Prostitution

Prostitution in the United States

Premarital coitus and prostitution

Entry into prostitution

World of the prostitute

Patterns of prostitution

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Prostitution is the granting of sexual access on a relatively indiscriminate basis for payment either in money or in goods, depending on the complexity of the local economic system. Payment is acknowledged to be for a specific sexual performance. Prostitution is a service that may be performed by either males or females and for either males or females, although in practice in nearly all societies acts of prostitution are commonly performed by females for males or by males for males. The focus of this article is exclusively on female prostitution.

Money and sexuality in prostitution. While prostitutes may be selective about the kinds of sexual activities that they will perform for money, it is always clear that some kind of sexual act is available from them. In like manner, prostitutes may be relatively selective about their clientele, choosing not to take those who are dirty or deformed, those who request sexual activities that they think aberrant, or those who violate certain of the norms of conduct between prostitute and customer. However, within the limits set by these idiosyncrasies, the entree to the prostitute is the capacity to pay for the relationship. Payment for the specific act is what distinguishes the prostitute from the mistress or from females who accept a range of gifts while having sexual contact with a male. While these latter cases are marginal, it is important to keep central to the discussion the immediate nexus between money and sexuality as a crucial part of the prostitute-customer relationship.

Money is the most public object in the society. In Simmel’s words, “Money, with all its colorlessness and indifference, becomes the common denominator of all values; irreparably it hollows out the core of things, their individuality, their specific value, and their incomparability” ([1902–1917] 1950, p. 414). Money is the universal lubricant and the universal metric; it provides the society with a fluidity and an ease of exchange that is deeply imbedded in the modern consciousness. In an era when marriage is no longer the exchange of goods for a reproductive object, and when there exists a romantic ideology dedicated to the self-selection of the mate, the private experience of sexuality is the polar opposite of the public quality of money. The sexual experience is expected to be individual, affective, and incommensurable, and it is in these attributes that it carries its special salience for society.

Social functions of prostitution. It is in the act of prostitution that the most public and the most private values in the society meet without conflicting. Sexual gratification is legitimately expected only within the marital bond, although there are quasi-legitimate forms of sexuality that are proscribed but not punished, either because they are tacitly recognized to promote marriage (premarital coitus between those in love) or because they reduce sexual drives during the absence of a marital partner (masturbation either in adolescence or during marriage). Prostitution had some of these quasi-legitimate functions in American society during the nineteenth century and the first quarter of the twentieth. The reason was that, so long as both premarital coitus and masturbation were frowned upon, the function of the “bad” woman could be seen as one of protecting the virtue of those who were “good,” and so of maintaining a certain property value. Given the large number of migrant males, many of whom never married, it was to be expected that police officials would conclude that the existence of prostitution was a necessary evil, or even that it was a positive good in that it reduced the number of rapes in the community.

From the evidence that is available, it seems that the way in which prostitution is organized, diffused, and evaluated is a function of the significance of marriage in the society and the ways in which society organizes access to legitimate sexual experience. Where there are great restraints on premarital coitus and females are highly valued for their reproductive capacities, prostitution among females will exist as an alternative form of gratification for large numbers of males.

Prostitution in the United States

A basic shift in the pattern of the use of prostitutes in the United States correlates with a major campaign against prostitution after World War I, but it is more significantly tied to other shifts in the structure of premarital coitus. Figures published in 1948 in Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male chronicle this shift, for while the proportion among males born in 1910 and after who had ever gone to a prostitute is the same as for males born in 1909 and before, the number of times that members of later age cohorts had gone to prostitutes was from two-thirds to one-half less (Kinsey et al. 1948, pp. 595–609). The most substantial changes were among those of lesser education; however, this change was true even of the college-educated, whose rate of contact with prostitutes had always been low and might therefore be expected to have remained stable. The differences between the college and noncollege rates in all cohorts are indicative of the impact of social class factors in this area of sexual behavior (ibid., pp. 351–355). It is clear that contact with prostitutes currently accounts for only a small proportion of the sexual experiences of American males in early adulthood and that most sexual experience is centered on peer group activity that results in initiation into heterosexual coitus (Kirkendall 1961, pp. 22–55). It is among males who do not marry or who were divorced or separated in their thirties that the proportion going to prostitutes increases to about 15 to 20 per cent of all sexual contacts after age 35 (Kinsey et al. 1948, pp. 249–259).

At first glance it would appear that these effects might be due to the decreasing visibility of prostitution, resulting from law enforcement and increased legal sanctions. But it is likely, given the intractability of the control of prostitution, that this change was the result of other forces. As a result of these forces, the proportion of never-married males in American society decreased; there was a shift in courtship patterns; and sexual contact between unmarried couples increased in saliency. During the same period in which the number of males going to prostitutes was decreasing, there was a concomitant rise in the proportion of respectable females who were having premarital coitus. This was an increase from about one-quarter of all females in the cohorts born before 1900 to about one-half in the cohorts born between 1900 and 1929 (Kinsey et al. 1953, pp. 298–302; Terman 1938; Freedman 1965). This shift occurred at all social levels and is as true of females with grade-school educations as of those with college educations. These changes in rates represent a fundamental shift in the role of coitus before marriage in American society, a shift that indicates a major break with nineteenth-century values and a change in the status of women.

Premarital coitus and prostitution

While the data from Kinsey and others indicate that the social class factor has substantial effects on the sexual behavior of males, there is no such finding in regard to the sexual behavior of females. Indeed, the premarital coitus rates of males tend to be a great deal higher than those for females, except among the college-educated, where the differences are more moderate (Kinsey et al. 1953, pp. 78–80). It is especially at the very lowest educational level distinguished in the Kinsey reports that the rates of premarital coitus for males are much greater than for females. Part of this may be exaggeration by the males interviewed, given the saliency of such coitus to them. Nevertheless, it is clear that their rates of premarital coitus are far greater than those reported by females in the Kinsey sample at the same educational level.

