Of Prostitution

After deciding to disclose that my grandmother had supported my mother and her brother by engaging in prostitution during WW2, I’ve decided to discuss the practice and ethics of prostitution directly for the first time.  Though I’ve studied this issue on the periphery of my professional work for decades, I decided to buy an academic work on prostitution across the globe over the past few thousand years. Love for Sale by Norwegian, Ringdal, Nils Johan. It turned out to be a very scholarly work that was as well documented as one could hope. In his book he put what I already knew into the context of the larger human experience. It was well worth my effort.  Here are some thoughts on the subject after reading his book.

The first issue I’ve had to conceptualize is what constitutes prostitution in the first place.

This might seem a silly question, but its not. The current popular American idea of a prostitute is mostly encapsulated in the provocatively dressed woman who is paid for a fifteen-minute trick in a cheap motel.  While indeed this model has some basis in modern urban culture, it is in no way indicative of the scope of what COULD and has been called prostitution across cultures and time.   I think a good analogy for the current vision of a prostitute compared to prostitutes in the past would be to consider people engaged in making shoes. Today the average person across the globe who makes shoes is an industrial worker who spends merely seconds on each shoe engaged in the same repetitive task over and over and over again.  She is not a craftsman, she is a drudge laborer.  However, for most of the history of humankind, a cobbler was a craftsman with each shoe taking hours or even days to complete and each shoe completed was a reflection of the maker's skill and personality.  

The change has not made shoemakers bad, it only devalued the human beings involved in the process due to no fault of their own. So too has the prostitute all too often become a drudge worker who is devalued as is the service she (or he) performs.

I should say, I’ve never paid anyone for sex and simply couldn’t imagine doing so. But I have known a number of women who could justly be said to have been engaging in prostitution. Yet, even in my time, the circumstances are varied.  Back in the early 80’s I was working my way through college at the Palmer House, a 2,000-room high-end business hotel in downtown Chicago.  At such a place there are many, many people both employees, guests, and just random people passing through. About a year into my employment, I’d gotten to know a pretty young woman (about my age at the time) and I would call her a friend. She dressed in attractive (if somewhat sexy) business attire and I’d chat with her about once a week. Yet, I never asked directly why she was in the hotel so often. It was only after half a year or so one of the security staff asked me if I’d seen one of the prostitutes who frequented the club on the lobby floor that I understood her presence.  OK, I was 19 years old and very naive. She later died of AIDS. It was the first person I’d ever known to die of anything. It was quite upsetting.

Years later, as a social worker, I worked with a number of women who could be called prostitutes, yet none of them were streetwalkers. In my experience, they were simply working moms trying to do the best they could for their kids.  Yes, some took cash on the barrelhead for sexual services on a regular basis, but most were much more nuanced.  Some simply took “gifts” from those men they slept with, while others (most of them actually) moved from man to man with their kids sleeping with him for a few weeks or months at a time exchanging both household tasks and sex for room, board and sometimes spending money.  While today most people would not call them prostitutes, yet over the course of human existence, that kind of temporary sex-for-support arrangement is likely the single most common form of selling sexual services. The women have been called temporary wives and/or mistresses and currently in vogue is the concept of the paid “girlfriend experience.”

Whatever this mixed social/sexual arrangement is called, it is a quid pro quo, transactional use of sex and has been practiced across the globe at different times and places. Yet it is still prostitution in the strict sense of the word.

To be sure, the fifteen-minute trick (more or less) has been around for a very long time, but mostly in slave brothels operated by militaries or mining companies across the globe (and across the millennia) . Enslaved prostitutes were (are) simply seen as commodities that are cheaper to replace when they break down (or die) than to care for.  In such places where this industrial scale prostitution is practiced, women (and often very young girls) live in tiny cubicles where they are expected to service one man after another all day, every day. From fragmentary reports from antiquity all the way up until detailed investigations in the 20th century, they are places of horror in which the women were kept by force.  The most detailed investigations are of the slave brothels (comfort stations) run by the  Japanese during WW2 where hundreds of thousands of women were forced to serve one soldier after another, up to sixty a day for years until they were liberated at the end of the war.

