=Sensuality.= All the rant of the purity prophets to the contrary notwithstanding, it is not sensuality which "lures" women into a "life of shame."
If the prostitute sought in her means of livelihood mere gratification of "vicious" instincts, why would she so often submit to the whims of a pimp who despoils her of her earnings. The prostitute hates the men who can compel her thru their financial superiority to submit to their sexual desires. The pimp, whom she keeps and who depends upon her bounty, is her inferior and the more she degrades him, the less she feels her own degradation.
The prostitute, like all inferiors, is dissatisfied, but so are the man of genius, the inventor and the artist. The genius is the dissatisfied individual who organically is able to compensate for his feeling of inferiority by creating a more pleasant environment, physical or mental, and derives therefrom credit, praise, rewards, small as those rewards may be. The prostitute, too weak organically to find a suitable, socially valuable, form of compensation, flees from a reality which is unpleasant to her. Alcohol and drugs supply her with a convenient form of escape from reality, the more acceptable to her as her intelligence is the more limited.
=Father Fixation.= Kurt Schneider found that fifty per cent of the prostitutes he examined were weak minded. The Chicago Vice report published a few years ago revealed the fact that fifty per cent of the prostitutes examined by the vice investigators were the victims of a violent father fixation.
One half of them, when asked by whom they had been seduced, incriminated their fathers. To a psychoanalyst such an answer is an obvious morbid wish fulfilment.
All of the women probably experienced unconscious incestuous cravings at some time or other, and in the minds of the weak minded, (fifty per cent of them according to Schneider), those cravings had produced an absolute delusion. Whether the incest was real or imaginary, the fact remains that those unfortunates either believed in it or considered it as a plausible explanation and scapegoat. A lie, when accepted as a part of our biography, often affects us as mightily as tho it were an actual fact. For, after all, every lie we tell is a fact unconsciously acceptable to us and which affords our ego a certain protection.