Almost a century ago, Georg Simmel drafted an essay in 1907 on “Prostitution”
that combines the central themes of the two major oppositions against prostitution: male
domination (feminist) and alienation (Marxist). Simmel’s writing is to be distinguished
from the conservative moralists who consider prostitutes to be immoral plagues of
society; rather, he sympathizes with prostitutes as powerless, alienated victims in a male-
dominated market economy. To Simmel, prostitution negates the Kantian principle that
man should never be treated as means but only as ends by reducing two individuals “to
the status of mere means.”
He wrote, “the nadir of human dignity is reached when what
is most intimate and personal for a woman … is offered for such thoroughly impersonal,
externally objective remuneration.”
The market exchange in prostitution works only to
the prostitute’s indignity and humiliation because in the sensual act, “the man contributes
only a minimal part of himself, but the woman her entire self.” The men never interact
with her “as real and whole persons,” and she “must feel a terrible loneliness and
dissatisfaction,” resulting in her, according to Simmel, turning to pimps and lesbianism.
To Simmel, prostitution takes away what is the most intimate and sensuous from a
woman (but not that of men), reducing her to a non-person who is alienated from all men
by instrumentalizing her as the object of men’s sexual outlet. Moreover, Simmel argued:
“the key feature of prostitution is not polyandry, but polygyny.” That is, the advantage of
the buyer (client) over the seller (prostitute) in the sexual exchange economy means that
prostitution is not defined by a woman’s availability to many men but in a man’s sexual
access to many women. Polygyny “diminishes uniqueness of a woman; she has lost the
Prostitution thus reinforces men’s domination and women’s
degradation.
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Convention