Margaret Mead Japan China Religie en seks Moral panics Seks en robots De seksuele ontwikkeling van jongeren Seksualisering Leeftijdverschillen Geweld en misbruik Consent Sexting Sex trafficking Prostitutie PornografieIncididunt nisi non nisi incididunt velit cillum magna commodo proident officia enim.
Christopher A. FARAONE / Laura K. MCCLUREEr waren al wel studies naar prostitutie e.d. bij Grieken en Romeinen. Maar:
"But while German scholars like Forberg, Brandt, and Hauschild pondered the shocking directness and profusion of Greco-Roman accounts of sexuality and prostitution, Anglophone scholarship largely remained silent on the question until well into the second half of the twentieth century."(4)
[Steeds weer die preutse Angelsaksen ... ]
"The profound influence of Michel Foucault, palpable in almost every study of ancient Greek sexuality from 1990 onward, occasioned a shift of focus in scholarly discourse and privileged a Hellenic perspective. Instead of emphasizing historical realities, these studies have taken up the role of prostitution as one of many cultural discourses produced by Athenians during the archaic and classical periods. The fact that the topic has figured prominently in many larger projects of cultural criticism attests to its pivotal importance for understanding ancient constructions of gender, sexuality, and even political ideology." [mijn nadruk] (4-5)
"While these essays do not pretend to provide a comprehensive, unified survey of ancient prostitution, they do reflect the variety and vitality of the debates engendered by the last three decades of research on the subject. In particular, they confront the ambiguities of terms for prostitutes in ancient languages, the difficulty of distinguishing the prostitute from the woman who is merely promiscuous or adulterous, the question of whether sacred or temple prostitution actually existed in the ancient Near East and Greece, and the political and social implications of literary representations of prostitutes and courtesans." [mijn nadruk] (5-6)
Definities zijn lastig. Veel bedekte termen, woordspelingen, etc. verwijzend naar heel verschillend gedrag.
"As the sociologist Iwan Bloch observed in 1912, any study of prostitution must contend with the difficulty of defining the practice; clear boundaries between nonmarital sexual relations, such as concubinage and adultery and sex for pay, are often elusive." [mijn nadruk] (6)
"The specter of sacred or cultic prostitution raised by Herodotus in his account of the temple of Ishtar at Babylon has generated controversy and debate for well over a century. In the last decade, however, both Near Eastern and classical scholars have questioned the existence of this practice both in ancient Mesopotamia and in ancient Greece, con- cluding that female cultic personnel in the service of fertility goddesses such as Inana and Aphrodite did not engage in any type of sexual activ- ity specific to their religious roles. As Martha Roth, Stephanie Budin, and Phyllis Bird suggest in their essays, the traditional view affirming cultic prostitution rests on flawed interpretations of terminology and unreliable ancient testimonia. " [mijn nadruk] (8)
"These promiscuous women — whether prostitutes, adulteresses, or merely sexually active females operating outside male control — occasioned fear because they did not submit to men and could disrupt legitimate marriages. They were of interest in the construction of Mesopotamian legal documents because of their impact on private and economic issues, such as inheritance devolution, rather than out of desire to regulate morality. " [mijn nadruk] (9)
"While prostitution was a legal and highly visible practice on the streets of ancient cities, and patronizing prostitutes was not necessarily stigmatized — as long as it did not involve squandering one’s patrimony — to be a prostitute incurred disgrace for both women and men."(11)
[Dus toen al werden wettelijk geregelde huwelijken belangrijk gevonden en werd seks geacht binnen een huwelijk plaats te vinden? Het is niet helemaal duidelijk.]
