Who are the real prostitutes?

First it should be pointed out that there are many types of prostitution, perhaps as many as there are men and women on Earth. Prostitution is a human phenomenon: animals don’t prostitute themselves, but human beings do. Throughout our history we have done nothing but construct a culture of prostitution for ourselves. Our social equilibrium is built on these foundations.

People prostitute themselves everywhere and in a million ways: prostitution occurs in the family, at work, at school, on markets, in factories, on holiday, on the road, in politics, in religious systems, in company systems, in the army, in every kind of business, in every area of society. The saying that best describes the concept of prostitution is: the strong lie with the weak, the weak with the strong. Having to submit in one way or another to those who are stronger, more cunning or more cruel lies at the heart of prostitution and of civilization itself.

In the field of female prostitution we have enriched the language with terms such as whores, streetwalkers, tarts, sluts, harlots, hookers, hustlers, women of the streets, scrubbers, strumpets, call girls, trollops, courtesans, cocottes, masseuses, just to mention a few. And why? Why this long list of names to describe the same person, the prostitute? Because in fact we are all sexually repressed, all greedy for sex, all in search of this precious carnal sensation. Males go around with roving eyes and an erect penis on their foreheads and drooling females long to suck it for them. If only they did! But no, everything is repressed and much squeezing, fiddling and masturbating goes on in both camps.

So in a world whose systems are built on prostitution, who are the real prostitutes ? Certainly not those that are commonly known as prostitutes. Absolutely not. At least 99 per cent of the women we call prostitutes are not prostitutes at all. They are women who, if they want to survive and keep their families alive, are obliged to prostitute themselves, debase themselves, and they have to do so because this is what has been decided for them.

However, if these women had been able to choose between prostitution and an honourable life, which would they have chosen? If they had been able to find a respectable job, if they had been able to earn a piece of bread by doing any other job than prostitution, would they have then gone to walk the streets? Would they have thrown themselves into the arms of strangers for the sake of some cash? Would they have chosen the life of the brothel ? Would they have given the most intimate, most feminine , most important part of their lives to people they don’t know and don’t love, but who, most of the time, fill them with disgust? Would they have given themselves to men who, for all they know, might be depraved and brutal?

So who then, and this is the crux of the matter, who drives prostitutes to be prostitutes ? Who makes them leave their homes by night and by day and venture into ugly, squalid, lonely, dark, cold, rainy, ghastly places? Who makes them be prostitutes at home, in porn films, in hotels, in cars, wherever they can? Who makes them stand at the side of the road displaying bodies that might be beautiful or ugly, tired and fed up, battered and sore, humiliated and suffering, just to attract hypothetical clients? Who so cruelly makes them set out on such an atrocious road to ruin? Makes them give their bodies to potential sex maniacs? Expose themselves to the infectious diseases that often come with the job? Go home half dead, despised  by all, with a headache and who knows what else? Who? Who makes them go through all this physical and mental torment?

We must be very naïve or stupid, nasty and despicable to think that it is the pimps, procurers, exploiters ,protectors, ponces, or whatever you want to call them, who are responsible for this, for it isn’t them. They are only links in the same sad depressing social chain. So it’s obvious who it is and in fact we all know who it is. It is our disgraceful social laws, our dear capitalist society and, above all, it is the State, the predatory state. This is the driving force that pushes honest women into prostitution, the reason why they are thrust into society’s inferno, just in order to survive.

But it is not these women, who are forced into prostitution by the State and society, who are the real prostitutes. The “ real prostitutes” are the State and society. The first legislates and tolerates, the second lets the State carry on with its criminal and evil ways; the first, without the social brothel would fall to pieces; the second, a depressed and death-fearing society ,needs prostitutes in order to relieve its frustrations and make its miserable insignificant existence more tolerable.

The prostitute, the one that social laws force to be a prostitute, does not do it for pleasure ( let’s leave out the nymphomaniacs, sexually insatiable women, and the ones that make the penis their lord and master) but she does it out of desperation, poverty, to stay alive. These women totally destroy their lives ( rarely can a woman who has been a prostitute rebuild a respectable life) thanks to an inhuman, brutal and abject society, but especially thanks to a State that is fundamentally irresponsible, indifferent, immoral, merciless, in short a monster, a state that beyond protecting its backside and its booty sees and hears nothing.

When I’m driving home from work on a horrid, cold ,dark and rainy night and I see a poor woman beside the road, numb with cold, all alone, all wrapped up in her painful existence, I realize what an unfair and grotesque world we live in; I realize how much I would have preferred to be born, if I had to be born, anything except a human.

Anyway, as I see it, the real prostitutes are not those that we commonly call prostitutes, but the ones who give themselves to despicable men in order to get on in their careers, to be promoted, to get a job, to pass an exam, to have a comfortable life, and for a host of other reasons. And then there are those who prostitute themselves out of duty (see Paolo Sorcinelli’s book “Avventure del corpo”, pages 155-156).That is, all those wives, partners or companions who give themselves to their husbands or their men even if they don’t love them, even if they hate them, even if they don’t respect them, even if their men hit them, are disgusted with them, even if they cheat on them and hate them. They are the pits, the real social disgrace. They are the real prostitutes.

And so we find couples and legally married husbands and wives, with a licence granted by the State and the Church, joined in the most degrading and scandalous of social relationships and not for love but because duty demands it of them! That is the real prostitution.

So, when we talk about prostitutes, let’s be careful, please, let’s be careful not to confuse honest and respectable women with real, genuine prostitutes.

Translated from the Italian by Madeleine Clark