Sessualità e prostituzione nella cultura scientifica positivista

Abstract

Stemming from the work by Marzio Barbagli, the present essay aims at investigating Western sexual morality focusing on the study of the history of prostitution in the Nineteen and Twentieth centuries. In this sense, it will show how positivist medical and anthropological theories, heirs of ancient sexual and gender prejudices, were able to convey the values of a sexual morality that, on the one hand, legitimated the exercise of female prostitution as a phenomenon necessary to ward man’s well-being, while on the other hand it stigmatized male prostitution, especially if homosexual, as a symbol of a lost, ideologically characterized, virility.