Hetaerism

Hetaerism is the institutional pairing of prostitution with marriage: while a wife is assigned chastity, prostitution provides an outlet for desires that the marital regime restricts. In this account, the arrangement is not a separate social fringe but a shadow cast by the family, organizing women into contrasting roles and distributing respect and vulnerability unequally.

Definition and Social Function

Drawing on Morgan, the discussion describes “Hetaerism” as following civilization like “a dark shadow upon the family.” Marriage demands chastity from the wife, yet men do not accept the limits of the regime imposed on her. The coexistence of wife and prostitute therefore exposes a contradiction within the marital order: the ideal of exclusive female virtue is maintained alongside a socially available class of women expected to serve men’s desires.

Historical examples illustrate the separation. Montaigne recounts that Persian kings sent their wives away when feasts turned to sensual indulgence, summoning other women instead. The women’s exclusion from those occasions protects the wives’ status as respectable, but also shows that this respect rests on a division of women into those bound to marital chastity and those made available outside it.

Stigma and the Double Standard

The account presents prostitution as a scapegoat role. The Church Fathers’ comparison of prostitutes to sewers needed to keep palaces sanitary, and Mandeville’s claim that some women must be sacrificed to preserve others, both express a social logic in which the prostitute is treated as necessary to the respectability of virtuous women. The analogy to defenses of slavery sharpens the criticism: just as the degradation of one group was said to permit refined relations among another, the existence of “lost women” supposedly allows chivalric treatment of wives.

That supposed protection does not extend to the prostitute herself. Whether she works clandestinely or is placed under police surveillance, she is treated as a pariah: men unload their own turpitude onto her and then repudiate her. The arrangement thus preserves a moral distinction between women by stigmatizing the person whose assigned role helps sustain the other’s respectability.

Economic Relation to Marriage

The comparison between prostitution and marriage is also economic. Marro’s formulation, cited in the discussion, is that the difference between selling oneself through prostitution and through marriage lies in the price and duration of the contract. In both cases, sex is treated as a service: a wife is bound to one man for life, while a prostitute has multiple clients who pay per transaction.

The difference in the number of men does not make either arrangement a simple source of power. The wife is protected by one man against the others; the prostitute, in a reversal, is described as defended by all against the exclusive tyranny of any one man. Yet both remain constrained by competition, and a husband’s marital duties are presented as contractual rather than as a favor. Male desire, in this account, may be directed toward a body in general rather than attachment to an individual woman, so neither wives nor courtesans can exploit men without possessing a distinctive power over them.

Personhood and the Broader Argument

The decisive distinction is not simply between a long contract and a short one, but between social recognition and its denial. A married woman is oppressed in her role as wife, yet is still respected as a human person; the account treats that recognition as a real limit on oppression. The prostitute, by contrast, is denied the rights of a person and is made to embody multiple forms of feminine subordination at once.

Hetaerism therefore reveals the unequal structure behind the apparent opposition between respectable marriage and prostitution. The family’s claim to virtue depends on a hierarchy that both restricts wives and stigmatizes prostitutes, while assigning the latter fewer protections. Its significance lies in showing that these are connected positions within one social order, not independent alternatives freely chosen on equal terms.