The explanation of these rate differentials lies in the fact that premarital coitus for the majority of females at all social levels, but most significantly among the better educated, takes place primarily with one male—the fiance. Indeed, nearly half of all females who report having experienced premarital coitus state that it was only with the fiancé (ibid., pp. 291–293), and about 55 per cent of them state that it was with only one male. Another 35 per cent had premarital coitus with two to five males. Of women who had premarital coitus but, as is characteristic of lower-class girls, married before twenty, the proportion reporting that premarital coitus was with five or fewer males is 90 per cent (ibid., table 78, p. 336).

These data indicate that patterns of premarital coitus are relatively similar for females across the social-class spectrum but that there exists a minority of females, primarily of lower-class origins, who serve as sexual targets for fairly large numbers of males and at fairly high rates of contact. These females, in addition, account for most of the instances of sexual contact between middle-class males and lower-class girls. This suggests that a relatively small number of females are serving the same functions as prostitutes did in the past, but without charging for this sexual activity. However, it is from this small group of females that the largest proportion of women who go into prostitution is drawn.

Entry into prostitution

The conventional image of the first experience of prostitution has commonly been one of innocence betrayed or, to judge from the biographies of many former prostitutes, a severely traumatic experience. However, for the bulk of girls who enter prostitution from a background of premarital promiscuity, the transition is untraumatic, and for some may even be an entry into a far more leisurely and less pressured way of life (Young 1964; McManus 1960, pp. 81–86). Indeed, even in the nineteenth century the working conditions of the prostitute in England seemed to some observers to be less physically damaging than either work in the factories or the exhaustion of repeated childbearing (Acton 1857, p. 59). The harmful effects of prostitution are far less obvious: they are attendant upon an increasing involvement in the life of prostitution correlated with decreasing social relationships with others outside that world. To the degree that there is specific trauma upon entering prostitution, it appears more often among females, especially middle-class females, who have not had earlier conditioning from multiple sexual contacts with a variety of males.

With the decline of the brothel, or house of prostitution, the apprenticeship experience in prostitution is now dependent upon dyadic relationships between the apprentice and either a more experienced prostitute or a male who operates as a pimp (Bryan 1965). The learning experience involves more tasks than simply that of getting over the experience of exchanging money for coitus, although this is the informing and central dilemma of the prostitute. It also involves learning ways of approaching males, setting the price, collecting the fee, managing the sexual contact, and letting the customer go. Each of these tasks involves making explicit what has been implicit in all prior sexual contacts, since, no matter how many of these there might have been, there was always the possibility of seeing them as part of a more conventional structure of sexual expectations. Once the commitment to take money has been made, it means that the female has given up even the pretense of an emotionally valued relationship with the male. The situation is no longer one of courting or dating but is limited to the specific exchange of sexual access for money. This means that even if she has refused no one previously, her present lack of discrimination is now a public event. During this apprenticeship period she must learn a specialized argot not only about sexual behavior but also about the naming of others in the environment: customers, steerers, the police, and other prostitutes. The argot is highly value-laden and in and of itself constrains the neophyte into patterns of action and belief (Maurer 1939).

The most complex of these tasks, however, involves learning to speak about sexual acts and sexual preferences that in the past have arisen and been performed in gestural and nonverbal contexts, and then learning to tie the new talk to the pricing of the specific activity that is requested. The problem is that while the relationship between money and sexuality is what makes the act possible, the economic portion of the act must not be allowed to intervene in the nature of the sexual performance. The structure of talk, once learned, becomes highly ritualized and predictable, although it varies from one social level of customer to another and from one situation of prostitution to another. Thus the centrality of the cash exchange is high for the lower-class customer, the sexual activities preferred are limited, and the content of the sexual talk is small. On the other hand, in contacts with middle-class males the price is set and not referred to again (although there may be psychic gain for the male as a result of payment), the sexual interest may be wide, and there is a certain expectation of talk that transcends the immediate sexual character of the relationship. The capacity to meet all of these expectations is a relatively uncommon skill, and this fact may account for the mobility problems of girls who enter the profession at various levels.

Entering “the life” thus requires learning a new conception of the self, a new relationship to males, and a new way of talking about the self, as well as learning to meet a new world populated by special kinds of others. At the same time there is a decrease in the frequency of interaction with conventional others (except with men in their new role as clients) and consequently a decreasing capacity to return to the conventional world. The life of prostitution, like other forms of deviance, commits a person at the most deeply experienced levels of the self and in the process produces far greater similarities between prostitutes than would be expected on the basis of any set of etiological characteristics.

World of the prostitute

The culture of prostitution is, like all cultures, composed of significant others who lay claim to the prostitute’s time, energy, and affection. Entry into this culture requires the prostitute to make a great many changes in the ways in which she defines other people. These new definitions inescapably cut off many of her older, more conventional definitions. But the older definitions may still have latent claims on her, and in some ways entangle her even when she is most enmeshed in her new experiences.

The world of the prostitute is composed of other prostitutes; clients (Johns); steerers and procurers; in some cases, pimps; in others, Lesbian lovers; and, finally, the police and other agents of law enforcement (Bryan 1965; 1966; Jackman et al. 1963). The relationships with other prostitutes are enormously complex, but they seem in all circumstances to carry with them a fair amount of mutual dislike and mutual exploitation. The content of conversations is often limited to the occupational life, for exposure of the self on other levels invites exploitation due to the prostitute’s increasing social vulnerability. However, the sharing of a special kind of alienation and social distance from conventional society forces the prostitute back on other prostitutes, for there is no one else with whom she can share the largest part of her daily experience.

