The woman with a father fixation is usually frigid. She either never marries or is a prey to prostitution fancies, until analysis has freed her of her unconscious incest fear or has led her to accept her incestuous cravings as a part of her personality.
=Prostitution is a neurosis=, affecting mostly the hypothyroid, hypoadrenal female of low culture and low intelligence.
Psychoanalysis, which requires a certain grade of mental development on the part of the patient, is rather impotent in the majority of cases of prostitution when the woman has crossed the line which separates fancies from practice.
There are male prostitutes also, of the normal sexual type. I do not allude here to the homosexual males whose mentality shall be considered in another chapter. By male prostitutes, I mean men who consort with women, in or out of wedlock, for purely sordid considerations.
=The Pimp= who exploits some prostitute is a prostitute himself, but so is the man who marries for money or power a woman who does not attract him sexually. The male prostitute is, if anything, ethically inferior to the female prostitute.
=Prevention=, rather than any form of cure, may some day solve the problem of prostitution. Repressive measures are, of course, a dishonest farce which deceives no one and benefits no one. The prostitute cannot be reeducated or adapted, for she is a weakling and the modern world offers to her no equivalent for what she would have to give up in order to reform. Female children, on the other hand, if trained properly and made independent, mentally and financially, could grow up free from the handicaps and the fears which, at the present day, drive too many girls into adopting the "easiest way."
=Prostitution has no redeeming grace.= It may have saved many young men from impotence but it has made quite as many impotent thru venereal infection. Some claim that it has saved many pure wives and daughters from temptation but it has contributed also thru infection to making thousands of innocent women sexual invalids.
Prostitution is a maladjustment whose worst sin is perhaps the maladjustment of married life which it occasions in thousands of cases.
Too many young men, who acquired their sexual experience with prostitutes solely, imagine that they know and understand women, and they proceed to treat their life mates as tho the latter were only slightly different from the unfortunate neurotics they hired to relieve their sexual cravings. To that sort of experience we owe the horrible type of the "typical husband" who never misses an opportunity of reminding his wife of the fact that "she is only a woman."