Women As Sex Vendors/Chapter 1
WE have often heard discussions of the reason we do not find women, as a sex, in the vanguard of world affairs; why the great educators, strong figures in progressive or revolutionary movements, are men rather than women; why these movements, themselves, are made up almost entirely of men rather than women. People have asked over and over again why, in the fields of the arts, the sciences, in the world of "practical affairs," men, rather than women, generally excel.
We believe the answer lies in the fact that women, as a sex, are the owners of a commodity vitally necessary to the health and well-being of man. Women occupy a more fortunate biologic, and in many countries, a more fortunate economic position, in the increasingly intensified struggle for existence. And the preferred class, the biologically and economically favored class, or sex, has rarely been efficient-to-do, has never been revolutionary to attack a social system that accords advantage to it.
As a sex, women have rarely been rebels or revolutionists. We do not see how they can ever be as long as there exists any system of exploitation to revolt against. Revolt comes from the submerged, never from the group occupying a favored place. Today the revolutionist is he who has nothing to sell but his labor power.
The skilled trade union group is least revolutionary among the workers. The best paid unions are not the most militant in acts calculated to improve the conditions of even their own group, and are least aggressive in conduct for improving the conditions of the whole working class. So long as they occupy a more favorable position in the industrial world, the trade unions will have something to conserve. They become conservative.
We see the small, struggling farmers, who have probably very little to lose in this world save their debts and their mortgages, counting themselves in a class of possible property owners and small exploiters, and generally throwing their support into movements promising petty reforms, when nothing but the abolition, or downfall of the system of private ownership in the means of production and distribution, can possibly help them.
The petty shop-keepers rail more against the "outrageously" high wages and the short hours of the skilled workers than against the large business organizations, like the packing interests, or the great monopolies, that hold them constantly on the edge of failure. Desperately and consistently, as they behold their competitors forced out in the irresistible march of centralization, they cling to their sinking ships, their small deceits and petty ideology in the hope of one day winning out against the terrific odds opposed to them, and landing high and dry in the capitalist class.
No shoe dealer in the darkest side street of the smallest village but hopes some day to leave his dingy shop behind and to climb into the class economically above him. He counts himself a man of business, and thinks and acts and goes down to failure, individualistically. He hates and fears his competitors, ascribes most of his wrongs to them or to the highly paid skilled workers, and apes and envies the men whom he sees rising to wealth in the economic conflict.
As a sex, women occupy a position similar to the petty shop-keeper, because they possess a commodity to sell or to barter. Men, as a sex, are buyers of, or barterers for, this commodity. The general attitude on this question of sex may be, and in fact usually is, wholly unconscious; but the fact remains that men and women meet each other, in the capitalist system, as buyers and sellers of, or barterers for, a commodity.
Scarcely anybody recognizes this fact, and those who sense it fail to understand the inevitable result upon society and upon women themselves. There is no office or saloon scrub-woman so displeasing and decrepit, no stenographer so old and so unattractive, no dish-washer so sodden, that she does not know, tucked far away in her inner consciousness, perhaps, that, if the very worst comes and she loses her job, there is the truck driver or the office clerk, the shaky-legged bar patron on the road to early locomotor ataxia, or the squint-eyed out-of-town salesman, who can be counted on to tide her over an emergency—usually for goods delivered.
When a man is out of a job and broke, he is flat on his back. His appetites, his desires cry out for satisfaction exactly as they did when he had money in his pockets to pay for the satisfaction of these appetites and these desires.
When a woman loses a job, she has always the sale of her sex to fall back upon as a last resort.
Please understand that this is in no way a criticism of the conduct of women. We desire to lay no stigma upon them. We lay no stigma upon any class or sex or group, for down at bottom, men and women do what they do because they have to do it. The more we understand the economic and biological status of any group, the more we see they are compelled to act, under the circumstances, and in the environment they occupy, precisely as they do act. In the struggle for existence today the laurels are only to those who use any and all methods to save themselves.
We only want to point out that women are able to save themselves because of their "favored" position in the biological world. Since economic interest and economic control are at the basis of all social institutions, we want to show some of the results of this sex monopoly possessed by women, and required by men.
Every group which possesses anything which is necessary to the health and well-being of any other group, is bound to be pursued, wooed, bribed, paid. The monopolistic class, or sex, in turn, learns to withhold, to barter, to become "uncertain, coy and hard to please," to enhance and raise the price of her commodity, even though the economic basis of the transaction be utterly concealed or disguised. All this is exactly as natural and inevitable as a group of wage workers demanding all they can get in payment for their labor power, or the land-owner holding up the farm renters for all the tenants will bear, or the broker selling to the highest bidder. No one is to be blamed.
