Prostitution  

"Where does prostitution end and the marriage of convenience begin?" --"Prostitution and Ways of Fighting It" (1921) by Alexandra Kollontai

"Take the subject of Prostitution, for example. For thousands of years, since long before the dawn of history, Prostitution has been the most glaring of social phenomena. Religious leaders, from Buddha and Confucius to Socrates, Christ, Mohammed and St. Augustine, have fulminated against it; legislators, from Moses and Lycurgus to the contemporary Comstocks, have drawn statutes to crush it, or at least have endeavored to curb its ravages; yet scholars (even today, when sociology is an educational fad) have left it almost wholly untouched. It is, it seems, one of the tribal taboos. The few who have dared to touch it — our Krafft-Ebings, our Forels, our Havelock Ellises, etc. — find themselves, more or less, contraband authors on our bookstalls: I shall not forget the severe snubbing I received when I made inquiries of a metropolitan book-clerk regarding the “Psychology of Sex”!" --Histoire de la prostitution, preface to the English translation

"In a certain respect it is a shame that Marx, in his famous commodity analysis, did not proceed from prostitution and its particular form of exchange. Such an approach would certainly have offered theoretical advantages. As head of the olet Party, he would have to be interested in every opportunity to demonstrate the cynicism of money. The woman as commodity would have been a truly irrefutable argument. But a book that intends to become the Bible of the worker's movement cannot begin with a theory of prostitution." --Critique of Cynical Reason (1983) by Peter Sloterdijk