Polygamy and Prostitution

What do men who use prostitutes and polygamists have in common?  According to Marci Hamilton, quite a lot.  They are both populations of men who get away with raping, abusing, and degrading women, even in places where what they're doing is illegal.  And like polygamists, johns are rarely prosecuted.

I've never really heard johns and polygamists compared in such stark terms, but I think Hamilton may be on to something.  Both prostitution and polygamy reduce a woman to a commodity.  In prostitution, a woman becomes an object, a tool for the pleasure of a man no more human than a sex toy.  Because the transaction of prostitution is about money, (not mutual desire, affection or pleasure), it commodifies as woman's body and values it only as a means of male pleasure.  In polygamy, a woman also becomes an object, though in this case a tool of reproduction, social status, and occasionally pleasure for a man.  Polygamy, as is practiced in fundamentalist religious communities, values women as commodities- suppliers of children.  They are just as much a machine designed to work for men as women in prostitution are.   

Prostitution and polygamy are both symptomatic and catalystic of a fundamental gender inequality, where women are objectified and commodified without regard to their humanity or agency.  And yet, the male perpetrators of both these crimes, the johns and the polygamist husbands, are rarely held accountable for their actions.  I once worked on a case where a 40-something man was caught having sex with a 15-year-old girl, for whom he had paid $200.  The police arrested the girl, put her in the back of the cop car, and brought her to jail.  They told the man what he was doing was wrong, but let him drive away.  When asked later why the cop let the john go, he replied,

 "He had a wife, and I thought it would be bad to embarrass him like that."

Having sex with a kid should be embarrassing!  It sould be a lot more embarrassing, in fact, it should result in an actual punishment.  How are we afraid to embarass men who are engaging in prostitution, but we're not afraid to embarass the women and girls? 

What interests me the most about the parallels between prostitution and polygamy is that many people who see prostitution as an opportunity for empowerment for women see polygamy as the opposite.  In fact, I would argue the contrary.  Prostitution and polygamy share more common values than dissimilar ones.  Those values include a view of women as tools of men, female bodies as tradable commodities, and social superiority of men over women. 

Photo credit: Jasonsager