"Current scholarly consensus holds that Athenian law did not regulate the sexual behavior of citizens for moral reasons unless it interfered with the aims of the political community. But Lape argues that around 350 BCE, litigants increasingly appealed to the idea that irregular sexual practices could have a moral impact on the polis."(12)
"Thomas McGinn takes us out of the law courts and into the streets with his examination of the topography of Roman prostitution. The lack of moral stigma attached to prostitution in most ancient literary discourses is reflected in the topographical layout of Roman cities, where brothels mixed with residential houses and other commercial businesses. McGinn observes that the plan of the ancient city of Pompeii, with its preponderance of brothels, shows no evidence of a segregated red-light district, nor of any “moral zoning.” Whereas in the Unites States, brothels tend to be isolated (as in the ranch brothels of the Nevada desert), illustrating our modern assumption that sex work should be segregated and unmentioned, Roman brothels were broadly dispersed throughout the city, clustering around combined residential and commercial districts with nearby lower-class housing. Only with the rise of Christianity does prostitution begin to appear to be linked to a concept of moral impurity." [mijn nadruk] (13)
[Het zoveelste voorbeeld van de vijandigheid tegenover seks van religies.]
"Comic genres, whether Attic Old, Middle or New Comedy and its Roman successors, as well as the hybrid genres of the Second Sophistic period, prove our richest source of representations of courtesans and prostitutes from Greco-Roman antiquity."(15)
Herodotus schilderde andere volkeren af als barbaren met rare gewoontes zodat het Griekse volk er goed van af kwam, zo is de huidige opvatting onder de geleerden.
"Although there is not a single modern piece of scholarship that gives any credence at all to any of Herodotus’s other “Babylonian customs” — whether wise or shameful — his story about the ritual defloration and sexual accessibility of common women in the sacred realm (“Babylonian sacred prostitution”) remains stubbornly embedded as an accepted fact in the literature."(22)
"It is clear that, other than this highly restricted and structured “sacred marriage,” there was no ritualized or institutionalized sexual intercourse associated with Mesopotamian religions or temples."(23)
[Is aangetoond, ze wil het er niet meer over hebben. Discussie gesloten totdat het omgekeerde wordt onderbouwd. Maar dat zie ik toch niet gebeuren.]
"The Mesopotamia world had a definite and appropriate place for women who exchanged sexual favors for pecuniary consideration, that is, “prostitutes.” This simple statement is not uncontested."(24)
[Die vertaling naar 'prostituee' is ook te simpel, omdat je daarmee 'prostitutie' koppelt aan betaalde seks. Ik vind die andere uitdrukking van Assante wel mooi: het gaat om vrouwen van wie de seksualiteit 'niet gereguleerd' is in een huwelijk. Zoals tegenwoordig het woord 'slet' gebruikt wordt voor meisjes en vrouwen die het met meer dan één man doen en niet in een relatie zitten en zich niet - per se - voor de seks laten betalen. En als even gevaarlijk gezien, al om haar zelfstandigheid en afwijkende ongereguleerde gedrag, maar ook hierom: "The fear that sexually available women could disrupt a marriage is, of course, not an uncommon one."(28)]
"Assante does not insist that no harīmtu is a prostitute; rather, she argues that not every harīmtu is a prostitute. Her thesis is that the harīmtu “stand[s] outside of or separate from societal norms, that is, [from] the patriarchally controlled household. . . . [W]ithin this legal description, the kar.kid/harīmtu could be anything from a virgin to a prostitute” (1998, 13). "(24)
Er bestaat heel wat materiaal aan kleitabletten etc., maar:
"Such documents rarely inform us about that intersection of prostitution — whose practitioners were, in some sense, free agents in the sexual and reproductive market — and recognized marriage — the locus of controlled, regulated, and legitimate sexual activities resulting in recognized inheritance devolution, to which this essay now turns.
A married man who consorted with a prostitute was not committing “adultery”. In Mesopotamia as in many other places and times, as has been well established, adultery resulted only if the female partner was married to a third party; a married woman who had sexual relations with a man other than her husband was denying the husband his exclusive sexual and reproductive access. For his part, her lover, whether unmarried or married, was “stealing” that which was the domain of another. There was no offense committed against the male lover’s wife comparable to that committed against the woman’s husband. In other words, there was but one wronged party — the married woman’s husband (Roth 1988a, 186–206; Westbrook 1990, 542–76)." [mijn nadruk] (25)
[Het historische begin van de dubbele moraal. ]
"Several of the law collections include pro- visions clarifying such competing inheritance rights of offspring born to wives, second-ranked wives, concubines, and slaves; one provision addresses the inheritance rights of children of a prostitute. "(31)
"All information about practices, incidence, and attitudes toward the practitioners must be drawn from a literature that contains a particular, theological employment of the language of prostitution and a history of interpretation that identified it with pagan religious practice." [mijn nadruk] (40)
"This may be seen, for example, in the concept of “sacred” or “cultic” prostitution, which has become a given in interpretations of “Canaanite” and ancient “oriental” religions. "(40)
[Wij goed, zij slecht. Wij netjes getrouwd en seks alleen voor de voortplanting, zij losbandig en promiscue en seks voor de lol of voor geld of zo, en zelfs in heiligdommen. Wie gelooft zoiets nog?]
