I don’t know what I think about prostitution.
I am opposed to the drug addicted streetwalkers and people-trafficking brothels who use drug addition, rape, violence and fear to control their workforce, but what about the suburban prostitutes who work from home, see a few clients and make a decent (no pun intended) living from it? In principle I feel that regulated, legalised prostitution whereby women can work on their own or with a partner (not a pimp) from their homes, with regular cooperation with the police, access to regular sexual health checkups and mandatory condom use would not be a problem. Make it as safe as possible and allow the transactions to occur. However, when I actually consider what prostitution is – allowing a stranger to have sex with you for money – I cannot help but be disturbed by it. What occurs in your life to make you think that buying women for sex is acceptable (or at least acceptable enough to not prevent you doing it, whatever guilt or shame you feel) or that selling your body is a viable form of work?
However, it’s more complex than that. If it’s an economic choice between prostitution or low skilled low paid work is there much difference between being fucked by punters or being fucked by your employer? What options do these women have? Due to psychological or economic conditions, or both, these women have very few options in terms of earning anything like a decent wage. As qualifications become mandatory for every job, however ‘low skilled’ it is, more and more people are failing to find work. Add to this a dependency on drugs or children to feed and all of a sudden maybe selling your body for cash doesn’t seem too bad after all. What if the only jobs available to you are poorly paid, unsecure and physically or psychologically demanding? I am by no means condoning prostitution as a career choice, but if you’re at the bottom of the economic barrel what options do you have?
But then I take the thought further. What defines prostitution? What about taking a partner out to dinner to ‘wine and dine’ them, the intended outcome being sex? What about flowers and chocolate on VD? The concept of ‘he pays’ when it comes to dating reflects the transaction involved. He pays, so they have sex. Marriages of convenience are no doubt prostitution, with the same punter again and again. He provides the house, the lifestyle, the money and she provides the sex. What this boils down to is, how often is sex an equal transaction? Consider a wife and husband, both of whom work and have children. The husband is the main breadwinner as the wife could not return to her former high-paying job after taking time off for bringing up her children. Their children have grown up and neither parent is happy in the marriage. The husband is content to bumble along and live his life, the wife wishes to leave but cannot. She doesn’t earn enough on her own to afford to rent or buy somewhere to live, so she is trapped. She remains in the marriage, has sex from time to time and maintains the house. She is trading her body (and her manual labour) for economic security. It’s hardly an equal partnership, nor a happy one.
If you believe the statistics that 1 man in 10 visits prostitutes, then all sorts of men are involved in the sex trade – married, single, old and young. That statistic is kind of staggering, of every 10 men you know it’s quite likely that one of them has visited a prostitute at least once in his lifetime. I’m sure men visit prostitutes for a variety of reasons – guilt, an inability to open up to women, being drunk and horny, no strings sex…but possibly the most concerning of all (besides the men who visits prostitutes to beat them and murder them) are those that use the excuse of ‘I’m too ugly/old/insert excuse here to get sex’. This is rather telling. It presumes that ‘getting’ sex (a concept related to buying presents to ensure sex – see above) is a right, not a privilege. Since when? The whole concept that ‘we don’t have any choice, we have to visit prostitutes’ concerns me. The underlying attitude is ‘but that’s what women are FOR! They just wont have sex with us when we demand it!’, which rather highlights how these men view women, and corroborates my gut feeling that most of the men who visits prostitutes have skewed ideas about women and relationships.
Prostitution raises all sorts of issues for me; the equality of relationships (or lack of it); how work takes your physical and mental faculties and uses them produce more money than you’ll ever earn; the use of money, violence or emotional blackmail to get sex; men’s attitude towards women and women’s attitude towards themselves; the violence and exploitation that seems an inherent part of capitalism…
Ultimately some huge sea changes have to occur in society to mean that all genders can have sex and relationships with each other in an equal, non-exploitative way. I don’t feel too hopeful.
