Women on the market Are men all equally desirable? Do women have no tendency toward polygamy? The good anthropologist does not rai questions. A fortiori: why are men not objects of exchange among women? It is because womens bodies-through their de for the condition Women on the market making social life and culture possible, although they remain an unknown"infrastructure"of the elaboration of that social life The society we know, our own culture, is based upon the and culture. The exploitation of the matter that has been sexu- exchange of women. Without the exchange of women, we are alized female is so integral a part of our sociocultural horizon told, we would fall back into the anarchy (?)of the natural that there is no way to interpret it except within this horizon. world, the randomness(? )of the animal kingdom. The passage ito the social order, into the symbolic order, into order as In still other words: all the systems of exchange that or such, is assured by the fact that men, or groups of men, circu- triarchal societies and all the modalities of productive work late women among themselves, according to a rule known as that are recognized, valued, and rewarded in these societies are the incest taboo mens business. The production of women, signs, and com- Whatever familial form this prohibition may take in a giver modities is always referred back to men(when a man buys state of society, its signification has a much br oader impact girl, he"pays"the father or the brother, not the mother..) assures the foundation of the economic, social, and cultural and they always pass from one man to another, from one group order that has been ours for centuries f men to another. The work force is thus always assumed to be Why exchange women? Because they are "scarce[commod- masculine, and" products"are objects to be used, objects of ities]., essential to the life of the group, "the anthropologist transaction among men alone. tells us. 'Why this characteristic of scarcity, given the biological equilibrium between male and female births? Because the"deep Which r t the possibility of our social life, of our polygamous tenden culture. d e on a ho(m)mo-sexual monopoly? The law makes the number of available women seem insufficient. Let us that order ety is the exclusive valorization of men's add that, even if there were as many women as men, these needs/desires, UI CHanges among men. What the anthropolo- women would not all be equally desirable. and that, by gist calls the passage from nature to culture thus amounts to the definit the most desirable women must form a institution of the reign of hom (m)o-sexuality. Not in an"im- mediate” practice, but in its“ social” mediation. From this This text was originally published as"Le marche des femmes, "in Sessualita point on, patriarchal societies might be interpreted as societies functioning in the mode of "semblance. "The value of sym- ship(Les Structures bolic and imaginary production superimposed upon, and elementaires de la parente, 1949, rev. 1967), trans. James Harle Bell, John Rich- even substituted for, the value of relations of mater ard von Sturmer, and Rodney Needham(Boston, 1969), p and p In this new matrix of History, in which man begets man as 171