Relationships with clients are equally difficult. They are most easily handled when they do not impinge on, or have properties of, relationships that might be sought in nondeviant ways. Thus the house girl, who lives in a world of other prostitutes and who services a lower-class clientele, is less likely to develop attachments to clients and more easily sees them as a series of replaceable objects. The call girl, on the other hand, insofar as she must appear in public with her clients in roles that are defined as nondeviant, runs the risk of becoming emotionally involved with them. This emotional involvement is expressed in demands that clients pay lawyers’ fees, pay for bail bonds, or otherwise help out when she is in trouble, and it typically results in intense anger when they do not. In such cases, because a residue of old relationships is still involved, it is clear that the girl has not fully made a separation between her work life and her personal life. Failure to achieve such a separation may also explain why a call girl often reports more intense feelings of antipathy for the customer than does the street or bar prostitute. The difficulty of the call girl’s role here is complicated by the fact that she may well have had middle-class origins and thus may be more committed to the love ethic and more vulnerable to disappointment.

Clients and their needs

The clients of prostitutes use them for a variety of reasons (Winick 1962; Gibbens & Silberman 1960; Kinsey et al. 1948, pp. 605–609). For many men, especially those in the lower class, the motive is often simply sexual relief or the opportunity to experience a novel sexual contact, in terms of either of a new female or of a tabooed technique (usually mouth-genital contact). However, for many other males, more commonly middle class, the resort to the prostitute is often more complex and is invested with greater ambivalence. Novelty in partner and technique are certainly involved, but an equally potent factor, it seems, is the lack of future responsibility for the consequences of sexual contact. Since many of the organizing constraints on sexual activity are related to maintaining the family and providing for its future, contact with a prostitute is significant to the client because it allows him sexual expression without such controls on behavior. The guilt consequent on the violation of the norms commonly deepens and intensifies the erotic character of the relationship, as does the degraded status of the prostitute, who provides sexual access separated from the entanglements of nurturance and affection. In addition, the prostitute provides a sexual contact that does not involve the male in the time consuming conventional buildup to coitus and frees him for other pursuits. The frequency of contacts with prostitutes by males at conventions and in other situations that are separated from the home suggests the loosening of social controls that are necessary for such contacts to take place.

There are also those males whose sexual interests are so bizarre that there is no population of conventional women who could understand these desires or provide for them. Indeed, the expression of such desires as sadism or masochism would undermine the rest of a nondeviant relationship. The proportion of such men is small, yet there exists a small number of prostitutes who will provide such services. The prostitute has to learn to cope with the various demands of these clients and to sort out those who request things that she will not do even for a price. Prostitutes tell each other about clients, and it is in this interaction that patterns of client management are learned.

Supporting relationships

The relationship of the prostitute to the pimp is poorly understood, and the anxiety that the thought of this relationship raises in other men is considerable. This reaction against the pimp has something to do with the asymmetry of a man living off the earnings of women in a society where men must provide for women. In addition, there is envy of the man who gets free that for which all others pay. The strength of the tie of the prostitute to the pimp is best understood in terms of her deprived emotional relationships with other males. In a world of changing faces, in terms of both prostitutes and clients, the pimp remains a stable figure who will speak in the terms of love and affection. Given that this is often a minimal relationship, it still provides a stable anchor for the self in a world where the private sexual experience has been depersonalized and the replaceability of not only the client, but also the self, has been made most apparent. Inadequate as it might seem to others, the tie to the pimp remains for many a prostitute the single human relationship where she may provide both sexuality and love, even if it is contaminated by money. Indeed, the very act of giving money away to the pimp is like divesting the self of filthy lucre.

Lesbian relationships have much the same character as the relationship with the pimp, but are probably less demoralizing. They arise from the need for affection and the alienation from men that is implied in the nexus between sex and money. It is not that Lesbians become prostitutes, but that prostitutes, out of their reaction to the emotional poverty of their world, seek loving human relationships and that often the only such relationships available are with women.

The world of secondary support for the prostitute is a shadowy one. The bell boy, bartender, or cab driver who directs the customer and the prostitute to each other is an untrustworthy ally, and the prostitute soon learns the cost of accepting help from these individuals, their relative unreliability, and the exploitative nature of their relationship to her. This system of secondary support is a quasidelinquent underworld that verges on the straightforwardly criminal.

Prostitution and law enforcement

Where prostitution is illegal, the prostitute is thrust into a world of police, courts, and correctional institutions. This act of exclusion from the larger society automatically includes her in a set of relationships with the criminal world. Thus her life, already difficult, is further complicated by contacts with narcotics, petty and major crime, and the corruption of the agencies of criminal justice. Since the law is enforced only against the paid participants in the act of prostitution (the customer is rarely arrested), the prostitute is forever confronted with the facts of unequal treatment. Since, in any case, enforcement of prostitution laws is uneven and often tied to changes in the political climate, she is vulnerable to blackmail for money from members of the police force who are free to arrest her or not, as they please. Since her position at the margin of the underworld makes her a listening post, she is pressured to give information to the police. In all of this she is further alienated from the society and forced into a criminal conception of the larger society and of herself. All of the enforcement procedures fail in their intent to reduce prostitution, since they more often confirm persons in the activity than they remove them from it.

Psychopathology among prostitutes

All forms of deviance may be seen as at least potentially conducive to the development of major psychopathology. One of the major functions of the culture of the prostitute is to reduce this potential by providing a system of significant others who operate as community and culture. While there is a good deal of evidence for pathology among prostitutes, it is probably reduced by the existence of the culture of prostitution. At the same time, the existence of this culture means’ that the prostitute’s capacity to return to conventional society is thereby reduced. The main potential for pathology is located in the amalgam of sexuality and money at its most obvious level and is complicated by the nature of the control procedures that society invokes. It should be clear that such pathology as exists is differentially distributed and probably occurs more frequently among middle-class girls who enter the life than among those who come from other kinds of backgrounds.

