2023-05-04 13:40:01
BY: EIFFEL RAMÍREZ AVILÉS
Many times we associate prostitutes with sordidness, impudence or shame. We necessarily represent them in remote places, where the neon lights glow dimly and where bottles and thugs abound. We characterize them, finally, by vulgar language and by their coarseness for dealings other than carnal ones.
That vision is not only of our time. Erasmus of Rotterdam himself –the most intelligent Erasmus, cultural father of Europe– pointed out centuries ago that the life of prostitutes was infamous and miserable. In his very brief fictional dialogue “The young man and the prostitute”, he offered a series of arguments for women to reject such a horrifying job. “You have become a public sewer,” one of his characters finally said to the prostitute, “where dirty, criminal, or sick people come to empty their…” Erasmus thought, then, that these types of women were doomed to the abject.
But Erasmus’s text shows a simple and obvious defect by which it self-destructs. He cannot disqualify a trade without first exposing a theory regarding human freedom (the freedom to choose, precisely, a trade); and one cannot pretend to support said theory without first considering the author –and any human, male or female– as a free being. In short, a prostitute might be despicable; but her freedom to choose from her, no.
My existentialist argument regarding freedom—existence precedes essence—may not please or satisfy. But I think there is another error of Erasmus: seeing the prostitute as an object and not as a subject. He compares it to a public bath. That’s what we do today too. We think, for example, that a brothel must be in some remote corner or, better, outside the walls; and when we think, for example, of the relocation of brothels, we assume it as if it were a mere move of second-hand furniture. And no labor advocate talks regarding the good or bad working environment of the brothels.
For the rest, I believe that the erudition of Erasmus – a cultist of ancient Greek life, as we know – has not missed the question of the hetairas. In the ancient world, a hetaira (a prostitute) had social power and high rank, not exclusively tied to her sex appeal. The famous Aspasia, for example, was a hetaira and orator, and who, at the hands of Pericles, ruled Athens in its golden age. A story like that would only have caused Erasmus to close his eyes for a few seconds and turn the page. Today, that there is an intelligent prostitute and a woman of the state, it might only start laughing in secular or religious, in academics or vulgar.
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