"Moreover, despite their diversity, all of the texts must be understood as male-authored and addressed primarily to males. Thus in all matters of sexual relations it is a male point of view that is expressed in the texts. In addition, the collection, and most of the individual compositions, must also be understood as the work of religious elites and created, selected, and preserved through a process that came to accord divine authority, and even authorship, to the texts." [mijn nadruk] (41)
"Despite these limiting and distorting factors, however, it is still possible to recognize the prostitute as an identifiable “type” already in the earliest sources"(41)
[Desondanks blijft het een beeld van religieuze mannen. Een belangrijk inzicht, dat.]
"The common term for a prostitute, and the only term generally recognized, is a feminine participle “zonah” of the verb “zanah,” whose basic meaning is “to engage in extramarital sexual relations.”" [mijn nadruk] (42)
[Dat is dus heel wat anders dan 'prostitutie is seks voor geld'.]
"As a general term for nonmarital sexual intercourse, the verb “zanah” is normally used only with female sub- jects, since it is only for women that marriage is the primary determinant of legal status and obligation. While male sexual activity is judged by the status of the female partner and prohibited only when it violates the recognized marital rights of another male, female sexual activity is judged according to the woman’s marital status.
In Israel’s moral code, a woman’s sexuality belonged to her husband alone, for whom it was reserved both before marriage as well as after." [mijn nadruk] (42)
[De befaamde aanvechtbare mannen- en vrouwenrollen.]
"Violation of a husband’s sexual rights, the most serious sexual offense, is signified by the verb “na’af,” “to commit adultery;” all other instances of sexual intercourse outside marriage are designated by “zanah.” These include premarital sex by a daughter, understood as an offense against her father and/or male kin, whose honor requires her chastity (Deuteronomy 22:13–21; Leviticus 21:9; cf. Genesis 34:31), or sex by a levirate-obligated widow (a woman promised or “betrothed” to her deceased husband’s brother [Genesis 38:6–11, 24–26]). It also includes the activity of the prostitute, the professional “fornicator,” who has no husband or sexual obligation to another male. Because her activity violates no man’s rights or honor, it is free from the sanctions imposed on casual fornication. Strictly speaking, her activity is not illicit — and neither is her role. Despite frequent assumptions to the contrary, there is no evidence that prostitution was ever outlawed in ancient Israel or that the prostitute was ever punished simply for her activity as a prostitute." [mijn nadruk] (42)
"Even though she was raped, the unmarried daughter is put into the category of the prostitute, the woman who offers sex to other men. Consent plays no role; the only relevant point is that an unmarried woman is involved in a sexual act."(45)
[Dat al die vrouwen indertijd niet in opstand kwamen tegen dit soort onrechtvaardigheden... Maar het zegt: seks mag alleen binnen het huwelijk, je moet als maagd het huwelijk in, je mag met niemand seks gehad hebben voordat je trouwt. Daar zit het probleem. Als iemand wil leven als de beschreven professionele prostituees die in de stad verblijven en op straathoeken rondhangen is dat een heel andere kwestie. Hoewel de vraag natuurlijk is hoe vrijwillig de keuze voor zo'n bestaan is.]