Departure from prostitution

Most prostitutes do not spend their entire lives in the career of prostitution. Looks and physical health are eroded, if not by the life itself, then by the very process of aging. Some prostitutes marry out of the life into relatively stable family systems, while others drop out into service and related occupations, some of which are at the margins of delinquent communities. There is probably some degree of upward mobility for women who enter the life at the call girl level from backgrounds at a lower social level. Others remain in the system because they have police and prison records, still others because they are drug addicts. The problem of how the exprostitute copes with her past and learns to manage the renewed disjuncture between money and sexuality has not been studied. If she does learn to manage it, part of her capacity to do so may be due to the very alienated relationships that she has had with clients, so that they really do not count as part of her sexual past. It is certain that conditions in the United States make exiting from the life of prostitution more difficult than, say, in Denmark, where there is no statute against the act of taking pay for a sexual contact as long as the female has another occupation. Denmark’s policy is based on the hope that through such a mechanism the prostitute will maintain sufficient ties with the conventional community to give her a past other than one of prostitution when she chooses to leave this career (Kemp 1936; Jersild 1958; 1959).

Patterns of prostitution

The structure and extent of prostitution in any society depend strongly upon the character of premarital sexual practices. It also depends on the numbers of unmarried males in the society at any one time. To the degree that premarital coitus is permissible and becomes part of the courting ritual, there will be a concomitant decrease in the use of prostitutes by young men. Further, the smaller the proportion of unmarried males of any age and the larger the proportion of married females, the less use of prostitutes there will be altogether.

In the United States, the structural conditions of premarital coitus have remained relatively stable —that is, a small proportion of the females provide sexual services for a large number of males. However, they do so through promiscuity rather than through engaging in the same behavior for pay. In other countries, to the degree that a woman’s virginity is identified with her marriage ability, and to the degree that there are homeless or womanless men, the practice of prostitution is likely to remain much the same as it was in the United States at the beginning of this century.

The social organization and the culture of prostitution do vary considerably by nationality. However, since prostitution in nearly all countries is illegal, socially stigmatized, or both, it is usually characterized by secrecy, intense occupational involvement, and difficulties in leaving the profession.

Its ties with the criminal underworld leave the prostitute open to harassment not only from the police but also from other prostitutes and other members of criminal subgroups. Even without the pressures created by illegality or stigma, the dilemmas of managing an identification of money with sexuality and of establishing an economic yardstick for sexual access would produce strains toward the creation of a prostitute subculture. Thus the prostitute needs to be provided with an occupational milieu that will help her to learn a new concept of self, to manage the complex tasks involved in her role, and to satisfy her normal needs for social relationships.

While it has been pointed out that the marriage tie also involves the exchange of sexual access for economic security (Davis 1961), the married woman does not resemble the prostitute in this respect, because the critical component in prostitution is making explicit the nature of this exchange and determining its value in the public medium of money.

John H. Gagnon

[See alsoPolice; Sexual behavior; Sociology, article onthe early history of social research; and the biography ofKinsey.]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Acton, William 1857 Prostitution Considered in Its Moral, Social, and Sanitary Aspects in London and Other Large Cities. London: Churchill.

British Social Biology Council 1955 Women of the Streets: A Sociological Study of the Common Prostitute. Edited by C. H. Rolph. London: Seeker & Warburg.

Bryan, James H. 1965 Apprenticeships in Prostitution. Social Problems 12:287–297.

Bryan, James H. 1966 Occupational Ideologies and Individual Attitudes of Call Girls. Social Problems 13:441–450.

Cousins, Sheila [pseud.] 1938 To Beg I Am Ashamed. New York: Vanguard.

Davis, Kingsley 1961 Prostitution. Pages 262–288 in Robert K. Merton and Robert A. Nisbet (editors), Contemporary Social Problems: An Introduction to the Sociology of Deviant Behavior and Social Disorganization. New York: Harcourt.

Freedman, Mervin B. 1965 The Sexual Behavior of American College Women: An Empirical Study and an Historical Survey. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly of Behavior and Development 11, no. 1:33–48.

Gibbens, T. C. N. 1956 Juvenile Prostitution. Unpublished manuscript. → Paper read before the Scientific Group for the Discussion of Delinquency Problems.

Gibbens, T. C. N.; and Silberman, M. 1960 The Clients of Prostitutes. British Journal of Venereal Diseases 36, no. 2:113–117.

Jackman, Norman H.; O’Toole, Richard; and Geis, GilBert 1963 The Self Image of the Prostitute. Sociological Quarterly 4, no. 2:150–161.

Jersild, Jens 1958 Amerikanerpiger. Copenhagen: Saertryk af Juristen.

Jersild, Jens 1959 Hvad unge bør vide om homoseksualitet, prostitution, saedelighedsforbrydelser og kønssygdomme. Copenhagen: Munksgaard.

Kemp, Tage 1936 Prostitution: An Investigation of Its Causes, Especially With Regard to Hereditary Factors. Translated from the Danish by Elsie-Marie Werner Kornerup. Copenhagen: Munksgaard.

Kinsey, Alfred C. et al. 1948 Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. Philadelphia: Saunders.

Kinsey, Alfred C. et al. 1953 Sexual Behavior in the Human Fernale. Philadelphia: Saunders.

Kirkendall, Lester A. 1961 Premarital Intercourse and Interpersonal Relationships. New York: Julian.

Mcmanus, Virginia 1960 Not for Love. New York: Putnam

Maurer, David W. 1939 Prostitutes and Criminal Argots. American Journal of Sociology 44:546–550.

Pomeroy, Wardell 1965 Some Aspects of Prostitution. Journal of Sex Research 1, no. 3:177–187.

Simmel, Georg (1902–1917) 1950 The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Edited and translated by Kurt H. Wolff. Glencoe, III.: Free Press. Streetwalker. 1959 London: Bodley Head. → Published anonymously.

Terman, L. M. et al. 1938 Psychological Factors in Marital Happiness. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Winick, Charles 1962 Prostitutes’ Clients’ Perception of the Prostitutes and of Themselves. International Journal of Social Psychiatry 8:289–297.

Young, Wayland 1964 Eros Denied: Sex in Western Society. New York: Grove. → See especially Chapter 14, “Prostitution.”

