perspective, the two conditions overlap and intersect, each reinforcing the efficacy of the other. Any woman can be both a prostitute and a mother, a prostitute and a wife (a potential mother), or one then the other in either order; and any woman can be subject
to the imperatives of both the brothel and the farming models of
female usage. On a grand scale, more women become mothers,
fewer prostitutes.
In general, the euphemisms of religion and romantic love keep
women from ever recognizing the farming model as having to do
directly and personally with them. Modern women do not think of
themselves as cows, nor as land that the man seeds; but maleheaded marriage incorporates both these vivid traditions of female definition; and the laws have been built on these same images and
ideas of what women are for; and the real history of women has
had as its center the actual use of women as cows and as land. The
w ay women are treated, valued, and used has remarkably little in
common with how women perceive themselves. The legend says
that vampires cannot see themselves in mirrors, but in this case the
vampires’ victims cannot see themselves: what would stare back—
the cow, the land, the uterus, the crop, the plowing, the planting,
the harvest, being put out to pasture, going d ry — would annihilate
the delusion of individuality that keeps most women going. The
laws that made women chattel derived from an analogy between
women and cows that hundreds of centuries of men found apt, and
the sexual slur was apparently a neutral observation infused with
the spleen of the moment— she’s a cow. The idea that the male
plants and the woman is planted in originates in antiquity, and
Marcuse among others has reiterated the idea that woman is the
land in more modern times. The farming model is not discussed as
such, even among feminists. It too clearly reveals the hopeless impersonality, degradation, and futility implicit in women’s subordinate position.
The brothel model is more familiar, partly because the situation
of prostitutes is held up to all women as warning, threat, inevitable
doom and damnation, the hellish punishment of girls gone wrong:
punishment for being women involved in sex without the protection of marriage and the purpose of reproduction; punishment for being bad or rebellious or sexually precocious; punishment for
being female without the cleansing sacraments.
In the brothel model, the woman is acknowledged to be for sex
without reference to reproduction. She will still have babies perhaps, but no one owes her anything: not the father, not the state, not the pimp, not the john, no one. Some women on the Left
accept the male leftist view that this is a giant step for womankind:
that this separation of sex and reproduction is in fact a form of
freedom—freedom from domestic constraint and domestic submission, freedom from an intrinsically totalitarian association of sex with reproduction. They do not recognize that in the brothel
model sex is dissociated from reproduction so that the sex can be
sold, so that sex (not babies) is what is produced, so that an intrinsically totalitarian association is forged between sex and money expressed lucidly in the selling of the woman as a sexual commodity.
In the brothel model, the woman is considered to be sexually free
even by those who think prostitution is bad or wrong; sexual freedom is when women do the things men think are sexy; the more women do these things, the more sexually free they are. Whatever
the conditions of the woman’s life, there is no perception that prostitution is by its nature antithetical to freedom. Sometimes the prostitute is construed to be economically liberated. In selling sex,
money passes through her hands: more money than the housewife
or the secretary will have in hand on any given night. The brothel
model particularly fosters these obfuscations of the female condition because the women are entirely interchangeable; perceived in terms of function they are entirely interchangeable; even among
themselves, any one could step out of her own life into the life of
the next woman and not notice the difference. Nothing that happens in the brothel is seen or has to be seen or recognized or re
membered or reckoned with: these women live outside of history
and what happens to them happens behind closed doors and in a
