“A prostitute opens the bedroom door and finds her father”: a structural analysis of a myth of so-called high-end female prostitution

Abstract

Based on anthropological research, this article draws on psychoanalytic theory to reflect on the repression of incestuous desire in the formation of the family and modern Western civility. To do so, it analyzes a story collected during fieldwork involving participant observation on high-end female prostitution in Rio de Janeiro. This story – repeatedly told among sex workers and approached here as a myth in the Straussian sense – recounts the encounter between a prostitute and her father during a paid sexual appointment. The article seeks to explore the meanings of this narrative within the ethnographic context from which it arises, while also traversing other settings to highlight the circulation of the myth (and its variants) in the social imagination surrounding prostitution on a broader scale. The discussion is framed by the question: how does the myth in question relate the economic and moral issue of sustenance, made possible through labor, to the traditional family structure prescribed as the model for modern Western society? The findings of the analysis underscore the significance of women’s labor in the underlying dynamics of desire that shape family and sexuality. It concludes, through an examination of the mytheme that gives the article its title, that the sense of dread and anguish expressed by women and represented in the mythical encounter with the father figure within the context of prostitution is tied to the conflict of meanings emerging from that setting.