PROSTITUTION

Prostitution as a legal category and as a social problem has undergone a reexamination in scholarly and policy debates since the 1970s. This rethinking of prostitution has relied upon a variety of historical and cross-cultural studies. Policy initiatives have increasingly turned to economic approaches, especially to transaction-cost analyses. New attention has been paid to the social position of the prostitute, especially to public health and other aspects of participation in prostitution, as well as to the gender politics of prostitution law and its enforcement. As a result of these studies, the earlier view that prostitution is a unitary and universal feature of human social life is no longer empirically or theoretically tenable. Rather, prostitution as we know it is a function of multiple sociocultural and historical processes, institutional structures, and interactional dynamics.

Social attribution and the construction of prostitution as a social problem

Prostitution as a category of crime and social identity is located at the intersection of sexuality and economics. Georg Simmel linked the "essence of prostitution" to the "nature of money itself" (p. 414). A more contemporary study has characterized prostitution as

a business transaction understood as such by the parties involved and in the nature of a short-term contract . . . . [T]o be a prostitute, one has to treat the exchanging of sexual gratification for an established fee as a business deal, that is, without any pretence to affection, and continue to do this as a form of financial occupation . . . . In other words, it must be clearly demonstrated that there is a buyer and a seller, a commodity offered and a contracted price. (Perkins and Bennett, p. 4)

The field of economics and the study of human sexuality have both gone through sharp internal polemics and revisions since the 1970s. Social and criminal justice policy toward prostitution has trailed along somewhat uncertainly in their wake. Indeed, prostitution policy has reacted to these scholarly developments in piecemeal fashion at best, as it has undertaken—in the absence of any single generally accepted conceptualization of the social problem of prostitution—a variety of ad hoc measures to mitigate prostitution's perceived negative social effects.

Universalist accounts of prostitution have maintained that it has existed throughout human history—the "oldest profession" canard—in all human communities, and even among some animal species. It is difficult to imagine that a historian writing after 1980 would undertake a project so grandiose and allencompassing that it could be entitled The History of Prostitution (Bullough). Earlier scholars' claims that, for example, ancient Babylonian religious ritual sexual practices or the great variety of short term marital or quasi-marital relations (Islamic law temporary marriage, European morganatic marriage, East African malaya relationships) constitute prostitution seem now to reveal more about the writers' theoretical commitments than about the social institutions in question (see Bullough, pp. 17–30; Richards, p. 88; and for a critique Pateman, pp. 195–196). Instead, since the 1970s, a great many empirical studies of sexual exchange and of human sexuality in general have exhaustively demonstrated the historical, geographic, and ethno-cultural diversity of the forms of human sexual interaction, identity, and relations (e.g., Davis).

Prostitution as a crime of sexuality and commerce requires that an economy of market exchange exist within a particular social order and that certain forms of sexual interaction be normatively excluded from economic exchange by the force of criminal sanction. Following Ferdinand Tonnies's classic sociological analysis that posited an ideal-type distinction between Gemeinschaft, a community ordered by kinship and customary obligation, and Gesellschaft, a society organized by free economic exchange, we see that a crime of prostitution could logically exist in neither of them. In a community of reciprocal gift-obligation, nothing could be put on the market for sale to the highest bidder—sexual interaction perhaps least of all. Similarly, in a society of pure economic exchange, everything is understood as available for a price, so that the selling of sexual services could hardly constitute a crime. It is only in a social order where some things are expected to be allocated by buying and selling in a market and other things are not to be sold at all that the selling of sexual interaction can be understood as a criminal offense.

This conceptual problem of how to distinguish between categories of licit and illicit sexual socioeconomic connection is an old issue in feminist thought that has attracted renewed attention since the 1970s. Two hundred years ago, Mary Wollstonecraft described a wife's status as "legal prostitution" (p. 247). To Emma Goldman in the early twentieth century, "it is simply a question of degree whether [a woman] sells herself to one man, in or out of marriage, or to many men" (p. 179). And for Simone de Beauvoir writing at mid-century, a wife is "hired for life by one man; the prostitute has several clients who pay her by the piece" (p. 619).

Since the 1970s many studies have focused closely on the gender politics of prostitution law and its enforcement. Although the Model Penal Code endorses gender neutrality by drawing no distinction between males and females accused of prostitution (section 207.12(1)), attention to prostitution as a two-sided economic transaction highlights a sharp gender asymmetry in the role of the consumer of sexual services. Markets in sexual services performed by men as well as women and directed toward male consumers are very widely attested. Yet, though it is easy enough to imagine a prostitution market aimed at female consumers, the virtual absence of reports of established markets selling sexual services to women is a robust sociological fact that has compelled a reconsideration of the gender effects of prostitution markets (Pateman).

A heightened concern over the public health aspects of prostitution followed the appearance of AIDS in the 1980s. This concern recalls the nineteenth-century furor over prostitution as path for disease transmission that achieved legal expression in the passage of Britain's Contagious Diseases Acts of the 1860s. In Carole Pateman's view, the compulsory public health registration of suspected prostitutes required by these acts was the precipitating factor for prostitution in our contemporary sense. This effect of compulsory registration was to "professionalize" a more or less permanent subclass of women as "common prostitutes" because of the difficulty of removing one's name once it had been added to the registry list and of subsequently finding other employment. Since the 1980s, public health concerns about AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases have contributed to the expansion of risk management and transaction cost approaches to prostitution as a social problem. The case law of the 1980s and 1990s in many jurisdictions reflects a "prostitutephobia" (Davis, p. 114) in numerous instances of lengthened prison sentences for prostitution justified as a form of quarantine for public health reasons.

Transaction-cost approaches to prostitution: from repression to regulation

Along with many other domains of social life in Western societies, prostitution has increasingly been approached through the lenses of transaction cost economic analysis and risk management. The application of legal economic reasoning has been extended from the regulation of established markets to "informal" economies and, ultimately, to the "economics of crime." (The work of Nobel laureate Gary Becker is foundational here; see also Hellman, pp. 129–144; Posner, pp. 70–80.)

