Comment on “Prostitution in Medieval Canon Law,” by James Brundage

James Brundage's article, “Prostitution in Medieval Canon Law” (Summer 1976), was interesting, but Brundage's definition of prostitution makes odd reading in Signs.

He speaks of promiscuity as central to the medieval definition of prostitution and adds his own agreement: “There is much sense in this” (p. 827). He adds, “It may be possible to be promiscuous without being a prostitute” (why the tentativeness? – of course it is possible), but “it is hardly possible to be a prostitute without being sexually promiscuous.” Prostitution thus becomes a subcategory of promiscuity.

Brundage seems entirely unaware of a feminist definition of prostitution (by no means a new one) that sees as central to it the exchange of sexual availability for considerations other than erotic ones. In this view, which was, for example, Emma Goldman's, marriage is a subcategory of prostitution. Women who trade sexual availability for financial security are prostitutes even if they do so with only one man and within institutions socially defined as respectable.

The patriarchal view makes indiscriminateness the test of whoredom. The inconsistencies of this view (which engage Brundage's comment in his article) are perfectly consistent with its central tenet: that a woman's sexual availability must be owned by one man, whether an earthly husband or polygamously by God. (Nuns, who are “brides of Christ,” have no counterpart in monks, who are not thought of as husbands of the Virgin Mary.) The real issue here is female independence; hence it is the unowned woman – the “promiscuous” one – who is at fault, whether she has sexual intercourse with many men for her own gain or does so for her own pleasure. Both are equated with the woman who has sexual intercourse with one man, but outside marriage. All are unchaste.

In the feminist view, trading in sexual availability is prostitution, whether the customers are human or divine, singular or plural. Female independence is again the issue, but feminists are for it; thus the statement “Marriage is prostitution” becomes a parallel to Proudhon's “Property is theft,” and thus we have frequent praise of the prostitute (in the patriarchal sense) as more independent and more honest than the con - ventionally married woman.