sexual intercourse of men with unmarried
women outside of the monogamous family, flourishing, as is well known,
during the whole period of civilization in many different forms and
tending more and more to open prostitution. This hetaerism is directly
derived from group marriage, from the sacrificial surrender of women for
the purpose of obtaining the right to chastity. The surrender for money
was at first a religious act; it took place in the temple of the goddess
of love and the money flowed originally into the treasury of the temple.
The hierodulae of Anaitis in Armenia, of Aphrodite in Corinth and the
religious dancing girls of India attached to the temples, the so-called
bajaderes (derived from the Portuguese "bailadera," dancing girl), were
the first prostitutes. The surrender, originally the duty of every
woman, was later on practiced by these priestesses alone in
representation of all others. Among other nations, hetaerism is derived
from the sexual freedom permitted to girls before marriage--also a
survival of the group marriage, only transmitted by another route. With
the rise of different property relations, in the higher stage of
barbarism, wage labor appears sporadically by the side of slavery, and
at the same time its unavoidable companion, professional prostitution of
free women by the side of the forced surrender of female slaves. It is
the heirloom bequeathed by group marriage to civilization, a gift as
ambiguous as everything else produced by ambiguous, double-faced,
schismatic and contradictory civilization. Here monogamy, there
hetaerism and its most extreme form, prostitution. Hetaerism is as much
a social institution as all others. It continues the old sexual
freedom--for the benefit of the men. In reality not only permitted, but
also assiduously practised by the ruling class, it is denounced only
nominally. Still in practice this denunciation strikes by no means the
men who indulge in it, but only the women. These are ostracised and cast
out by society, in order to proclaim once more the fundamental law of
unconditional male supremacy over the female sex.

However, a second contradiction is thereby developed within monogamy
itself. By the side of the husband, who is making his life pleasant by
hetaerism, stands the neglected wife. And you cannot have one side of
the contradiction without the other, just as you cannot have the whole
apple after eating half of it. Nevertheless this seems to have been