Prostitution

It is puzzling how much contempt societies, based upon the principle of exchanging bodily functions for an universal equivalent, have for the sale of one particular bodily function. I make my living selling my intellect, which could be regarded as more integral to my self than my genitals, yet the first is deemed acceptable, while the latter is scorned. Love is not to be sold, after all. Love, a specifically capitalist phenomenon, is the prime alibi of capitalism, its prime obfuscation. Prostitution lays bare the ideological denial of universal mediatedness at work in the bourgeois idea of love, reveals that abstract negation - reserving a sphere of complete self-will in the midst of universal servitude - is hypocrisy. In the hysteric reaction towards prostitution the subject denies the painful realisation that he or she is sold daily and that this transaction is the basis of subjectivity. Prostitution is the lens through which society can be comprehended in its totality. As such it deserves scorn just as much as Galilei's telescope.