/pol/ - International /Pol/itics & /Bant/er

"But the other form of sexual contact-mercenary prostitution-distorts the human psyche even more. "What could be more monstrous than the act of love reduced to the level of a profession?" Leaving aside all the social poverty connected with prostitution-all the physical suffering, illness, deformity and degeneration-let us stop to consider the question of the influence of prostitution on the human psyche. Nothing so empties the human soul as the buying of physical love from a stranger or the selling of love in this way. Prostitution extinguishes the love in people's hearts. Eros flies away in terror fearing to soil his golden wings in a bed so bespattered with dirt.

Prostitution deforms a normal attitude towards sex. It cripples and impoverishes the spirit, it cuts out and takes away what is most valuable-the ability to feel the passion and love that extend and enrich the individual by giving him a store of emotional experience. Prostitution distorts our understanding. It makes us see something shameful, low and coarsely animal in one of the most serious moments of human life-in the act of love, in the final harmony of complicated emotional experience.

When men purchase their pleasure they don't achieve psychological fulfilment, and this has a particularly pernicious effect on the male psyche. With a prostitute a man finds no moments of deeply-felt, truly-erotic ecstasy that are somehow transforming. He learns to come to a woman with 'lowered' needs, with a psyche oversimplified and faded. Used to submissive 'obliging' caresses he no longer watches the complicated emotional process working itself out in the woman, his partner. He ceases to 'hear' and catch the subtle shade of her emotions. How many of the scenes that women make are sparked off by this 'simplification' of the male psyche, a simplification that takes place in the brothel! Prostitution inevitably spreads dark shadows even over the heads of the 'independent' lover, and over the woman who loves naively and is thus expecting a lot. Prostitution ruthlessly poisons the joy of loving for those women who see the sexual act as the 'final harmony' of mutual all-absorbing passion.[2]

A woman normally looks to personal relationships for fulfilment and harmony. But a man educated in prostitution has lost sight of the intricate vibrations of feeling. He follows only the pale monotony of physical attraction and ends up with a feeling of unfulfilment and emotional hunger. The mutual 'misunderstanding' of the sexes grows. The greater the individuality of the woman, the more complicated her emotional needs and the more acute the sexual crisis becomes. Prostitution is dangerous just because it has an influence far beyond the confines of the brothel."