This widespread turn to economic approaches does not, however, imply any general agreement on prostitution policy. Some economic theorists have proposed quite classical Benthamite rational disincentives to deter prostitution as criminal conduct (Hellman). Others have followed Nobel laureate Ronald Coase's theory of the internalization of social costs ("negative externalities") in economic transactions (Coase; Posner, 1992). Still others have argued that prostitution should be promoted as a form of free economic exchange just like any other economic activity that increases aggregate social wealth (these two latter views are not inconsistent with one another; see the extremely influential work of Richard Posner (1992)).

Further, mutually opposing normative views of the labor economics of prostitution structure the debate between the social movements that seek, on the one hand, to advance prostitutes' rights as "sex workers" and, on the other, to "rescue" prostitutes from exploitation in unconscionable labor conditions (Jenness). Recognizing prostitution as a two-sided economic transaction between a sexual service provider and a consumer reframes the "prostitution question" away from focusing solely on the alleged criminality or sociopathology of the prostitute and redirects attention to the consumption behaviors of the customer.

Typology of prostitution

The usual taxonomy of "types" of prostitute thus becomes differently interpretable as a socially stratified array of sexual-market consumption niches. These "market segments" can be distinguished from one another by place, by manner of solicitation, and by price level (Reynolds). It is instructive that many of the most commonly identified markets for sexual services are ambiguously positioned between legal and illegal forms of commercial bodily interaction: massage parlors, studios for nude photography, strip clubs, stag parties, and other erotic dance venues. In such socially liminal spaces, the boundary line between licit and illicit encounters is permeable and negotiable on a flexible, occasional basis, and is therefore correspondingly difficult to study empirically or to police effectively.

A brief survey of common prostitution "types" or "market segments" illustrates the sorts of questions that confront both social scientists and criminal justice professionals.

Streetwalkers. Streetwalkers are prostitutes who make themselves visible and commercially available on urban streets. They solicit customers who are passing on foot or in automobiles. Services are performed in customers' cars, in nearby hotels, alleys, doorways, and so on. On average, these prostitutes command the lowest prices, they typically have the least bargaining leverage over condom use and choice of sexual practices, and they have the highest risk of harm from customers or others. They are generally considered to generate the highest levels of negative externalities in terms of diminished neighborhood property values, association with other criminal activities, and "curb-crawling" by their customers. Not surprisingly, they also run the highest risk of arrest.

Bar/hotel prostitutes. Some prostitutes solicit customers in bars, clubs, and hotels, especially those frequented by conventioneers and other likely customers. Prostitutes often collaborate, and must share their revenues, with either the manager of the bar or club or, in the case of hotels, a bellhop or desk clerk who refers clients to the prostitute. Services may be provided in the establishment, in a dark corner or back room of a club, or in a hotel room rented by either the prostitute or the customer. The prostitute's income varies from fairly low to quite high according to the prestige and price range of the establishment and its clientele. The prostitute's net income also varies according to the percentage of fees demanded by the manager or employee(s) of the establishment in exchange for referrals, protection, or simply for looking the other way. The prostitute's risk of harm and arrest are low to moderate as long as the collaborative relation with the establishment is maintained and the prostitute does not venture into unfamiliar territory.

Escort services and call girls/boys. Some prostitutes operate on an "outcall basis" and therefore, unlike streetwalkers and bar/hotel prostitutes, are not restricted to a specific site. However, their calls are most often to locations where there are well-to-do clients who prefer the insulation of an intermediary referral service. Customers are typically assigned to prostitutes by the escort agency, which first charges a fee to the customer. The prostitute then negotiates with the customer the price for specific services. Like escorts, call girls/boys also rely upon referral and screening either by an agent, by a restricted circle of other prostitutes in the same market, or by familiar clients. The prices in this market segment reach the highest levels. The prostitute has considerable bargaining leverage over condom use and sexual practices. The risk of harm or arrest is lessened by reliance on an intermediary, and by the fact that this market segment tends to be limited to upper-income customers whose need for the appearance of propriety minimizes negative externalities and diminishes the likelihood of violence or other reason for police intervention.

House or brothel prostitutes. The only legally tolerated prostitution in the United States is found in the brothels permitted in the rural counties of the state of Nevada, at the discretion of the individual county. Nevada's current legal regime dates to shortly after World War II (prostitution had been outlawed during the war to minimize sexually transmitted disease among the large numbers of troops undergoing training in Nevada). Typically, the prostitutes at Nevada brothels are women from outside Nevada who are brought in on short-term contracts, living at the establishments for two or three weeks at a time with one or two weeks off. They are expected to spend long shifts on display in a bar/lounge reception area where prices for services are posted, to accept any customer who chooses them, then to take the customer to another room to perform the services contracted. The customer typically pays the house and the prostitute later receives 40 to 60 percent of the revenue that she has generated, sometimes with deductions for room, board, and supplies. Prostitutes in this market segment enjoy the highest level of protection from their customers since they work in a highly controlled environment where condom use has been enforced since the late 1980s. However, they have little personal autonomy or bargaining leverage over working conditions with their managers. They are typically controlled by state and county regulations that require them to be fingerprinted and to undergo weekly medical examinations; other legal regulations (of doubtful constitutionality) frequently prohibit the prostitutes from joining or even mingling with the communities in which the brothels are located. In many other parts of the United States, various forms of house prostitution exist illegally, though not infrequently with the tacit tolerance of the authorities (sometimes purchased), as long as public visibility and negative externalities are kept to a low level.

Miscellaneous other markets. Since prostitution is a highly flexible segment of the informal economy a great variety of other prostitution arrangements exists. Many prostitutes move in and out of prostitution as their financial needs dictate. Some are seasonally active as they, for example, follow mobile encampments of migrant workers in agriculture, the lumber industry, summer and winter resort traffic, or even sports and music tours.

