vice

Why is sex for money between consenting adults a criminal act? Allegedly, this is not a "victimless crime", given the demographic background of women involved (no mention of male prostitution is made). The arguments for criminalization are that women are victimized whether they consent or not, sex trafficking is a growth industry, health risks increase for prostitutes, and other forms of illegality circle around prostitution. Experiments in legalization apparently have had mixed results. What seems to work best in combating prostitution, according to Nicholas Kristof, is the arrest and prosecution of customers.

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But these policy concerns beg the question of why sex is dangerous when it is bartered, so that its sale must be proscribed, hemmed in, driven underground, and turned into a stigma. The only sufficient answer comes from Freud, who argues that civilization only exists to the extent that sexual instincts, both constructive and destructive, are repressed, sublimated, rendered socially useful. Hence, Freud's narrative of the primal horde, the monopolization of pleasure by the Father, the original patricide, and the subsequent denial of access to women among the bloody band of brothers. But the Father who enjoys pleasure (le pere jouissance) also denies pleasure to Others (ala Zizek/Lacan), and this denial rather than enjoyment becomes the hallmark of civilization and created the conditions of possibility for psychoanalysis: the generation of an unconscious as the psychical vessel of the repressed, the creation of moral rules that are opposed to human needs, and the subsequent neurotic afflictions that arise under the pressure of morality.

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The tale of the primal horde is a myth of origins (of civilization). Freud's textual account of this myth, in Totem and Taboo, is mythological (or mythopoetic/mythopsychoanalytic): it functions as a screen memory for a hypothetically real event that is, in reality, a necessary fantasy. It is "necessary" as a historical point of departure for that which is ahistorical (the Unconscious; the general, structural Unconscious which is not to be confused with the particular unconscious). The elements of Freud's myth/fantasy/dream memory are comprised of the objects that interact in the formation of the Superego (in the male child at least). Freud takes what occurs in the unconscious past of each individual and places it in the unconscious past of civilization, the infantile stage of human society. The original denied object of pleasure, the mother, is transformed into a taboo on all familiar women. Why is this necessary? Because sex is analytically linked to power (to the Father); it is dangerous to possess (for the one whose monopoly on sex led to his demise), impossible to hold (for the brothers, who are confronted by an ever renewed war of all against all), and better kept under control (for the individual, who must submit to the Father anyway). On this account, sex is never between individuals, it is between subjects of social and psychical compulsion. Fear of pleasure, which I will conjecture owes significantly to the rise of monotheism, makes all sex dangerous; the adding of monetary value to it doubles the pleasure and the danger.

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art object credit: Anthony Frederick Augustus Sandys, Mary Magdalene, 1860