ABSTRACT
Prostitution is the other great arena in which the battle against unsocialized sex and its dangers in a potentially fragmented culture was fought. “Whoring,” of course, had long been regarded as wicked and detrimental to the commonweal but so had drunkenness, blasphemy and other disturbances of the peace. The emphasis in “the solitary vice” should perhaps be less on “vice,” understood as the fulfillment of illegitimate desire, than on “solitary,” the channeling of perfectly healthy desire back into itself. The reasons given in late medieval and Renaissance literature for the barrenness of prostitutes are several: excess heat, as mentioned above; a womb too moist and slippery to retain the seed; and the mingling of various seeds—in short, reasons very much like those given by nineteenth-century doctors. The problem with masturbation and prostitution is essentially quantitative: doing it alone and doing it with lots of people rather than doing it in pairs.
