What Is Racial Fetishism

Earlier in civilization we would refers to prostitution as a sex trade. Sex trades, trace back all the way up to the third millennium. The first major inhabitants of Mesopotamia were the Sumerians, who are known as the founders of prostitution. Ironically, their religious practices are what gave birth to prostitution. The Sumerians worship the goddess Ishtar, a deity that would remain constant throughout Mesopotamia’s Babylonian and Assyrian empires. Ishtar was the goddess of love and war, symbolized by the planet Venus, and was born anew as a maiden every morning only to become a ‘whore’ every evening. The etymology of the word lying in the Indo-European root meaning ‘desire’. (Fanni, 2014) Women in Ishtar’s service would help men who offered money to her temples with the ‘sacred’ powers of their bodies. Achieving a priority of communication with the goddess from their fertility, only women enjoyed this religious position. Thus Ishtar temples became knowledge centers concerning birth, birth control, and sexuality. Throughout the world prostitution was viewed as a religious act almost, a sacrifice. As time progression people swayed away from this idea and it became sometime that was no longer done for religious purposes but simply for money in a hard economic

Urged by women and the “code of chivalry,” which was like the “cult of true womanhood,” men lost sexual access to their wives. Because of this, prostitution flourished. Though men were urged to control themselves, it was understood that desire was “in a man’s nature,” and therefore very hard for him to control.

The slave owner’s exploitation of the black woman’s sexuality was one of the most significant factors differentiating the experience of slavery for males and females. The white man’s claim to the slave body, male as well as female, was inherent in the concept of the Slave Trade and was tangibly realized perhaps no where more than the auction block. Captive Africans were stripped of their clothing, oiled down, and poked and prodded by potential buyers. The erotic undertones of such scenes were particularly pronounced in the case of black women. Throughout the period of slavery in America, white society believed black women to be innately lustful beings. The perception of the African woman as hyper-sexual made her both the object of white man’s abhorrence and his fantasy. Within the bonds of slavery, masters often felt it was their right to engage in sexual activity with black women. Sometimes, female slaves made advances hoping that such relationships would increase the chances that they or their children would be liberated by the master. Most of the time, slave owners took slaves by force.

Pretty Woman displays our fascination of “fetishism” of the commodity-form on multiple levels. We have the relatively straightforward case of prostitution, for instance, where sex and the woman's

Prostitution, sometimes referred to as “the world’s oldest profession” (Henslin, pg. 54), is defined by James M. Henslin as “the renting of one’s body for sexual purposes” (pg. 54). This arrangement, though illegal and socially deviant in most parts of the world, exists universally in many different forms (pg. 54). As a matter of fact, types of prostitutes range greatly in variety from call girls – who are said to be “the elite of prostitutes” (pg. 58), to streetwalkers – “who have the lowest status among prostitutes” (pg. 58), to sugar babies -young, physically attractive women who provide “rich, older men” (Kitchener, par.4) “…with attention (and sex) in exchange for the finer things in life” (par. 4).

Prostitution is one of the oldest and most controversial professions on earth. According to records, prostitution was a normal practice of the earliest known civilizations. Ancient Greeks and Roma governments went as far as sponsoring brothels to ensure their citizens could afford a prostitute. The emergence of religions like Christianity and Islam transformed the moral views on prostitution. Following a tremendous pressure from the religious authorities, many European countries started to ban the practice on the bases of being immoral and harmful to society. The king of Spain made prostitution punishable law. Those caught could face a harsh punishment or they could be exiled. Pope Sixths of Rome went as far as making prostitution punishable by death .Despite the laws drafted by the authorities, people continued to provide and use sexual services. In this modern era, we are still debating the ethics of prostitution. Most people claim that prostitution is morally degrading and harmful to the wellbeing of society. While others claim that legalizing prostitution can help create tax revenues, undermine organized crime and reduce the spread of disease. Using utilitarianism, virtue ethics and Kant deontology I will prove that prostitution is immoral and it should be banned.

