Sex and Deviance

by Guillaume Faye

  * * *

  Political prostitution is akin to worldly prostitution; the mechanisms involved are related. A political boss, even of middling rank, has a certain aura and disposes of a certain amount of power. He usually understands that this power can be translated into sexual terms. So the temptation to practice blackmail, even implicitly, is very strong. Political prostitution is practiced in two ways: the leader uses his own party as a hunting grounds, picks out certain women and gives them to understand that in order to rise within the party or attain a desirable position, they must ‘put out’ (the laws on parity have perversely exacerbated this situation). The politician can also proceed with the old technique of advantages and solicitations, especially if he has significant ‘pull’ with the administration. Attractive women who solicit a favour only get it if they become mistresses, even if only for a night. From Louis XIV to the Presidents of the Republic, not forgetting Félix Faure[15] who died from it (in the arms of Mme Steinheil), this practice is a constant. In France it is not shocking, but it revolts puritanical and hypocritical America (note the Lewinsky affair).

  Obviously, it is difficult to imagine De Gaulle falling into such practices. In his doctoral thesis,[16] the historian Fabrice d’Almeida reveals that Hitler’s personal staff — that is, the Chancellery office in charge of his private and social life — received a significant number of propositions from women of high society and even middle-grade society who offered their charms to the Führer. All the more in that he was officially a bachelor, since it was Germany he had married, according to De Gaulle’s formula in his Memoirs. Almeida says it is unknown whether Hitler followed up any of these offers, but it is very improbable. Another dictator, on the other hand, Mao Zedong, was quite untroubled over his own practice of ‘fishing’ for sex.

  However that may be, it is certain that one of the primary motives for men to enter into a political career is to benefit from that sort of prostitution — to find women at little cost. This remark does not mean that political leaders who indulge in such practices are incompetent. Louis XIV, who used and abused such practices, can hardly be called an insignificant Head of State.

  However, it is true that authority is weakened if it seems to compromise too much with sex and pleasure. To impress people, to prevail (as Machiavelli says), authority must disincarnate itself, that is, remain inaccessible, mysterious, super-human. But, as Machiavelli also explains, everything is a question of appearances and not of fundamental realities.

  Regulating Prostitution

  So two kinds of prostitution exist: one which is overt and professional, and a parallel sort that dares not speak its name. The first should be legalised and strictly controlled; the second cannot be controlled and should be ignored.

  A question: Should prostitution be condemned? Two kinds of moral condemnation are pronounced. The first is of a Christian, Jewish, or Muslim kind: venal sex is sinful by definition, as is sex for pure pleasure. The second sort of condemnation comes from humanist and feminist perspectives: prostitution is related to a kind of slavery. In reality, we must find a middle position, in the Aristotelian fashion, and say: venal sex has nothing degrading about it if it is not accompanied by slavery and exploitation.

  For why should a woman (or a man, for that matter) not be able to rent out her body as long as it is not mistreated? How is this more degrading than renting out one’s labour power? It is perfectly understandable and normal that a young man without a girlfriend or experience, that an ugly man without much charm and no mistress, that a husband abandoned by his wife should have recourse to the services of prostitutes, or that a woman of a certain age should have recourse to gigolos to make up for what she is missing. For certain persons in a position of sexual dissatisfaction, prostitution can play a very positive role, because it allows them to respond to a physiological need which is as much a need as is the need for food. On the other hand, there exist women who are prostituted by force, others by preference, and still others for lack of anything better, because it pays better than being a supermarket cashier. Human sexuality, let us repeat, is polymorphic. The male, but also the female, has need of multiple sexual relations, even if they are of a more subtle and concealed nature. No morality will reshape nature, and morality cannot consider nature like a clay to be molded.

  But anarchic, proteiform prostitution obviously causes enormous social problems, like every unregulated market. Contrary to the drug market, however, which represents a real health danger, the sexual market does not represent any serious danger if a modicum of precaution (against STDs and female slavery) is taken.

  * * *

  The principal argument of those who seek to criminalise prostitution is that it is an enslavement of women. This argument comes both from neo-puritan Swedes (who go so far as to forbid prostitution legally and even prosecute customers as ‘accomplices’) and from certain feminists. Now, this is obviously not true in every case. Like any other activity (work in a factory, in the fields, in a craftsman’s studio, in domestic service, and so on), prostitution can occur with enslavement or without it. It is obvious that a clandestine immigrant woman forced at knife-point by an Albanian or African pimp is a slave. But a part-time call girl is not; her lot is certainly more desirable than that of exploited workers or the destitute unemployed.