Yet, in nearly every case we must understand this kind of brutal treatment of prostitutes goes hand in hand with the brutal treatment of the larger population where male workers are routinely worked to death.  Industrial slave prostitution is little different than life for Roman galley slaves or enslaved Africans in sugar plantations during the 17th & 18th centuries where an enslaved man’s lifespan was measured in months.  So, in considering the morality of prostitution, one must consider that the abusive conditions of sex workers have historically been mostly a function of their low social status than of the work they perform.  Prostitutes who are treated as sub-human repositories for semen live in societies where other low-valued people are seen more as objects than humans with intrinsic value.

Of course, the virtual enslavement of prostitutes continues to this day with the same pain and misery. Any forced prostitution whether it is achieved by fear of beatings, confiscation of passports, or through deliberately feeding a drug addiction is grossly immoral and should be categorically condemned.

On the opposite extreme of industrialized prostitution of enslaved people, were the religious and luxury prostitutes who have also existed across time and cultures. In both cases, the sex workers are highly trained and valued.

In societies across the globe, both sacred prostitutes and luxury prostitutes could hold their heads high in social settings and control their own destinies and wealth. Such women often enjoyed lives that were on par with the men of the upper social castes.  In a great many cultures, female prostitutes had far better and freer lives than did any other women in their societies.

From the oldest written records dating back some 4,000 years, young women who joined temples entered environments much like those in European nunneries of the Middle Ages. They could expect longer, safer, and easier lives than their sisters who remained in the larger social structures.  While after they finished their training, sex would be part, (often a very small part), of their duties, they were still given titles that indicated that sex was the highest valued thing they brought to their god(s).  What is hard for modern people to understand is that Temple prostitutes were primarily religious workers, not just gussied-up brothel girls. When a divine whore invited a man to enter her, it was nearly always part of a lengthy process that was closely regulated to ensure that the goddess was being honored. Almost universally men were expected to clean their bodies before touching the representative of the goddess and there was a firm expectation that he would serve the pleasure of the woman.  The temple prostitute was expected to be able to give the man (and sometimes woman or couple) guidance as to how to give and receive the pleasure that the divine expected. She was not a fifteen-minute trick.

Until the British authorities in India finally stamped it out nearly completely In the late 1800’s, a young girl going to a temple to train to be a temple “dancer” could expect a life that was better than most others, both male and female.  But by then, they were the final surviving type of temple prostitute, a relic of thousands of years of tradition.  However because it did survive so long, European writers left us some of the most detailed accounts of how these women (and frequently men) danced, sang, and served the guests at banquets and festivals for hours before they would invite individuals or couples to an alcove to begin physical contact.

When you think of the luxury prostitute, think of the 18th-19th century Japanese geisha, the Renaissance-era Viennese courtesan, or Greek Hetaera all of whom were leaders in social circles and could become quite wealthy in their own right. Similarly, luxury prostitutes in many cultures have been afforded honor and respect by their clients.  One way this was enforced was that not everyone could enter her house.  Depending on the culture, the client might make appointments months in advance, and/or have to have a referral to vouch for their character and social standing. And even once in the house, the luxury prostitute had to choose the client and was free to turn them away. And of course, they were VERY expensive. These women might only see a couple of clients a week and each encounter lasted from afternoon until late in the evening or until morning, and actual sex was only a small fraction of the time spent at the prostitute’s house.

Almost universal was that luxury prostitutes spent years in training as apprentices. Though the specific skills they had to master varied by culture, common were reading aloud, rhetoric, music, and dance.  Like all apprentices, they entered service as children, spending years or decades serving their master doing all the menial tasks such as prep work as well as accompanying the master to work and learning by observation, only slowly easing into doing the work themselves. 

The upshot of this was that a master prostitute spent most of her time with a client, relaxing, talking and just making herself desirable as her apprentices danced, sang, and served food.  In Europe, we have ample records that those highly successful prostitutes who did not marry one of their clients had long careers lasting into their 50s and even 60s.  Those who did marry often became the scions of the community. The fact they’d spent years as a prostitute did not inhibit their entry into polite society. 

I should take this as a place to mention one thing that becomes apparent in studying prostitutes from across the past few thousand years and across the globe. It appears that part of a professional prostitute’s training must have included effective birth control.  From what evidence can be gathered, long before latex or chemical birth control, career prostitutes have far fewer pregnancies than wives despite the fact they were inseminated perhaps a hundred times as often.  There is evidence that things like cervical caps made of beeswax have been used as far back as ancient Egypt.  It is reasonable to assume that birth control methods were sort of a trade secret going back beyond recorded history. What we do know is as late as the early 20th century it was a crime in many places (including the US) to reveal and pass on that knowledge.  Despite how it is portrayed in right-wing media, in the US, Planned Parenthood’s first battle was to tell married women how not to get pregnant. More than a few activists went to prison for passing on that secret. So, it is no surprise we have little written descriptions of birth control prior to 1800.

