many of them were drunkards.
One half of them were weak minded.
Seven per cent of them had been brought up in institutions.
We have there a striking picture of inferiority. An endocrinological examination of those unfortunates, similar to those which have been conducted recently at St. Elizabeth Hospital, Washington, D. C., would have probably revealed back of their unwillingness to work and of their thirst for money, weak thyroids and poor adrenals, not to mention[Pg 107] unbalanced pituitary glands. The fires of the body burnt slow in them, producing and consuming little energy, a condition which, causing an obscure unconscious fear of the future, compelled those women to seek easy ways of gathering money, the only protection they could think of. Their inferiority complex revealed itself in their craving for personal adornment, to which they sacrificed their protective earnings.
Sensuality. All the rant of the purity prophets to the contrary notwithstanding, it is not sensuality which "lures" women into a "life of shame."
If the prostitute sought in her means of livelihood mere gratification of "vicious" instincts, why would she so often submit to the whims of a pimp who despoils her of her earnings. The prostitute hates the men who can compel her thru their financial superiority to submit to their sexual desires. The pimp, whom she keeps and who depends upon her bounty, is her inferior and the more she degrades him, the less she feels her own degradation.
The prostitute, like all inferiors, is dissatisfied, but so a............