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illegal: the state harasses and persecutes individual prostitutes and

leaves the institutions and the powerful who profit from them

alone. It does this because it is accepted that prostitution expresses

the w ill of the prostitute, and that therefore punishing her is the

proper expression of hostility toward prostitution. It is precisely

this notion of individual responsibility (when in fact there is only a

class-determined behavior) that perpetuates prostitution and protects the profits and power of those who sell women to men. Feminists, unlike the state, go after the institutions and the powerful, not the individual women, because feminists recognize above all

that the prostitute is created by material conditions outside herself. * In the new prostitution of reproduction, which is just beginning to unfold, the third party that w ill develop the female population for sale w ill be the scientist or doctor. He is a new kind

of pimp, but he is not a new enemy of women. The formidable

institutions of scientific research institutes and medical hospitals

will be the new houses out of which women are sold to men: the

use of their wombs for money.

*This does not mean that prostitution is reinvented in every generation

only through material conditions. The colonialization o f women is both

external and internal, as Kate Millett made clear in Sexual Politics. Sexual

exploitation and abuse create in women a psychological submission to self-

denigration; in The Prostitution Papers Millett went so far as to describe this

submission as “a kind o f psychological addiction to self-denigration. ” (See

The Prostitution Papers [New York: Avon, 1973], p. 9 6 . )

Before the advent of any reproductive technologies, the farming

model used to be very distinct from the brothel model. Even

though the woman was not human—the land—or was less than

human—a cow—farming had the symbolic overtones of old-fash-

ioned agrarian romance: plowing the land was loving it, feeding the

cow was tending it. In the farming model, the woman was owned

privately; she was the homestead, not a public thoroughfare. One

farmer worked her. The land was valued because it produced a

valuable crop; and in keeping with the mystique of the model itself, sometimes the land was real pretty, special, richly endowed; a man could love it. The cow was valued because of what she produced: calves, milk; sometimes she took a prize. There was nothing actually idyllic in this. As many as one quarter of all acts of battery

may be against pregnant women; and women die from pregnancy

even without the intervention of a male fist. But farming implied a

relationship of some substance between the farmer and what was

his: and it is grander being the earth, being nature, even being a

cow, than being a cunt with no redeeming mythology. Motherhood ensconced a woman in the continuing life of a man: how he used her was going to have consequences for him. Since she was

his, her state of being reflected on him; and therefore he had a

social and psychological stake in her welfare as well as an economic

one. Because the man farmed the woman over a period of years,

they developed a personal relationship, at least from her point of

view: one limited by his notions of her sex and her kind; one

strained because she could never rise to the human if it meant

abandoning the female; but it was her best chance to be known, to

be regarded with some tenderness or compassion meant for her,

one particular woman. Nevertheless, the archaic meaning of the

verb to husband is “to plow for the purpose of growing crops. ”

There is not a lot of room for tenderness or compassion in that.

Still, it is no wonder that women hang on possessively to any generic associations of women as such or “the female” with the land, nature, earth, the environment, even though those culturally sane-

tioned associations posit a female nature that is not fully human