Actually, in looking at the religious right’s 19th-century fight against prostitution in English-speaking countries, we see the game plan they still use to try to control women’s sexuality today. One has to understand that since St. Augustine, the religious right has seen a woman enjoying sex as the number one enemy of society and God.  The idea that women are raving sex maniacs seeking to destroy the morality of God-fearing men has been integral to conservative Christian theology for 1,500 years.  Prostitution has been the focal point for much of that time.  But understand, for close to 500 years, Catholic theologians have equated any woman who has sex with multiple men as a whore. Several times pronouncements were put out setting a number for how many men a woman could sleep with before she was officially a prostitute. Money did not have to change hands. In fact, a woman who had sex for money to support herself was considered less sinful than one who had sex with multiple men for her own pleasure.

To be fair, some of this predates the Christian era. Jewish writings tell young men to beware whorish women who lay in wait to devour their souls with their raving vaginas. But it is mostly Christian leaders who present a woman’s vagina as a gateway to hell… and as an open maul that will eat Godly men alive.

IN the 1800s starting in France, doctors and public officials became alarmed at the rates of syphilis.  Within a few years, they worked up protocols of licensing and inspecting prostitutes, quarantining and treating women found to have active infections.  The protocols worked and spread all over Europe and North America. Syphilis rates plummeted.  But to the religious right in the British Empire, this was a BAD thing. To them, sin should be punished and God’s punishment was syphilis. Yes, the same line of reasoning came back in the 1980’s about AIDS. In time the activists got the laws repealed and guess what… Syphilis rates skyrocketed. But then as now, the religious right simply don’t care how much pain and death comes to the people they are “saving.”

The net effect of the good Christian’s work was not less prostitution, but the stigmatization and marginalization of prostitutes that sticks with us to this day in the Anglophile world.

It appears that throughout the ages, prostitution has most often been a way stop for young women from their teens to their early twenties on their way to a “normal” life.  In sub-Saharan Africa, up until the mid-20th century, young women from all but the wealthiest families might spend a few years selling sexual services in order to gather the capital (usually cattle)  to make a good marriage match. In doing so, the young family had a higher degree of financial security than would be possible any other way. Since it was simply an expected path to motherhood, it was not stigmatized (well until the Christian Missionaries made it so).

For millennia, girls who engaged in prostitution across the globe have had the off-ramp of marriage, yet for others it is a career path. Traditionally older prostitutes become cosmetic sellers, madams, or trainers for young girls. By this method, prostitution was often a desirable life-long career path for women in societies that gave little regard for fulfillment for working-class people, male or female.  Of course, not all women could pursue this path, physical beauty and some innate talents like singing and wit were prerequisites just as strength and stamina were required to be a successful blacksmith. To be clear, a good deal of the path to success was having the luck of being chosen by the right master and finding the right clients. But that is certainly not unique to prostitution. In all walks of life, being born in the right place to the right family with the right physical, emotional and mental capacities is the luck of the draw.  But for the fortunate ones, life was good. We know this because from the 17th century right up until the 20th we have written accounts by women (or those who have interviewed them) that indicate many successful prostitutes were very happy with their lives. We can only extrapolate this backward to before such written accounts were kept that in societies across time and cultures where prostitutes were well-treated, many women have found this a rewarding life.

Now, between the enslaved women in industrial brothels and the fine life of the luxury or sacred temple priestess lies most of the world's prostitutes. Every case is different, but we know for instance for every woman practicing inside of the temple, several others worked in semi-official circumstances in homes or small brothels just outside the temple. Think of them as working-class women. They served more men, with less formality on a scale from very similar to conditions inside the temple to conditions not much better than streetwalkers.  Sadly such women left very little in the way of evidence of their lives. Writers and artists tend to focus on those at the top of the pyramid.

This brings me to the idea of who exactly should be considered a prostitute.

Throughout most of human history, most people had very little control over their lives and how “their betters” used their bodies.  Slavery and serfdom were nearly universal until the past couple of hundred years.  Slaves by definition had no ownership of their bodies. The master could put his dick into anyone he owned, woman, boy, or girl whenever he wanted. Similarly, he could take money to let other men do the same. There is a reason why African Americans have roughly 50% European DNA.