"None of the examples cited thus far suggest that prostitution was prohibited in Israel — or had any cultic associations. All presuppose the existence of prostitutes as part of the urban scene, and all presuppose their low, or marginal, social status. Prostitution, like fornication (whose vocabulary it shares), presents a female profile, despite the fact that both activities require active male participation. This asymmetry of conception and nomenclature is a characteristic feature of patriarchal societies, reflecting a general pattern of asymmetry in gender-related roles, values, and obligations. The anomaly of the prostitute as a tolerated specialist in an activity prohibited to every other woman represents a patriarchal accommodation to the dual desires of men for exclusive control of their wives’ sexuality (and hence offspring) and, at the same time, for sexual access to other women. The greater the inaccessibility of women as a result of restrictions on the wife and unmarried nubile woman, the greater the need for an institutionally legitimized “other woman.” The prostitute is the “other woman,” tolerated but stigmatized, desired but ostracized. Prostitution appears to be characterized by some degree of ambivalence in every society, and the biblical evidence does not support the common notion of a sharp distinction between Israelite and “Canaanite” society with respect to the prostitute’s legal or social status." [mijn nadruk] (47)
[Goede beschrijving van die dubbele standaard en zo.]
"For in the ruling stereotype (as seen, for example, in Proverbs), the prostitute is a woman of smooth speech, self-serving and predatory. One does not expect truth from such as these."(48)
"I have emphasized the female profile of prostitution in Israel. Male prostitution is homosexual and designated by distinct nomenclature. It appears to have been a minor phenomenon in ancient Israel, in keeping with a general abhorrence of male-male intercourse exhibited in a variety of texts (Bird 2000, 146–62; Nissinen 1998)."(49)
[Degelijk stuk.]
"Leslie Kurke has rightly called attention to the importance of literary representations of prostitutes’ monuments from Herodotus onward. The task of verifying the authenticity of the representation of such monuments of any period proves to be impossible."(60)
[Wat volgt is een bijzonder specialistisch verhaal dat ik niet wil volgen.]
"This paper reconsiders the evidence for sacred prostitution in the classical corpus. It takes as a departure point the recent Near Eastern scholarship that shows that sacred prostitution never existed in the ancient Near East but rather was a fabricated idea based on allegations made by classical authors and mistranslation by scholars of cultic terminology. Rather than seeing sacred prostitution as an historical reality, I consider Biblical scholar Robert Oden’s suggestion that it was an accusation, a literary motif used by one society to denigrate another, and test this suggestion against the notion of firsthand accounts of sacred prostitution, whereby a society recounts the existence of sacred prostitution in its own time and culture; thus, sacred prostitution in the “first person.” If a society freely claims sacred prostitution as one of its own cultural institutions, the hypothesis of accusatorial, literary motif must be abandoned. However, as the evidence will show, there are, in fact, no known firsthand accounts of sacred prostitution in the ancient world. Those apparent examples from the classical world are either misinterpretations of classical authors, or, as with the Near Eastern evidence, mistranslations of certain terminology. In the end the evidence supports the idea that sacred prostitution never existed in the ancient world." [mijn nadruk] (77)
[En dat geeft de kern van het verhaal goed weer. Meer hoef ik niet te weten. De onderbouwing lijkt me solide.]
"Modern languages use the word “prostitution” (and its foreign equivalents) inexactly to cover a multitude of conflicting meanings denoting a variety of physical, commercial, and social arrangements. Although scholars have long sought to differentiate commercial sex from other erotic arrangements, emphasizing factors like payment, promiscuity, and emotional attachment (or indifference), the defining line — if any — between modern prostitution and other forms of sexual exchange remains unclear: even marriage has sometimes been characterized as “legal prostitution.” Ultimately, and in frustration, it is sometimes asserted that “the meaning of ‘prostitution’ is self-evident” (Pateman 1988, 195)." [mijn nadruk] (95)
[Dit wordt terecht opnieuw benadrukt. Als je bijvoorbeeld iemand betaalt voor gezelschap, gewoon om het gezellig te hebben, om eens een mooie vrouw om je heen te hebben die je vermaakt, zonder dat er seks aan te pas komt, is dat dan wel of geen prostitutie?]