Regimes of prohibition, criminalization, and regulation

The 1980s and 1990s saw different faces of prostitution presented in American media. The 1980s case of Sydney Biddle Barrows, the "Mayflower Madam," and the 1990s case of Heidi Fleiss, the "Hollywood Madam," brought public scrutiny, even celebrity, to the world of elite call girls who earn thousands, even tens of thousands, of dollars per day for their services. Over the same period, the expansion of crack cocaine consumption in poor urban neighborhoods contributed to the appearance of the "crack whore." The "crack whore" has become an urban American social type, a persona that is at once a depiction of the most severely drug-addicted, impoverished street prostitutes as well as a rhetorical figure summoned up in policy debates over "welfare reform" and the "war on drugs." Socioeconomic studies of the lives and livelihoods of such drug-addicted prostitutes reveal that their income is often less than the federal minimum wage (Maher and Daly).

Academic, political, and criminal justice policy debates frequently hinge on whether one takes the "entrepreneurial call girl" or the "crack whore" as the paradigm case of prostitution, that is, whether the underlying "cause" of prostitution is free individual choice or socioeconomic and psychopharmacological compulsion. Arrest statistics showing that the vast majority of those charged with prostitution offenses are low-income urban ethnic-minority women are commonly cited to support the latter position. Yet, empirically, it is difficult or impossible to falsify the counterclaim that there exist large numbers of prostitutes who go about their business providing services and contributing to the economy in low visibility, informal market sectors and who are rarely or never arrested. Ultimately, there remains a lack of conclusive empirical findings and criminal justice policy is often mired in the politics of folk moralizing embodied in the warring media stereotypes of glamorous call girl versus pitiable crack whore. As a result, most American jurisdictions retain criminal statutes strictly prohibiting prostitution with little or no change from a century ago.

The legal prohibition in force in all U.S. jurisdictions except Nevada's rural counties is something of an anomaly in the global context. In most of Western Europe, India, Southeast Asia, Canada, Australia, the Pacific, and much of Latin America the policy regimes governing prostitution tend not to criminalize sexual commerce itself (which is usually not fully legal, but rather "decriminalized"). Instead, these countries generally criminalize prostitution-related activities such as solicitation, advertising, living off another person's earnings from sexual commerce, and recruiting and transporting persons to engage in prostitution (in the United States, most of these activities are also criminally sanctioned in addition to prostitution per se). The criminalization of activities associated with prostitution shades subtly into other regimes that are intended to regulate the conduct of prostitution while at least implicitly tolerating it (see Davis).

In Western Europe and certain other regions such decriminalization and regulatory approaches have led to a dual market in prostitution. Most European Union residents can engage in prostitution without criminal sanction, yet at the same time there also exists a widespread illegal secondary prostitution market made up of tens of thousands of migrants from Eastern Europe, Asia, and Latin America. These migrants practice prostitution in an underground economy, for lower earnings and in lesser conditions, fearing arrest, deportation, and coercive violence from their employers.

In virtually no country has prostitution been entirely accepted as a legitimate profession with the full social rights, worker protection, pensions, and other benefits accorded to other laborers and business enterprises. Whether legally prohibited, decriminalized, or regulated, wherever prostitution is practiced it remains a liminal social space subject to regimes of social control. Increasingly, no matter whether prostitution per se is legal or not, criminal justice and other social control strategies are directed toward minimizing the negative externalities (undesirable effects upon third parties or on society in general) that result from prostitution transactions.

A growing tendency is to make use of strategies for spatially segregating prostitution and activities associated with it in order to manage or minimize perceived externalities. This echoes the long-time practice in many cities where overt prostitution is de facto shunted into specific enclaves, often called "red light districts." These have usually been "low-rent" neighborhoods, that is, low-valued land-use urban zones, in or near ethnic minority or migrants' residential areas. It is illustrative of the spatial logic of minimizing the social costs of prostitution that the only place where it is legally tolerated in the United States are certain rural counties of Nevada—areas with very low population densities whose economic development alternatives include military weapons testing sites and toxic waste dumps.

In nearly all other American jurisdictions where prostitution is prohibited, it exists nonetheless and is in effect regulated through various spatially differentiated control strategies. Dallas, Texas, is an example of what has been called the "Control Model" (Reynolds). Here, police pressure is exerted to keep prostitution all but invisible in Dallas, except for some poorer neighborhoods. A certain amount of hotel and call girl/boy prostitution is tolerated as long as it remains confined to the convention trade and the more highly visible streetwalking is confined to poorer minority communities in the region.

San Francisco, a city that prides itself on its cosmopolitan tolerance, has been a long-time example of the "laissez-faire model" of prostitution regulation (Reynolds). One might describe this as a regime where nothing is legal but everything is permitted. Historically, overt street prostitution has flourished in the Tenderloin district and certain other lower-income neighborhoods. It is periodically suppressed by police pressure, just enough to minimize unsightliness that might offend the tourist trade. Much like Western European regulatory policies, San Francisco police strategy has often been to prosecute incidents of theft and violence associated with street prostitution but not to pursue the sexual offenses themselves. Call services and other less visible forms of prostitution are only rarely targeted by vigorous police enforcement.

In the 1970s, the city of Boston decided to use zoning law to localize de jure the city's "adult businesses" within a single neighborhood called the "Combat Zone." Although prostitution was not legalized, it was to a large extent effectively enclosed along with adult cinemas, pornography shops, and massage parlors. This extremely influential strategy has been called the "zoning model" (Reynolds). It sets up something rather like a sexual version of the "free trade zones" that exist in seaports and border towns, exempted from ordinary tariffs and regulations. Such spatial concentration of sex-oriented business may in fact lead to greater efficiency for sexual commerce because of lower search and transaction costs. However, the zoning model's greatest influence has been as a strategy for localizing and managing the risks and externalities associated with prostitution and other sexual commerce.