  The second argument condemning prostitution is that which is prevalent in moral discourse. It is said to be unworthy and dehumanising that a woman should ‘sell her body’ — an argument which, curiously, is never made for gigolos. But first of all, if a woman desires to ‘sell her body’, this regards no one but herself. Once cannot substitute oneself for her free will. Furthermore, prostitutes do not usually have the same sort of sexual relations with their customers as with a chosen lover; all the more in that many prostitutes are choosy about their customers. This moral argument argues from the premise that prostitutes despise themselves and are ‘dirtying’ themselves, and also that they are forced to prostitute themselves and would choose otherwise if they could. This argument is not acceptable on the grounds that many prostitutes, both professional and part-time, choose this activity in complete lucidity, and some of them out of a taste for it. I am also quite certain that most underground miners have not chosen their profession out of a taste for it.

  The Swedes, who have outlawed all prostitution by criminalising the customer, legislated on the basis of the argument that ‘in a prostituted sexual relation, the woman feels no love’ and that she is therefore instrumentalised as merchandise, dehumanised, and oppressed. This is a typical reaction of a puritanical culture which imagines that sex and love are the same; one which, incidentally, pioneered the pornographic film industry.

  A third, much more pertinent argument condemns procuring[17] without forbidding the individual prostitute from carrying out her activity. This is the basis of current French law, where the prostitute is free to practice but any organiser, profiteer, or anyone who otherwise exploits these individuals is outside the protection of the law. This, however, forgets that individual prostitution — in some ways exercised as a free profession — is not always possible, and impractical at the high-end (call-girls) and that, in the case of mid-level consumption, procuring is both socially and economically necessary, both for business reasons (attracting customers, vetting them, providing a place for the transaction to take place) and because of easily understandable security considerations. Even in connection with de luxe prostitution, procuring may turn out to be necessary, again for reasons of security and dealing with customers — networks of the ‘Mme Claude’ type.[18] The procurer or procuress is not in such cases an exploiter or slaveholder, but a service provider, whether landlord or one who organises a secure network.

  * * *

  ‘Swingers’ Clubs’[19] are regularly closed by the police (labelled as ‘hotel procuring’) because it has been proven that prostitutes worked there to complement the sexual offerings p
rovided by non-prostitutes. Such a measure is absurd because one does not see how these private and discreet establishments harm either public order or public health. The few prostitutes who may be there as auxiliaries are not mistreated and are well paid. One might also ask whether the legislators, judges, and politicians responsible for such decisions are personally convinced of their usefulness and whether they themselves have never had relations with prostitutes. Another case that receives little attention from sociologists involves prostitution in connection with armies in the field, discreetly arranged for by the military authorities, and which reveals the impossibility of doing without such prostitution. In the French Army, they are called Military Campaign Brothels. Various sources of information little used by the media indicate that troops on NATO and UN missions enjoy an organised system of prostitution, which is indispensable for avoiding rapes of civilians.

  The legal prohibition of prostitution is not only unrealistic but has the perverse effect of instituting wildcat prostitution which usually facilitates sex slavery by pimps. In reality, prostitution is only to be condemned with regard to this simple criterion: the absence of the woman’s consent, blackmail, or in cases of oppression practiced against her. In this category must also be included the sex slave working on the streets as well as the woman who is a victim of sexual harassment or blackmail at a company. Similarly, the prohibition on procuring also amounts to allowing an uncontrolled form of wildcat procuring to thrive. For this reason, it is more intelligent to support a professionalising and regulation of prostitution, both female and male, in the knowledge that attempts to forbid or even pass judgment on occasional and hidden prostitution would be entirely in vain.

  * * *

  Professional prostitution must be controlled by the State, institutionalised, and strictly surveyed in establishments where the prostitutes are registered and protected, as is done in Spain, Germany, and Belgium, although not in a transparent manner.[20] Or as was the case in France before the Second World War, before the 1946 law was passed on the initiative of Marthe Richard — a former prostitute — which prohibited bordellos. Similarly, criminalising and prosecuting ‘Mme Claudes’ who manage networks of call-girls who carry out their work under conditions that are safe and in no way degrading, and who can turn down clients if they wish, seems particularly hypocritical and stupid. The politicians who have concocted such laws and the magistrates who pass judgment in accordance with them often themselves patronise prostitutes.

  The reestablishment of houses of prostitution, with oversight and regulation (including sanitary regulation), graded according to price, would dry up the market for wildcat prostitution and sex trafficking. For the State has shown itself entirely incapable, despite grand declarations, of combating abusive and wildcat prostitution, just as it has shown itself powerless to stop the public sale of narcotics despite well-publicised and ineffective sting operations. In Paris, the Bois de Boulogne and the grands boulevards have for decades been the territory of transvestite and illegal immigrant slave-prostitutes as soon as night falls. This has not been a great concern of the police department. Politicians and bureaucrats have never wanted to dismantle these networks. They prefer to concentrate on traffic violations.

