both there is no hum anity for women. The brothel model has been
efficient. It uses the women in it until they are used up. Men get
sex from them with a graceful economy of means: effective force;
hunger, degradation, drugs; rare escape. The woman is easily reduced to what she sells. Women under the yoke of the brothel model do not organize political movements; they do not rebel collectively; the yoke is too heavy. Quite sim ply, a percentage of the class women is given over to the brothel model; whatever its laws,
societies accept this disposition of a significant number of females
for sex service. Once within that model, these women are controlled and used; what men want from them they get; their bodies go where their sex is wanted; there is an absolute equation between
what they are and what they provide, between their physical
bodies and their function, between their sex and their work. There
is no wasted energy here: a prostituted female serves her purpose
absolutely. The farming model has always been relatively ineffi
cient. It is sloppier. Picking a woman who lives in the home with
the man on a continuing basis is harder. Picking a woman who can
and will have children is harder. There is more leeway for her
attitudes to interfere. She has ways of saying no or subverting male
sexual and reproductive intentions. The brothel model simply requires that the women under it be women: it does not matter who they are or what they are like or where they come from or what
they think; they get worn down fast by being used the same way
and being reduced to the same common denominator; nothing is
necessary except that they be female. The farming model requires
the constant application of force (explicit or implicit, usually a nice
combination), incentive, reward; and a lot of plain luck with respect to fertility and reproductive vigor. When a man wants sons, as most do, the inefficiency inherent in the model is particularly
emphasized: no matter how many babies she has, there is no certainty that any of them will be male. And, for all the coercion of the farming model, the women subject to it have organized politically, have found ways to seize the time between babies and domestic chores—here and there, now and then—to foment some rebellion. The very fact that such women have been involved in
movements, especially feminist movements, argues for the inefficiency of the farming model. The farming model has haphazard success: there are too many factors besides the efficacy of the fuck
that can interfere with the harvesting of the crop. The quality of
the crop cannot really be predetermined either. Men, recognizing
the inefficiency of the farming model, have simply imposed it on
all women not prostituted so as not to miss a chance: they use
social and economic sanctions to punish women who try to live
outside it, especially so-called spinsters and lesbians. To anticipate
and counterbalance the failures, the losses, the tremendous element
of chance, the bad breaks, the power of men as a class has been
exercised to keep all women not prostitutes reproducing under the
explicit domination of a husband. This has been the best way men
have had to control reproduction, to appropriate the uteruses of
women in order to have children, to keep the women subject to the
reproductive w ill of the men. The use of women by men in this
reproductive tyranny has been presented as what women are for: a
proper use of females, the best actualization of their human potential because, after all, they are women.
Reproductive technology is now changing the terms on which
men control reproduction. The social control of women who reproduce— the sloppy, messy kind of control— is being replaced by medical control much more precise, much closer to the efficiency