"Commercially, Athens was a thriving entrepreneurial megalopolis — in fact, in the fourth century the dominant commercial center of the eastern Mediterranean — but she nevertheless harbored a conservative side that objected to all profit-making endeavor, including that relating to sex."(96)
"But for most analysts, neither promiscuity nor affection but “status” has been the differentiating characteristic: social position is believed to separate the high-class hetairos (-a) from the street or brothel pornos (-ê). In fact, Greek literature is replete with tales of glamorous and brilliant women who allegedly made important contributions to Athenian civilization and politics, while supporting themselves magnificently by providing sexual services to important male leaders. Yet many scholars reject outright — as mere myth and romanticization — the very concept of prostitutes of high status: the “refined hetaira” is “a fabrication of the male mind” (Keuls 1985, 199). For these classicists, “hetaira” and “pornê” are for the Greeks merely two words covering a single form of exploitation." [mijn nadruk] (97)
[Ja, maar wat is het nu feitelijk?]
"Ultimately, however, whether unitary, binary or diverse — whether definable or impervious to definition, whether a commodity or a gift — prostitution involves payment for sex. And so, in what follows, I will explore the labor context in which Athenians provided erotic services." [mijn nadruk] (108)
[Hoe kun je dat nu stellen na die beginalinea's? Slordig. Gemakzuchtig ook. Het kan ook 'betaling' voor andere diensten zijn die niets met seks te maken hebben.]
"In the modern world, prostitution is, of course, not “just another job”: contemporary societies in general reject commercial sex as morally degenerate and humanly exploitative. Labor laws deny sexual workers rights available to others. Prostitutional arrangements are denied recognition as legitimate contracts of employment. In most countries, prostitutes are even branded as criminals. Modern scholars often insist that prostitution likewise aroused Athenian antagonism or contempt — sometimes citing as evidence remarks by unrepresentative theorists opposed to all forms of commercial endeavor or erotic expression, but usually simply assuming the universality of negative attitudes toward sellers of sex. In fact, at Athens prostitution was lawful and pervasive (...) And through its “tax on prostitution” (pornikon telos), Athens — which never did restrict “victimless sexual conduct” (Wallace 1997, 151–52) — was an active accessory to the sexual labors of its residents (Aeschines 1.119). Even the city’s goddess, Athena, titular deity of crafts, listed prostitutes among her benefactors (Harris 1995, 144–49), and a monument honoring a famed hetaira stood on the Athenian acropolis next to a statue of Aphrodite (Pausanias 1.23.2)." [mijn nadruk] (99-100)
"The presence, or absence, of supervision and control was a critical, perhaps the central, factor in Athenian evaluation of work situations. "(101)
"Athenian aversion to the dependence inherent in salaried employment meant that in principal providing sex in brothels was appropriate only for slaves. (...) Athenians assumed, correctly, that persons performing repetitive functions in a commercial context — whether bank staff or sexual workers — were likely to be slaves.(101-102)"
[Waarom dat waardeoordeel met 'correctly'? Vreemd en ook weer slordig. ]
" ... slaves working as prostitutes are known to have received specialized training, sometimes starting in childhood."(103)
"Free Athenian purveyors of erôs sought carefully to avoid all suggestion of dependence, and sought to manifest their autonomy through elaborate, sometimes seemingly recherché, mechanisms. Thus, among the hetairoi of Athens, contractual arrangements for sexual services — whether directly explicit, as in Lysias 3 (see above), or constructed with greater complexity, as in Hyperides 5 (see E. E. Cohen, forthcoming) — were the norm."(109)
"For prostitutes, however, formal contracts were not the sole indicia of a labor relationship compatible with the work ethics of free Athenians. Other manifestations included control over one’s physical and familial surroundings, including the ownership of valuable personal property (the antithesis of servile confinement in a brothel), the freedom to choose the clients with whom one associated (the antithesis of compulsory sexual submission to any would-be purchaser), the provision of reciprocated largess to one’s lovers, the appearance of leisurely dedication to cultural and social activities, and the pursuit of work not merely as an economic necessity but also as a mechanism of self-definition."(110)
"In general, scholars distinguish between pornai and hetairai. They view the former as low-class prostitutes and the latter as sophisticated courtesans. Apollodorus’s dissolution of categories complicates attempts to interpret the image of Neaira and to define the status of various prostitutes, rendering the focus on a taxonomy of prostitution misplaced. "(126)
"Clearly, Athenians look down on excessive desire for hetairai and those who waste money on such women."(127)
[En zo voort en zo verder. Ik geloof het verder wel en ga dit boek niet verder uitlezen. Ik heb een indruk van de situatie in de Oudheid. ]