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Prostitution: Prostitution might appear to be an odd topic for historical inquiry. As "the world's oldest profession, " concerned with buying and selling something as "natural" and "unchanging" as sex, it might seem to have no history. However, prostitution is subject to historical change and is shaped by the society in which it exists. In the United States, over the last couple hundred years, the nature of prostitution and the experiences of people working as prostitutes have varied a great deal.
The character of women's economic options has affected them by economic depression, by wars, by changing popular attitudes and, in particular, by the law and the ways in which the police, the courts and the prisons have administered the law. Organized political resistance has also played a role. Women working as prostitutes have developed strategies to survive and resist increasing social control. At the same time, the unique cultures of prostitutes are also formed by factors not immediately related to their work. For example, prostitution is more prevalent in working class communities and families. The historical record of prostitution, however, points us towards examining issues of social control, religion, profits, disease and legal regulations.
It is funny how prostitution is the world's oldest profession, and yet it is still only legal in one of the fifty United States of America. Prostitution could be a guaranteed moneymaker for the Internal Revenue Service; instead, it remains a seedy underside of society. It seems obvious to me that prostitution should be legalized, although statistics regarding the rates of disease and death from such an industry are difficult to verify it is common sense that the cost to society is high. Consider the necessary evils of pimps, or procurers, these are men (and occasionally women) who traffic in the flesh of others, as tax free as the Catholic Church I might add. And prostitutes themselves, whether working in a legal brothel in Nevada or on the corner of forty-second and Broadway, These are women, (and occasionally men) who have given up all other options for money making. Usually forced to admit that their one marketable skill isn't even legally marketable.
Prostitution is about sex, and so it is dirty, and wrong, and illegal. But is it really so dirty wrong or even as illegal as we are lead to belive? Is it even what we think it is? The conundrum that I come to is that we only seem to know prostitution when we see it. Defining it is a stickier wicket. Okay, we know that sex for money is prostitution, but what about sex for a place to live, if one does not live and have sex with one's significant other, then one must either find another other, or pay rent on a place of their own, yet a man who pays his girlfriend's rent could not be arrested.
As a matter of fact, a man who gave his girlfriend money because she needed it could not be arrested, neither could the woman. But if the man and the woman do not know each other before the sex act, and have an agreement spoken or otherwise that there will be no social contact after the act, well, that's illegal. What's the difference? De Bouvier states that: "Marriage... is directly correlated with prostitution which... follows humanity from ancient to modern times like a dark shadow over the family. "a caste of 'shameless women' allows the 'honest woman' to be treated with he most chivalrous respect.
The prostitute is a scapegoat; man vents his turpitude upon her, and he rejects her... She is treated as a pariah. .".. Viewed from the standpoint of economics her position corresponds with that of the married woman. " Moralists would say there is a large difference. People especially in this Judeo-Christian, puritanically rooted society of late 20 th Century America need to believe that sex equals love. Money can't buy love. Selling sex is wrong.
But it brings us back again and again to the definition of selling. Clearly bartering sex isn't quite so wrong. A single mother, with a boyfriend, who gets an offer for a job in another state. This job pays significantly more money than her current position. The woman announces she is moving.
The man who really enjoys having sex with this woman offers to help her with her rent if she is willing to stay here near him. Has she just prostituted herself? Is her fall from grace a one shot deal when she has sex with him on the night he offers this proposition, or is it an ongoing illegal act as she sees him almost every weekend? The definition of prostitution has its fair share of gray areas.
Now lets say for the sake of argument that we are not focusing on the gray but the black and the white of it. A person hires another person to get them to orgasm in some standard way, i. e. penetration or oral stimulation. This is currently illegal in 49 states.
What does this illegality, and creation of a criminal culture in the sex industry, cost society in dollars and cents? Lets talk about disease. There is AIDS of course, there is Hepatitis, Herpes, Chlymiddia, syphilis, genital lice (crabs), ghonnorrea, and other really scary things living in our bodies that find sex a really handy way to propagate. So while sex trade remains illegal, the spread of disease is practically unchecked, protection left up to each individual transaction. But if we legalize it, then we have the ability to monitor and maintain acceptable standards of hygiene health and safety. Meat Processing plants can't sell raw meat in this country without government standards for health and safety, why not have the same type of standards for a legalized skin trade.
Monthly doctors visits inoculations, treatment, group insurance plans, and best of all for the government, declarable and therefore taxable income. The money collected from currently non-taxpaying prostitutes would more than cover the cost of such proposed health care issues because the old saying about an ounce of prevention still holds true. And we as a society are paying out the nose for pounds and pounds of cure. Women who earn their living as prostitutes are often also collecting welfare and food stamps.
With no declared income they qualify. Now, these welfare recipients then fall ill, and the American health care system foots the bill and passes the cost onto you and I the medical insurance and care consumer. In a study by the San Francisco Task Force on Prostitution conducted in 1996 146 sex workers between the ages of 25 and 44 years old, with varied recent histories of crack / cocaine use, were questioned. More than 70 % of the women said they sought treatment for drug addiction because of their concern for their children. 29 % reported that they would be unable to participate in any sort of treatment program without childcare services.
And 98 % of the women said that services for children were a critical component of addiction programs. Less that half of these women had a high school diploma and over 70 % desired some sort of vocational training. These statistics paint a grim picture. These are not women who chose to become whores because they are criminals at heart. Nor are they living a glamorous lifestyle due to a philosophical bent, and an eschewing of social mores.
These are women who turned to the sex trade because they had nothing else to offer society in the way of gainful employment or economic addition. So now, in my hypothetical world, we are taxing and regulating prostitution, it is an established industry that is generating revenue. The women are unionized and the pimps are long gone. American business thrives and the stigma attached is lessening although it will be quite sometime before it is gone completely. Boys can save a couple of hundred dollars and learn what they are doing before they end up date raping their girlfriend, women can have it all because the need of finding and keeping a man is no longer so economically urgent. All of these are a benefit to society but there is an even more important issue at hand.
The government will have finally sent a message to the American people. When we reach this utopian attitude towards sex. The government will have finally recognized two things to which they currently apply a lot of lip service and very little action. 1. A true separation of church and state with no puritanical or religious based rules governing industry 2.
The genuine acceptance of a woman having total freedom and complete right to do as she wishes with her own body. Feminist philosophers believe that each person has a private domain, and area over which one is the sole sovereign. People have their offices, their gardens, their kitchen, their car, but when a woman does not have the right to say what she does with her body, and what the going rate is to join her, then she does not have even that most basic of domains, and if her own body is not her domain, then can anything else really be? As for the religious aspect, what is wrong with prostitution?
Since the dawn of time, women have been striking deals with men as to mating rights and the benefits of mating with one or another male. Women have one thing that men want (well at least 70 - 90 % depending on whose statistics you read) And what women have, lets face it is a commodity, they are all about the same, it is pretty packaging and prestige factor that make one more expensive than the other. Miss America does not marry the local auto mechanic, she doesn't have to, and she can sell her sexual currency at a much higher price. The cashier at the local Wal-Mart will have a different lot in store for her, and this is because men know what they need to provide for which women.
The famous rock song "if her daddy's rich take her out for a meal, if her daddy's poor you can do what you feel" This concept exists and needs to be changed and one way to do that would be to legalize prostitution, to bring it out into the broad light of day and see how silly the price we pay for Puritanism really is. Women need to be respected. Laws governing women's bodies need to be repealed. Prostitution needs to be legalized. Bibliography:
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