Surfs nominally had more ownership of their bodies, but in reality, if the landowner wanted to fuck a man’s wife or daughter, the surf had little agency to stop it.  Even as late as the Victorian era, while it was bad manners for a man to fuck his young maid, it was so common as to be considered nearly universal.  Letting the master of the house (or his sons) fuck you was a fully expected part of the job. No working-class man who married a girl who’d been a maid expected to break her cherry.

So, is it prostitution when a woman takes a job when she expects she’ll have to provide sexual services to her boss at least on occasion? Right through the 1970’s a young attractive woman who took a job as an executive secretary knew that at some point she’d have to choose between putting out and keeping that job. Were such women prostituting themselves when they did not quit in the face of an exec that hounded her for sex?

Or what about a woman who accepts an invitation for an overnight trip with a man that she’s not already interested in as a sexual partner because she wants to go to the place he’s offering? Is she prostituting herself by trading the trip for sex?  Or even more ubiquitous is a girl or woman who has sex with a guy to gain social standing engaging in prostitution?  Does it take physical money exchanging hands to count as prostitution?

And I should add, that throughout history men and boys have taken money for sex too. According to Johan, it varies by culture, but overall, as much as 15% of prostitution over time has been done by males for other males. However, he points out that nearly all the clients who buy sex from males present in public as purely heterosexual.

Single-sex environments were very common throughout the world until the 20th century. In them, men had sex with other men as a normal part of life. In most times and places, males were openly available at brothels. A successful brothel owner just assumed that some clients will want dick, so he had the personnel on hand for it. Amusingly, only in the English-speaking world were male prostitutes systemically hidden, but they were still there. Males were either hidden in women’s attire or secretly switched out for the woman once the client arrived in his room.

Historically, males of all ages have serviced other males, but in societies where women are openly free to choose their own partners, middle-aged women also pay hot young men to service them. Throughout most of history, male prostitutes were young, from early puberty to mid-20’s, however, in recent decades there has been a significant rise in muscular men in their 20s and 30’s serving both male and female clients.

Now I want to directly ask, Is all transactional sex prostitution?

In my novel, I present several women who bring up these issues.  Was Gina Richards a prostitute for taking money to make high-end home sex videos with rich clients? Later, did she prostitute herself to provide her daughter with a stable home by sleeping in Bob’s bed in what she knew was transactional sex?  Is Heather prostituting herself to work for the LeMarcos knowing that part of the deal is that she is Brian’s mistress on the weekends and would be asked to have sex with company clients on occasion? On the other hand, is DeeDee really a prostitute when she does not require a fixed cash payment for sex? She takes money as a gift to God, but she doesn’t have “a set price,” so is it really prostitution when she accepts those gifts?  When it is hard to define what constitutes prostitution, it is even harder to make blanket statements about the morality of “selling sex.”

It is so easy to sidestep the questions of the morality and ethics of prostitution if one simply sticks to the idea that all prostitutes are drug-addicted streetwalkers controlled by violent and abusive pimps. While it is true that prostitutes are more often victims of assault than other people, and yes, prostitutes are more likely to be addicts, it does not follow that selling sexual favors causes violence or addiction. In studies done in the 80s and 90s it was found that few prostitutes become addicts, rather addicts turn to prostitution to support their habit. The difference is important. 

Further, the root cause of the high rate of violence toward prostitutes is that in both Europe and North America, beating, raping, or robbing a prostitute has effectively a zero percent prosecution rate. Police not only don’t arrest men for those crimes, but all too often, they are perpetrators. Prostitutes effectively get no protection from authorities… so it is no wonder they are targeted.

Even so, several large-scale surveys of active prostitutes in Europe and the US (including streetwalkers found the majority of them were happy with their choice of employment. This would certainly be as good as women who are waitresses or cashiers who are paid far less than prostitutes. It would be interesting to know the relative satisfaction rates of high-end prostitutes with women in management positions.

