"deep polygamous tendency, which exists among all men, always makes the number of available women seem insufficient. Let us even were as many women as men, these women would not be equally desirable...and that, by definition…the most desirable women must form a minority.”
Levi-Strauss is an anthropologist who developed what has come to be known as the “alliance theory” for explaining how various categories of social kinship arose. The author quotes Levi-Strauss here to illuminate the contention expressed in the essay’s opening line that society has evolved to its current point on the basis of women possession value as a commodity to be exchanged by men. She goes on to point out what is lacking in the anthropological logic of this statement: women can be polygamous, not all men are desirable and therefore the argument postulated her would seem to apply equally to both sexes, but clearly men have not been commodified in the same was as women over the course of history.
Mother, virgin, prostitute: these are the social roles imposed on women.
As commodities within a patriarchal economic system, women are have historically been assigned three roles to which their value can be assigned and exploited. It must be noted that each role and its value is dependent upon the means and manner in which it enters into the realm of exchange for the purpose of meeting the needs and desires of men.
Their responsibility is to maintain the social order without intervening so as to change it.
It should be easy enough to deduce which of the three roles this assertion is to be applied. The particular of the role of the mother in society indicates the authority of the patriarchy. While without women there can be so reproduction of species and subsequent progression of society, she is not to be considered a co-equal partner. Value ends at maintenance; beyond that and into the realm of alteration (or improvement), the mother’s market value is conditionally appropriated.
She is nothing but the possibility, the place, the sign of relations among men. In and of herself, she does not exist.
While the prostitute is deemed to be value that “has already been realized” as a result of “usage that is exchanged” (with the implications of the conditions of that exchange inherently obvious) the role of virgin is one characterized not by any realization of value but only an unknown potential. Within the world of market forces, the virgin might be compared to the “futures” market in which investors choose a price that is fair for buying soybeans today based on a determination of what conditions will be like in the future. The virgin is an unknown quantity; she is a gamble. But she is desirable because the ultimate value determination lies in the fact that once no longer a virgin, she is (or at least historically has been) removed from the marketplace to become private property.