  * * *

  The arguments of certain prostitutes who have been allowed to speak in the media is very interesting: they only dispute exploitation by pimps, rejecting the argument about the commercialisation of their bodies and the great misfortune that anonymous and ‘loveless’ sex supposedly is for them, according to the naïve analysis of feminists and puritans. They demand to be allowed to exercise their profession freely, choosing their customers in the same way one would do in any other free profession. They demand the protection of the State. They deny that their freely exercised profession cannot also be a pleasure for them. They explain that theirs is a trade and a social service like others, and that a certain number of women know it is the only source of a decent income for them and that there is nothing shameful or ‘alienating’ about the activity. They hotly denounce the competition from immigrant sex-slaves. In short, they ask for the regulation and clear normalisation of their occupation, with their desire for this being just the same as that of the merchant who fulfills his licensing conditions and wants to be protected against fly-by-nighters.

  It is undeniable that these assertions by certain prostitutes clash head-on with the pornographic industry. They are competing with it. The prostitutes defend the legal commercialisation of real sex, whereas the proteiform pornographic industry sells virtual sex. Hence comes strong pressure not to (re)establish legal prostitution.

  * * *

  Prostitution, when it was legal and regulated, also protected traditional couples from adultery. Rather than involvements with competing ‘mistresses’, the man discreetly visited a bordello. Such prostitution was a good response to the Christian error of confusing sex with conjugality and believing that sexual monogamy is possible. A mistress competes with the wife, a prostitute does not.

  The feminist, puritan, and ‘human-rights-ist’ idea that prostitution is always ‘alienating’ for women, who sees her sexuality violated and devalued, is not exactly blindingly obvious either. Are there no ‘happy hookers’ who enjoy their profession? Why should we want to cram all women into the same mold and deny freedom of choice to those who wish to prostitute themselves, asking only that it be done safely? Aren’t there women (and men, of course) more alienated than prostitutes?

  Finally, as with pornographic actresses who ‘sell their bodies’ under the camera’s eye (the only legal form of virtual prostitution), cannot prostitutes experience, outside of their professional sexual activity, ‘true love’? Can they not live several lives at once, or successively when they get older? Can prostitutes not have peaceable, even friendly relations with their customers?[21]

  * * *

  Prostitution is part of public life. According to the Aristotelian doctrine of the golden mean, it can neither be condemned nor accepted without regulation. It must be organised according to rules and be made compatible with the social order. This is why it would be smart to reestablish the famous private houses outlawed in 1946 — hospitality establishments under communal direction, with various price categories, inspection of sanitary and work conditions — as discreet meeting places. Wildcat prostitution would never recover.

  [1] The great difference between the three great forms of monotheism and the occidental and oriental forms of polytheism is that, in the case of the former, sexuality is mostly relegated to the domain of the impure, and only enters that of purity in the case of marriage — and even there is subject to various conditions. In polytheistic cults, the distinction between pure and impure cuts across all forms of sex — among others, sex for pleasure (sacrificial libations) and the pleasure of spectacle and sport (games in honour of the divinities, the best known being the Olympic Games, tragic theatre, etc.) being closely tied to the sacred and to religion. You can imagine the shock for the pagan elites of the Empire when, after the conversion of Constantine, the incomprehensible fact was explained to them that everything which had to do with the body was excluded from religious rituals. Even the Pythagoreans, the Stoics, and the Neo-Platonists who preached a kind of spiritual asceticism and detachment had never thought of such a thing.

  [2] In Le Monde des religions, January-February 2008.

  [3] In Renaissance Italy, Sigisbees were young men attached to the service of noble women whose husbands were absent, often on military campaigns. They were in love with the woman and served her, but officially there were no sexual relations. Officially....

  [4] A call girl is a de luxe prostitute. The term first appeared in the 1920s in the US when the telephone became available to the affluent classes. Call girls no longer depended on pimps but were independent prostitutes (or part of a network of prostitutes under the umbrella of an older ‘Madam
e’), which overcame the need for street solicitation. Today in France, the network of professional or part-time call girls accessible by telephone is fairly extensive and depends less upon particular types of nightclubs and increasingly upon specialised reviews, but especially upon the Internet and word of mouth. The number can be estimated at between five and ten thousand women. The price never goes below €200 for an encounter and can rise to €10,000 per weekend for elite prostitutes accustomed to a wealthy international clientele. In France, certain companies provide call girls to ‘big shot’ visiting customers. It is the common practice around the world (except in the United States) for visiting heads of state or foreign ministers to receive such welcoming gifts. As for Berlusconian soirées with call girls, their only inconvenience is their lack of discretion, but similar events are organised in France, including by the respectable (and rich) labour unions.

  [5] The Minitel was a service introduced in France in the 1980s that operated through phone lines; users could send and receive messages and make purchases. It ceased operation in 2012. –Tr.