PART ONE SEXUAL
CHAPTER ONE THE PROSTITUTE
Subject to ceaseless harassment by blue laws, church groups, chambers of commerce, etc., prostitutes nevertheless continue to trade with the public.
The value of their service is proven by the fact that people continue to seek them out, despite legal and civic opposition.
A prostitute may be defined as one who engages in the voluntary trade of sexual services
for a fee.
The essential part of the definition, however, is voluntary trade.
A magazine cover by Norman Rockwell some time ago illustrated the essence of prostitution,
if not the specifics.
It portrayed a milkman and a pie man standing near their trucks, each busily eating a pie
and Drinking Milk, both obviously pleased with their voluntary trade.
Those lacking sufficient imagination will see no connection between the prostitute entertaining
her customer and the aforementioned milk and pie episode.
But, in both cases, two people have come together on a voluntary basis in an attempt to mutually
gain satisfaction.
In neither case is force or fraud applied. Of course the customer of the prostitute may
later decide that the services he received were not worth the money he paid. The prostitute
may feel that the money she was paid did not fully compensate her for the services she
provided. Similar dissatisfactions could also occur in the milk pie trade. The milk could
have been sour or the pie underbaked, but both regrets would be after the fact and would
not alter the description of these trades as voluntary.
If all the participants were not willing, the trades would not have taken place.
There are those, women's liberationists among them, who lament the plight of the poor downtrodden
prostitute and who think of her life as demeaning and exploitative.
But the prostitute does not look upon the sale of sex as demeaning.
After considering the good features, short hours, high remuneration, with the drawbacks,
harassment by the police, enforced commissions to her pimp, uninspiring working conditions,
the prostitute obviously prefers her work, otherwise she would not continue it.
There are, of course, many negative aspects experienced by prostitutes which belie the
happy hooker image.
There are prostitutes who are drug addicts, prostitutes who are beaten by pimps, and prostitutes
who are held in brothels against their will.
But these sordid aspects have little to do with the intrinsic career of prostitution.
There are nurses and doctors who are kidnapped and forced to perform for fugitives from justice.
There are carpenters who are drug addicts, there are bookkeepers who are beaten by muggers.
We would hardly conclude that any of these professions or vocations are suspect, demeaning
or exploitative.
The life of the prostitute is as good or as bad as she wishes it to be.
She enters it voluntarily, qua prostitute, and is free to leave at any time.
Why then the harassment and prohibitions against prostitution?
The momentum does not come from the customer.
He is a willing participant.
If the customer decides that patronization of a prostitute is not to his advantage, he
can stop.
Nor does the move toward prohibition of prostitution come from the prostitutes themselves.
They have volunteered for their tasks and can almost always quit if they change their
The Impetus for the Prohibition of Prostitution is initiated by third parties, not directly
involved in the trades.
Their reasons vary from group to group, from area to area, and from year to year.
What they have in common is the fact that they are outside parties.
They have neither stake nor standing in the matter, and should be ignored.
To allow them to decide this matter is as absurd as allowing an outsider to decide
about the trade between the milkman and the pie man.
Why then are the two cases treated differently?
Imagine a league called the Decent Eaters, organized to espouse the doctrine that eating
pie together with milk is evil.
Even if it could be demonstrated that the league against pie and milk and the league
Ludwig against prostitution had identical intellectual merit, namely, none.
The reaction to the two would still be different.
The attempt to prohibit pie and milk would evoke only laughter, but there would be a
more tolerant attitude toward the attempt to prohibit prostitution.
There is something in operation which staunchly resists an intellectual penetration of the
prostitution question.
Why has prostitution not been legalized?
Though the arguments against this legalization are without merit, they have never been clearly
assailed by the intellectual community as specious.
The difference between sexual trades, such as the ones that take place in prostitution,
and other trades, such as the pie-milk trade, seems to be based on, or at least connected
The following well-known joke illustrates this point.
A good-looking man asks an attractive and virtuous woman if she will go to bed with
him for $100,000.
She is appalled by the offer. However, after some reflection, she concludes that, as evil
as prostitution is, she could use the proceeds of the offer for charity and good works.
The man seems charming, not at all dangerous or repugnant. She shyly says, yes. The man
then asks, how about for twenty dollars? The woman indignantly replies, how dare you?
What kind of woman do you think I am? As she slaps his face. Well, we've already established
what kind of woman you are. Now we're trying to establish the price, he replies.
The degree to which the man's reply strikes a telling blow against the woman is a small
measure of the scorn heaped upon individuals involved in this kind of endeavor. There are
There are two approaches which might combat the attitude that paying for sex is degrading.
There is the frontal attack which simply denies that it is wrong to pay for sex.
This however would hardly convince those who think of prostitution as an evil.
The other possibility would be to show that we are always paying for sex, all of us, all
the time, and therefore we should not cavil at the arrangements between a professional
In what sense can it be said that we all engage in trade and payments when we engage in sexual
activity? At the very least, we have to offer something to our prospective partners before
they will consent to have sex with us. With explicit prostitution, the offer is in terms
of Cash.
In other cases, the trade is not so obvious.
Many dating patterns clearly conform to the prostitution model.
The male is expected to pay for the movies, dinner, flowers, etc. and the female is expected
to reciprocate with sexual services.
The marriages in which the husband provides the financial elements and the wife, the sexual
Social and Housekeeping functions also conforms clearly enough to the model.
In fact, all voluntary human relationships, from love relationships to intellectual relationships,
are trades.
In the case of romantic love and marriage, the trade is in terms of affection, consideration,
kindness, etc.
The trade may be a happy one, and the partners may find joy in the giving, but it is still
a trade. It is clear that unless affection, kindness, etc. or something is given, it will
not be reciprocated. In the same way, if two non-mercenary poets did not get anything from
each other, their relationship too would terminate. If there are trades, there are also payments.
Where there are payments for relationships which include sexual congress, such as marriage
and in some dating patterns, there is prostitution, according to the definition of that term.
Several social commentators have correctly likened marriage to prostitution.
But all relationships where trade takes place, those which include sex as well as those which
do not, are a form of prostitution.
Instead of condemning all such relationships because of their similarity to prostitution,
prostitution should be viewed as just one kind of interaction in which all human beings
participate.
Objections should not be raised to any of them, not to marriage, not to friendship,
to Prostitution.