The private possession of a commodity necessary to man, the lower cost of living for women, are the natural causes of lower wages for women than for men, and explains why women are actually able to live on lower wages, as a sex, than men.
Few people speak frankly about sex matters today. And still fewer understand them and their economic basis. The subject of sex is clothed in pretense. We discuss women philosophically, idealistically, sometimes from the viewpoint of biology, but never from an economic and a biological standpoint, which is the only scientific basis from which to regard them.
Everywhere in the animal world except among humankind, the male possesses the gay and attractive plumage, the color and form to please the eye. Naturally he should possess them. But this is not so in the world of man. Here we find the woman decorating herself in the colorful garb. Woman has ceased to ask, "Is he beautiful?" She asks "What does he own?" or, "How much can he pay?"
Men love to dress their women in expensive clothes, to provide them with luxurious surroundings, because this advertises to the world the fact that they are able to purchase a superior, i. e., a higher priced commodity. Women give much time and spend money extravagantly in articles of conspicuous waste for the simple reason that by so doing they announce the fact that they are finer than other women, higher priced, of a fancier brand, possessed of better wares.
Everybody knows that the office clerk who aspires to the affections of an artistically gowned, jewel decked young woman, often spends most of his wages upon her in the hope of winning her attention. His office associates may describe her as "fancy," or speak of her as "an expensive package." And so the twenty dollar-a-week clerk magnifies his "income" in order to bribe the young lady into "giving herself" to him in exchange for his name and some sort of life-long support, provided he can produce it.
How many young wives have learned, to their chagrin, of the deceits thus practiced upon them by their husbands! Alas! The scenes that are enacted when it is discovered, after the ceremony, that the diamond engagement ring is not yet paid for, and that the mahogany furniture in the new flat so joyously selected by the young bride-elect, was bought upon the installment plan! That John earns only twenty dollars a week in the shipping room instead of the fifty a week he had declared, as assistant manager! Here the man has not paid as promised and every one feels that the woman has made a "bad bargain."
On the other hand, women disguise the economic basis of the deal in every possible way; lie, cheat and compete in a life and death struggle with others of their sex. A thousand illusions, tricks, subtleties; hypocrisies are employed to cover the bald fact that wares are being displayed, are being bidden for by other men. The deal is smothered in chivalrous urbanities and sentimental verbiage. Unnumbered circumlocutions are resorted to to conceal the salesmanship of one who has a commodity to sell.
MONOGAMY FOR WIVES
When certain strong men found themselves able to garner a larger share of property than their fellows, they rebelled against the communistic ownership of property, and the state, with the system of private ownership, was evolved, came into being to protect the private owners in their private ownership against the community, or the mass, which possessed no private property. Wealthy men then began to desire to leave their fortunes to their own children and so the marriage system, with theoretical monogamy for both sexes and practical monogamy for wives, arose. Men of property then felt tolerably certain that their wealth would descend to their own sons and to the sons of no others.
We are not inclined to believe this was due to the prevalence of any so-called paternal instinct. Paternal instinct is, we suspect, a minus, rather than a plus, quantity. It seems to us that fathers more often learn to love their children through following the conduct prescribed by good form and pretending to love them, or through love of display, pride or by association, than through any "natural tendency."
The almost universality of the maternal instinct is proven by the peoples in the world today, for scarcely anybody would have a chance for existence if it were not for the care of the mothers.
Generally the coming of children is a handicap to a woman in the market in which Nature and the present system have placed her. Where this is the case, it is here that society, customs and laws speak for the family, in ways built up, sometimes blindly, sometimes consciously, to preserve the species, and upon the old biological and economic foundations.
It is generally granted that women with children are more conservative than women without children. We believe this is true only when they and their children are provided for. When a mother is left with no one to support her children, she becomes more predatory than other women in the pursuit of a new provider. Our jails and workhouses are full of unsuccessful mothers of this class, convicted of crimes against property.
Mothers are conservative when their children are secure; more predatory when they are in want. Mothers often compete successfully in making their wares attractive and in binding the male by habits and associations that hold him and induce him to continue to pay.
Among men, the possession of, and ability to support a woman in perpetuity, whom no other may touch, is honorific, a high sign of display. It announces to the world that such a man is able to hold a trophy in the struggle for existence. A monogamous wife is, in fact, an emblem of well-off-ness, and greatly to be desired.
A man does not wish to be one among a corporation of men owning a woman any more than he desires to be owner of a sixth part of an automobile. Not because there is anything more intrinsically wrong in purchasing one-sixth than six-sixths, but because, in a world where the ownership of private property is the greatest of all good things, individual ownership denotes respectability, comfort, ability to buy outright. Hence we have monogamy for wives and mistresses in general, and polygamy for men.
