among men; but even men are not so dense as to try to romanticize
prostitution to the prostitute.
In the brothel model, the women are held to a strictly sexual
standard of behavior and accountability: they sell themselves for
sex, not to make babies. T hey do what men want them to do for
money that men pay them and that then they usually turn over to a
man. Women are defined strictly with reference to sex and they are
defined unfailingly without reference to personality or individuality or human potential; they are used without reference to anything but sex orifices and sex class and sex scenes. In the brothel model, several women belong to one man or in some cases are supervised by an older woman who is herself accountable to a rich man or men. The job of the women is to bring in— to a man or to a
house— a certain amount of money by servicing a certain number
of men. T hey sell parts of their bodies— vagina, rectum, mouth;
and they also sell acts— what they say and what they do. In
sex, they absorb, endure, or get indifferent toward an enormous
amount of male aggression, hostility, and contempt. Men have few
restraints in expressing to prostitutes—during sex or in any sexual
scenario— their real attitudes toward women as a class; they have
no reason to feel constrained, since the woman is there to be a
woman, period— to be inferior, subservient, and used. She is there
because the man wants a woman, someone exactly of her class,
someone who is her sex function, not human but an it, a cunt: she
is there for that reason, not for anything human in her. Her func
tion is limited, specialized, sex-specific, and intensely and intrinsically dehumanizing.
It is essential to recognize how genuinely accepted both the
brothel model and prostitution are in the social structure, and how
this disposition of women is simply accepted as inevitable because
they are women. However evil prostitution is held to be, however
righteous or religious men are said to be, the brothel model does
more than endure; it thrives. However marginal the women are
said to be, they form the sex nucleus of a sex industry that is in no
sense marginal. The brothel model thrives because men accept it
and all that is part of it as proper treatment for sexual women:
women who are sexual in male terms, women who get fucked by
many men, women who get fucked outside the protective custody
of a traditional father or husband. The staying power of both the
brothel as an institution and prostitution as a practice comes from
the efficacy of both for regulating the sexual use of women and the
disposition of sexually exploitable women. Think of what it means.
The brothel is most often something like a prison—women cannot
come and go freely. Women are displayed, used, and treated like
sexual things or sexual animals, all penned up. The brothel exists
usually with the tacit or overt protection of police and politicians;
the brothel is used by the rich and powerful as well as by all other
kinds of men; the brothel is the kind of place men like to have
women in, confined in, locked in, penned in, shut in; the brothel
suggests a wealth of women available to the man, it means he is
rich in having so many women in one place for him, it means he
chooses absolutely and his will is done by whomever he chooses.