I would suggest that the key to transactional sexual morality is not about the fact that one party is taking money to have sex, but rather the presence or absence of mutual respect.  So, perhaps the most important thing to consider about the morality of prostitution is the view of prostitutes by those who have power and influence. In the US and Europe, beginning in the late Victorian era, public officials have nearly universally treated prostitution as a public menace, so that the prostitutes themselves are seen as the problem justifying official mistreatment. For over a century, prostitutes have known their safety and lives are worth very little to the authorities. Since the late 1800’s it has been all too common for girls who are picked up by the police on the mere suspicion of prostitution to be subject to what can only be called official rape when sexual services are part of the conditions for their release. Yet no matter how many women complain about it, the cases where a police official is called to account for forcing a woman to have sex with him are almost nonexistent.  Prostitutes simply aren’t seen as worthy of respect by authorities. It is no wonder that in their private lives, prostitutes are subject to violence far more than other people.

Can we blame the victims of institutional bias for their abuse? Can we point a morally judgmental finger at prostitutes and blame them when they are mistreated?  I say no. One cannot wrap evil behavior up in moral self-righteousness and call it good.  This is most egregious in cases where the prostitute is not free to stop selling sex.  As a Christian, I know that Jesus called on us to lift up the downtrodden and abused, yet all too often it is the so-called Christians who work to keep prostitutes marginalized, keeping them at risk of abuse and violence.

This brings us to the real question, can prostitution be ethical and moral?

I say yes it can… but that is not to say that it is always or even usually is these days.

Consider this, at the turn of the 20th century, anxious American women went to their doctors for relief through what was called hysterical paroxysm… which was nothing more than the doctor giving the woman a hand job to orgasm.  If that was done in a massage parlor today, it would be called illegal prostitution, yet because it was done by a professional, it was not called such.  Similarly to this day in large cities, one can find professional sex coaches who work with couples or individuals to achieve sexual fulfillment.  Even though in many cases there is direct sexual contact to orgasm, it is not called prostitution.  And or course there is the now ubiquitous porn industry that pays men and women to have sex, yet the producer is not called a pimp and the actors are not called prostitutes.

In simple fact, we have a great deal of prostitution going on under other guises.  The issue does not seem to be sex for money, but how it is cast.   

I think society would be much better off if we went back to the model of regulated prostitution of the late 1800’s.  If there were a system of training, much like we have for massage or cosmetology with rules, insurance, and licenses required, most of the problems we see in modern prostitution would be eliminated.  Practice requirements such as a two-hour minimum for sessions which would include warm up and cool down for both client and prostitute to prevent the industrial model from reappearing.  Registration and licensure would effectively eliminate illegal trafficking. Perhaps most important of all, would be a minimum wage set high enough that a prostitute could make a living with two clients a day, and limits on how many clients a “professional” can see per week.  And of course, regular medical exams.  All these things have been used in the past to raise and maintain the status of the prostitute to one of a valued professional. 

One of the commonalities of all the abusive forms of prostitution is that the cost of the prostitute’s services are so low they must service dozens of clients a day to survive. In part of Asia today, in seedy redlight districts a blow job or a fuck costs no more than a beer. At those wages, there is  no way for the prostitute to gain social value, nor is there a way for the prostitute to move out of the gutter.

Through such changes, lonely people of all types could receive the therapeutic benefit of skin-to-skin body contact in a safe and mutually beneficial manner.  We live in a society that is increasingly marked by loneliness, yet the process of finding someone to share with intimately has become even more difficult and even dangerous.   Consider the following three kinds of people who would benefit from non-exploitive paid sexual contact:

The socially inept young adult (male or female) with little or no sexual experience who longs to be held in caring arms, but has no idea how to make that happen and wouldn’t know what to do if he/she did.

The middle-aged man or woman whose spouse is sick or simply no longer has the desire for intimate touching of any kind. 

The man or woman in a heterosexual relationship who feels strong urges to have intimate contact with someone of their own sex. Currently, their only option is going online or cruising, both of which carry great risks.

With the availability of skilled and licensed “intimacy therapists” such people would have more fulfilling lives… and those people who truly enjoy sharing sexually and being appreciated and respected for doing it would have a positive career path.

But, even if we could have legislation passed to make this happen, critical would be for law enforcement to treat prostitutes as citizens with rights that must be protected by the police and from the police. Thieving pimps/madams would have to be prosecuted as would violent clients. 

Of course, sadly the chance of such legislation is about nill here in the US. We have the real problem that the religious right has no desire to increase sexual freedoms. They don’t want to make prostitution safer. Though they no longer say it clearly, the underlying belief in the Christian right is that women are a moral danger to men and men must make them behave by force.

I write all this in memory of my grandmother who braved the social stigma to give pleasure to American soldiers and sailors going off to war as she made money to care for my mother all those years ago.