Glenda Simms, Contributor
Writer Fiona Carson, in an essay titled 'Feminism and the Body', posits that the patriarch plays the dual role of regulating women's access to services such as contraception and abortion, while the idealised forms of women's bodies are "objectified by various means for male consumption and sexual delectation".
The complex role of the prostitute in the affairs of men was described by author Lael Morgan of Fairbanks, Alaska, who researched the realities of life in the early 19th century exploits of the Alaska-Yukon gold rush. The outcome of Morgan's efforts resulted in the 1999 publication, Good Time Girls.
Such good time women were a feature of all the activities that were designed to exploit the natural resources and break the frontiers in other remote areas of places such as South Africa and Australia. In all these circumstances Morgan reminds her readers that "the women who followed the miners were not their wives, mothers and daughters, but those women who everywhere are drawn to the lure of money easily found and easily spent".
In the case of the disgraced Eliot Spitzer, former Governor of New York, the virtual frontier environment was provided by the VIP Club which supplied young prostitutes such as 'Kristen' to make $5,500 in a short period of "stylized and customer specific activities for another powerful man".
The hot times
Such men ensure that their wives and daughters are protected from the excitement of the type of sex that they crave. Like the earlier men of the Klondike gold rush, the contemporary men who run churches, nation states and corporate board rooms continue to find 'the hot times' removed from Victorian constraints and the lavender and Avon delicacies of their womenfolk.
The lure of the prostitute lies only partially in the need of women to make money by bartering their body parts to the highest bidder in a detached and anonymous environment. The role of the prostitute is defined and maintained by the patriarch, who has deliberately ensured that the control of female sexuality continues to be the critical element of patriarchy.
Social anthropologists have proposed that from the earliest and most primitive times when men realised that they contributed to pregnancy, the effort to control female sexuality began in earnest.
In any discussion on prostitution there is a need to understand fundamentally the historical and contemporary interdependence between the role of the whore and the maintenance of patriarchal value and power systems. Author Nickie Roberts, in her excellently researched book, Whores in History: Prostitution in Western Society, reminds her readers that the whore has her deep roots in all the stages and evolution of human societies.
Roberts discusses the strength and the role of the matriarchy and goddess in pre-patriarchal society. She highlights the insights of anthropological lenses that have unearthed and recorded the sterling contributions of so-called primitive women in the establishment of a more humane and productive civilisation. The control and autonomy of her sexuality was firmly in the hands of the woman at this point in our history.
According to Roberts' findings, the role of the whore in ancient societies was not only holy but was essentially civilising. The key to this discussion is the fact that when the balance of social, religious, economic and political power shifted from women to men, the patriarch set out to ensure that women's sexuality was controlled by him and his cheerleaders of both sexes.
The lifestyles, class systems and intellectual pursuits of ancient Greece evolved over time to the establishment of 'Western civilisation' and our contemporary realities of hypocrisy, ambivalence and insecurities as men and women in modern society collude to oppress, maginalise and subjugate the sexual potential of the female of the species.
Critical element
Writer Siemila Abeysekera argues in an article titled, 'Sexuality: a Feminist Issue?', that "the control of female sexuality is a critical element of patriarchy." Throughout the history of this control the patriarch has created a morass of contradictions.
Through theological, sociological, psychological and economical machinations, the patriarch finds it difficult to come to grips with his need for both the Madonna and the whore, the wife and the prostitute. In his deliberate effort to insist that the 'bad girl' must be separated from the 'good girl', he reinforces his appetite for contradictions in both his public and private life.
His wife type is often the marginal, passive, compliant and supportive woman who restricts her sexual pleasure and stands by her man through thick and thin. On the other hand, he desires the whore to liberate him from his need to express his sexuality in the most bizarre or unnatural ways. The whore as opposed to the Madonna/wife satisfies his need to feel powerful even in the days of his waning virility and mundane sexual abilities.
In Memories of My Melancholy Whores, the Nobel Prize winner, Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez, describes the last desperate efforts of a 90-year-old bachelor who decided to use the services of a whorehouse madam to find him a virgin who could rekindle in him a moment of ecstasy before he meets his maker.
In this hypnotising and disturbing literary treatment of life, Marquez forces us to deal with the exploitation of the young girl who must preserve her hymen, not because she needs to have body integrity and autonomy but because she has been told that her virginity is a bargaining chip for mothers, fathers and grandparents who reinforce their sons' perception of their right to own and control women under patriarchy.
Oversexualised
As virgins become scarcer and scarcer in the oversexualised free market, the need for sex with children (boys and girls) is reinforced through socio-economic structures that continue to oppress poor women and upper crust madonnas.
The recent soap opera circumstance around Governor Spitzer, the Harvard-educated Silda Spitzer and high school dropout Kristen, the high-rolling whore who was transported from New York to a Washington hotel room, is a typical story of the patriarch.
Here in Jamaica we use talk show hosts to obfuscate the prime prerogative of the patriarch. They rarely discuss the ease with which the whores of Eastern Europe, Cuba and the Dominican Republic reinvent themselves and enter the most distinguished parlours and boardrooms of the upper crust. Instead, we send the police to harass the pathetic blond-wigged, fat-bellied, ghetto-fabulous women who hang around New Kingston as they try to get a little money from the patriarch and his new generation of sons.
Mr Patriarch, you are the most hypocritical and self-righteous of the human species. Get real and deal with the prime-time issues of the continued maginalisation of poor black people in general and young women in particular. If you think the prostitute is no longer important to your impending impotence, pick up the Johns, impound their SUVs, charge them and leave the hapless street prostitute alone. She is your creation, face your nightmare.
Glenda P. Simms is a gender expert and consultant.