For both white and minority women, this period was marked with increased judgment for their sex as well as the dismissal of charges for their male counterparts. Since many women of color did not belong to the Anglo-Saxon culture that attempted to enforce the ideology on them, they often resisted and were met with false depictions of their sexuality. Yet within this period, the patriarchal society was able to control most aspects of consensual sex even before this shift had completely taken

At the turn of the twentieth century, how did white men in power regard the sexuality of African-Americans? How did they use these attitudes to justify indifference to abuse?

Prostitution is known to many as “the oldest occupation”, but when examined, the harsh reality of the sex industry is exposed and it is visible that prostitution is more of a form of oppression than it is a profession. The oldest occupation has many names: prostitute, streetwalker, hooker, escort. These types of terms are just examples of how the women who participate in this industry are reduced to labels and objectified. This social oppression is met with physical violence among sex workers, making it the most dangerous profession in human history. If it is so violent and horrible to participate in though, then why has it existed for all of these centuries? The answer is that the entire

The first part of Nussbaum’s paper challenges to examine the stigmatization of prostitution by comparing it to six other kinds of jobs/professions in which the individual uses her body in ways that majority of us do not necessary find morally objectionable but are not far off from the ways prostitutes use their bodies in the trade. These range from the domestic servant who “must do what the client wants, or fail at the job” (pg. 375), the nightclub singer who pleasures her customers by her voice to the colonoscopy artist who allows herself to be probed without anesthesia in a “consensual invasion” (pg. 378) of her bodily space for the purpose of medical education. The further we go down the list of the six jobs/professions, we see a closer

“The demand is the result of a simple biological appetite. When all other sources of gratification fail, due to defects of person or circumstance, prostitution can be relied upon to furnish relief” (Davis, 753). Prostitution in a latent sense saves marriages and allows men to fulfill their sexual desires. “Prostitution embraces an economic relation, and is naturally connected with the entire system of economic forces” (Davis, 749). One societal function that prostitution fills is a release for those who desire the prostitute (latent) and a source of income for the prostitute (manifest).

Prostitution, as stated by Flemming, is known as a form of sexual activity, a kind of sexual style or category, and a form of economic activity, a way of making a living through the provisions of certain services, by behaving in accordance with, or falling into such a category (39). This definition, though, is controversial. While conducting research for this project, we found that most topics regarding prostitution and its affiliates were controversial. Each author gave a differing interpretation for the same data. Due to this, our project centered on the female prostitutes, even though there is evidence of male prostitutes.

Prostitution is defined as the act of “providing or receiving sexual acts, between a prostitute and a client, in exchange for money or some other form of remuneration” (Hock 557). The idea of exchanging sex for valuables has been around since the beginning of human society. The first reported data about prostitution was reported around 3000 B.C.E in one of the first known civilizations, Mesopotamia (Caraboi and Fierbinteanu 362). It is often referred to as “the world’s oldest profession.” Today, even though prostitution is illegal in most parts of the world, it is still prevalent worldwide with different ways to exchange sexual services for payment and many different types of prostitutes. One of these types of prostitutes are brothel workers; brothel workers work in “a house of prostitution,” a brothel, which are normally in areas where prostitution is not criminalized or is legalized (Hock 560). Like prostitution, human trafficking has been around for thousands of years and is still present today.

Prostitution is the act of engaging in sexual activity for financial gain. It is described as one of the oldest profession and one of the most controversial issues in the modern society. In the ancient world, prostitution was allowed as part of religious traditions in some cultures such as Greek where prostitutes were dedicated to gods. Today prostitution has become more open, and some countries such as Bulgaria and Netherlands have legalized the practice. In the recent past, ethics of prostitution have been debated with many people claiming that it is morally wrong. However, like all other controversial practices, prostitution has continued to thrive in the society as evidenced by recent headlines. In this paper, I will argue that prostitution is not morally permissible despite being around for thousands of years. Prostitution is an immoral transaction that has brought many negative impacts such as community policy issues, health issues, and religious issues.

Here the idea of a fetish becomes important. A fetish, by Freud’s description is the male impulse to eroticize objects or female body parts, which derives from a disavowal of a material lack (of the penis on the mother’s body). The second understanding of the word is through Marx’s account of the felicitation of the commodity: at the moment of exchange, the commodity appears to be separate from the workers who product it; the ‘special social character of private labours’ disavowed.