Adriel Trott, Associate Professor in Philosophy at Wabash College writes:
"In 'Debt:The First 5,000 Years, David Graeber writes:
One could see how the metaphor of the porne might seem particularly appropriate. A woman "common to the people"-as the poet Archilochos put it-is available to everyone. In principle, we shouldn't be attracted to such an undiscriminating creature. In fact, of course, we are. And nothing was both so undiscriminating, and so desirable, as money."
"This is in the context of explaining why Greek aristocrats thought money was garish. The conception of women behind this critique of money is telling. Women have value because they are inaccessible and restricted. Men protect and isolate their women to preserve this value, which is not based on the woman's unique personality, appearance, wit or strength, but on the extent to which she is accessible to other men. The less accessible, the more valuable. The less accessible, the more desirable. How one is a woman, either parenthenos, virgin or gyne, wife or mother, is determined by whether anyone has access to her or not. In the case of gyne, your husband and your sons have access to you. The power of Athena as parthenos is in part her refusal of access to anyone.
'Porne' means prostitute in Greek and it comes from the word meaning to export for sale. The prostitute then is the woman who is accessible to everyone and thus not worth as much. The obscenity of money is thus associated with the distaste for the woman who is made accessible to everyone, and thus not even seeming like woman, having no value. And yet, of course, as Graeber writes, we are attracted to this accessible woman, who men want but know they shouldn't. The restriction on commerce is required to restrict our base desires just like the restriction on prostitution is required to save men from their base desires.
But unlike money, the woman being exchanged has her own desires. The analogy between money and woman depends on defining woman in terms of degrees of sexual accessibility and defining woman as a commodity with no desire of her own. Money might start to accumulate on its own in the same way that women might start to desire. While money might seem to be the great equalizer, as a universal measure it points to the way that woman is viewed as a universal measure of man, where the least inaccessible woman is worth the most and the more inaccessible women he can accumulate the more he is worth. On this account, money began to work as money because women already functioned as measures of men based on varying degrees of accessibility and distribution."
-Article written by Adriel Trott ^^^^^^
I wrote this out instead of copy/paste because I wanted to understand it all. I found it when I googled "misogyny and prostitution" in order to understand some of what is posted here. Ironically, articles featuring the biblical story of "The Woman at the Well" surfaced in search. I won't get into that on here, but I learned so much today from my google search and it goes without saying that what is old is new again. There is nothing new under the sun.
My Bio Page - Texas - North and East
Day 15: Money, Prostitution and Misogyny