For if it is honorific to possess one woman, it is still more proof of one's buying power to support half a dozen different establishments. Besides, biologically, a man may require many women for the satisfaction of his desires.
CHASTITY
Why do young girls remain chaste before the importunities of their lovers and, perhaps, against their own desires, if not for the purpose of forcing or inducing them to offer the sure and permanent price of matrimony?
Do not all respectable and well-meaning parents (and others not so respectable) seek gently to guide their daughters into safe matrimonial harbors where they barter themselves for a respectable meal-ticket, or an income, presumably, for life? They would be shocked beyond measure if you told them that back of all their exalted mummeries, they desired to see their daughters barter their sex for the highest and most enduring stake rather than to see them selling their labor or brain power for wages, or selling their sex on the installment, or retail plan, to the chance purchaser. Yet these are the facts.
And it is this hope of bartering their sex privileges for permanent support and the title of "wife" that keeps the girls of the working class in the same category as the small shop-keeper. Nearly every ordinary woman under ninety, hopes some day to find a man who will marry her and support her for the rest of her days. Instead of fitting herself for a trade or a profession, young women, and old women, devote their time to schemes for prevailing upon some man, to pay the ultimate price and marry them.
And so women, not every individual, but as a sex, are ever individualistic, ever competing among themselves, ever displaying their wares, ever looking for a possible purchaser of the commodity they have to sell, ever endeavoring to keep the purchaser satisfied and willing to pay more.
Human beings are human animals however much we may pretend to the contrary. In the rest of the animal world the fact of the mating season is frankly acknowledged. It has never been recognized among humankind within the period of written history. Is it possible that when women are released from economic and social coercion, this periodic mating instinct in the woman of the species may assert, or reassert, itself?
Wives and mistresses often submit to their husbands or lovers only through fear of losing economic security to the ever alert competitor. It is certain that when all men and all women have gained individual economic opportunity and security, social institutions will change also. May it not be possible that the jealousies now prevalent, because of the economic import or the social standing that the private claim on the individual brings, may vanish also?
WHICH IS SUPERIOR?
But do not imagine for a single moment that women are inferior to men. Biology has long since proven that daughters inherit the same natural tendencies from their fathers and their grandfathers, their mothers and their grandmothers that sons do. In the case of the girls it is only as it would be if the sons in a family all inherited a share in the monopoly of a commodity that half the human race requires.
The son of your butcher may have all the nervous and intellectual capacities of Thomas Edison, or Dr. E. L. Thorndyke. Perhaps he has. But the economic environment in which he is born will give him small opportunity to so prove himself.
Women are intellectually capable of all that men can do. They always will be because the paternal branch of the family bequeathes to its daughters the same natural tendencies and capacities that are the heritage of its sons. It is biologically impossible for sons to inherit the cumulative capacities of their fathers alone just as it is biologically impossible for the daughters to inherit from their mothers alone. So that, at birth, it appears that both sexes must remain on an equal footing so far as heredity is concerned. But the social and economic environment differentiates. Boys and girls learn to differ more than they differ physically at birth.
We believe it is due to the fact that woman, biologically possessed of a necessary commodity, something to sell besides her labor power, leans and reckons upon this ownership, which prevents her, not individually, but as a sex, from taking an active and permanent part in the affairs and workshops of the world today. There are exceptions to the rule, of course. And often, unconsciously, perhaps, she seeks to excel in the fields occupied by the men who surround her, for the purpose of enhancing her wares.
It is to be remembered that in nearly all phases of the relations between men and women, both are almost always at least partially unconscious of the economic basis of the bargain they make, although, legally, marriage is a contract. Here society and social institutions protect the possible future mothers of the race.
We are in no way denying the existence of affection between the sexes. We see undoubted instances of self-sacrifice (in the economic sense) on the part of women everywhere. We are not gainsaying these. We only claim that the root of the relation of the sexes in America is today the economic basis of buyers and sellers of a commodity and that this basis of sex, sold as a commodity, affects every phase of our social life, and all of our social institutions, and that we fail to recognize these economic roots because of the leaves upon the social tree.
Why, do you imagine, the woman who brings to a penniless husband, not only herself but a fortune as well, is looked down upon in many countries? Why is the woman of the streets, who spends her sex earnings upon her lover, scorned universally? Is it not because both are, unconsciously violating the code, or the trade "understandings," in giving not only of themselves, but their substance as well? These women are selling below the market, or scabbing on the job.