As we have seen, spatial discourse in early modern literature reveals a metonymic association of the female body with the spaces it occupies, particularly the house and the liminal areas that mark its perimeter. The housed woman of the early modern imaginary symbolizes containment and order while the mobile woman communicates sexual deviance and availability. Female picaresque texts problematize this dichotomy by creating an eroticized spatial discourse in which the same locations that demarcate female virtue in didactic texts become fictional mechanisms to negotiate sexual capital within a stratified system of prostitution. The female picaresque thus exposes the inadequacy of domestic enclosure to safeguard chastity since exterior signs of virtue can mask a corrupt interior. The archetype of the prostitute as disorderly woman serves, in fictionalized form, to express cultural unease about the imagined threat female sexuality poses to the social order through portrayals of devious pícaras who utilize the indicators of female virtue and modesty to outwit, deceive, and even at times humiliate men, revealing the fragility of a patriarchal system that depended on women's chastity to ensure the legitimacy of succession even as it mistrusted women's capacity to regulate their own sexuality.

While social order depended on the fidelity of wives, it also required the sexual availability of some women as a means to regulate male behaviour, especially in an era of rising age of male marriage. The fact that many acts of sexual trickery remain unconsummated demonstrates that patriarchal anxiety centred not on female sexuality per se, but rather on concern regarding the illegibility of social class and virtue. Nonetheless, although fundamentally misogynist, the female picaresque displays a range of perspectives on the regulation of female sexuality in which some texts include defences of brothels and prostitution as necessary to moral order even as they denounce women's deceptive nature and lament the lack of transparency in transactional sex wherein women ‘pass’ as elite.

Debates over the place of prostitution in early modern society expose contradictions between moral ideologies and medical constructions of the body that emphasized the need for release of excess fluids.