This Sex which is not One Women on the market The virginal woman, on the other hand, is pure nge value herself as its material support without getting pleasure her She is nothing but the possibility, the place, the sign of relations self... Neither as mother nor as virgin nor as prostitute has woman mong men. In and of herself, she does not exist: she is a simple any right to her own pleasure envelope veiling what is really at stake in social exchange. In this sense, her natural body disappears into its representative Of course the theoreticians of sexuality are sometimes as- function. Red blood remains on the mother's side, but it has no onished by women,s frigidity. But, according to them, this price, as such, in the social order; woman, for her part, as frigidity is explained more by an impotence inherent to femi- medium of exchange, is no longer anything but semblance. The nine "nature "than by the submission of that nature to a certain ritualized passage from woman to mother is accomplished b type of society. However, what is required of a"normal"feminine the violation of an envelope: the hymen, which has taken on the sexuality is oddly evocative of the characteristics of the status of a value of taboo, the taboo of virginity Once deflowered, woman ommodity. With references to and rejections of the"natural is relegated to the status of use value, to her entrapment in physiological and organic nature, and -that are equall private property; she is removed from exchange among men. ambiguous he prostitute remains to be considered. Explicitly condemned by the social order, she is implicitly tolerated. No doubt because -just as nature has to be subjected to man in order to be- the break between usage and exchange is, in her case, less clear come a commodity, so, it appears, does"the development of a cut? In her case, the qualities of woman,s body are"useful normal woman. ""a development that amounts, for the fer However, these qualities have"value"only because they have nine, to subordination to the forms and laws of masculine ac already been, appropriated by a man, and because they serve as tivity. The rejection of the mother-imputed to woman- e locus of relations-hidden ones-between men Prostitution ould find its"cause"here mounts to usage that is exchanged. Usage that is not merely potential: it has already been realized. The woman's body is valuable because it has already been used In the extreme case, the erchyust as, in commodities, natural utility is overridden by the nge function, so the properties of a womans body have to more it has served the more it is worth. Not because its natural e suppressed and subordinated to the exigencies of its trans- sets have been put to use this way, but, on the contrary formation into an object of circulation among men because its nature has been"used up, " and has become once again no more than a vehicle for relations among men just as a commodity has no mirror it can use to reflect itself, so woman serves as reflection, as image of and for man, Mother, virgin, prostitute: these are the social roles imposed on but lacks specific qualities of her own. Her value-invested form women. The characteristics of (so-called) feminine sexuality de- amounts to what man inscribes in and on its matter: that is, her rive from them: the valorization of reproduction and nursing: faithfulness; modesty, ignorance of and even lack of interest in sexual pleasure; a passive acceptance of men's"activity";educ- -just as commodities cannot make exchanges among them- tiveness, in order to arouse the consumers'desire while offering selves without the intervention of a subject that measures them