In the 1990s, other cities (notably Portland, Oregon) have employed zoning in a different fashion. Rather than quarantining sexual commerce by zoning it into a specific urban area like Boston's Combat Zone, now zoning is used to exclude prostitutes by establishing "prostitution-free zones." Drawing upon new urban strategies such as business improvement districts and area-specific gang-abatement injunctions, people who have been identified as known prostitutes are legally banned from whole sections of the city. The "cleansing" of New York City's Times Square in the 1990s is another example of such exclusionary strategies.

These adaptations of zoning law for the suppression, displacement, and spatial regulation of vice are part of a broader policy shift from strictly criminal repression to a flexible mix of criminal and civil sanctions in the crafting of new regulatory regimes. Although no jurisdiction has maintained customer-arrest levels equal to the arrest of prostitutes, there has been a new attention to this disparity. Some cities, notably San Francisco and Portland, have established programs modeled on so-called traffic schools for automobile driving infractions. Although these "therapeutic" programs are in principle available to prostitutes as well as to their customers, they are commonly referred to as "john schools" and have reportedly been little used by arrested prostitutes (Meier and Geis, pp. 52–53).

Conclusion

The fundamental problem of how to conceptualize prostitution—as sin, as crime, as enslavement, as productive work, as disease vector, as social risk profile—and of how to approach it in policy and practice became more acute in the 1980s and 1990s (Davis). The trends toward globalization in communications and the economy, in migrant labor flows, in international "sextourism," and in the spread of AIDS and other diseases have exposed the inadequacies of traditional, locally focused efforts to understand and to address prostitution (Truong, 1986, 1990). The conceptual incoherence of sociolegal theories is compounded by the radical complexity of global jurisdictional differences in legislation, in criminal justice policies, and in social consequences. Prostitutes from the most impoverished and disease-afflicted areas of the world walk the streets of the wealthiest countries as "sextourists" flow in the opposite direction. As media panics about disease epidemics and about the sexual exploitation and even enslavement of children as well as adults seize the short attention span of the global public, the dimensions of the problems are rapidly outpacing the authority and even the scope of vision of local and national governments.

International law instruments such as the 1949 UN Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others (only ratified by about one-third of the UN member states as of 1998) are still no more than tentative and rudimentary efforts. Nongovernmental organizations are considerably more in touch with the rapidly changing global facts of prostitution at the beginning of the twenty-first century, but they too suffer from the lack of any shared conception of the problems and they routinely expend their limited resources working at cross-purposes to one another. In few other domains of crime and justice is there a more urgent need for more and more rigorous empirical research on a worldwide scale and for a fundamental theoretical reorientation.

Richard Warren Perry

See also Criminalization and Decriminalization; Deviance; Gender and Crime; Homosexuality and Crime; Mass Media and Crime; Organized Crime; Police: Policing Complainantless Crimes; Rape: Behavioral Aspects; Rape: Legal Aspects; Sex Offenses: Consensual; Sexual Predators; Victimless Crime.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Becker, Gary. "Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach." Journal of Political Economy 76, no. 2 (1968): 168–217.

Bullough, Vern L. The History of Prostitution. New Hyde Park, N.Y.: University Books, 1964.

Coase, Ronald. "The Problem of Social Cost." Journal of Law and Economics 3, no. 1 (1960): 1–44.

Davis, Nanette J., ed. Prostitution: An International Handbook on Trends, Problems, and Policies. New York: Greenwood Press, 1993.

De Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. (1953). Translated and edited by H. M. Parshley. New York: Vintage, 1974.

Goldman, Emma. "The Traffic in Women." In Anarchism and Other Essays (1915). New York: Dover Publications, 1969.

Hellman, Daryl A. The Economics of Crime. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1980.

Jenness, Valerie. Making It Work: The Contemporary Prostitutes' Rights Movement in Perspective. New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1993.

Maher, Lisa, and Daly, Kathleen. "Women in the Street-Level Drug Economy: Continuity or Change?" Criminology 34 (1993): 465–492.

Meier, Robert F., and Geis, Gilbert. "Prostitution." In Victimless Crime? Prostitution, Drugs, Homosexuality, Abortion. Los Angeles: Roxbury Publishing, 1997.

Pateman, Carole. The Sexual Contract. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988.

Perkins, Roberta, and Bennett, Garry. Being A Prostitute. Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1985.

Posner, Richard A. Sex and Reason. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1992.

Reynolds, Helen. The Economics of Prostitution. Springfield, Ill.: Charles C. Thomas, 1986.

Richards, David A. J. Sex, Drugs, Death, and the Law. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1982.

Simmel, Georg. The Sociology of Georg Simmel. (1908). Edited by Kurt H. Wolf. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1982.

Tonnies, Ferdinand. Community and Society. (1887). Translated and edited by Charles P. Loomis. New York: Harper and Row, 1963.

Truong, Thanh-Dam. Virtue, Order, Health, and Money: Towards a Comprehensive Perspective on Female Prostitution in Asia. Bangkok: United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific, 1986.

——. Sex, Money, and Morality: Prostitution and Tourism in Southeast Asia. London: Zed Books, 1990.

Wollstonecraft, Mary. "A Vindication of the Rights of Men" (1799). In A Mary Wollstonecraft Reader. Edited by Barbara H. Solomon and Paula S. Berggren.

PROSTITUTION

The act of offering one's self for hire to engage in sexual relations.

Prostitution is illegal in all states except Nevada, where it is strictly regulated. Some state statutes punish the act of prostitution, and other state statutes criminalize the acts of soliciting prostitution, arranging for prostitution, and operating a house of prostitution. On the federal level, the mann act (18 U.S.C.A. § 2421 [as amended 1986] makes it a crime to transport a person in interstate or foreign commerce for the

purpose of prostitution or for any other immoral purpose.

Prostitution, historically and currently a trade largely practiced by women, was not a distinct offense in colonial America. A prostitute could be arrested for vagrancy if she were loitering on the streets, but generally, the act of engaging in sex for money was not itself a crime.

The first prostitution statutes were enacted during the so-called Progressive political movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Urban areas experienced unprecedented growth during this period. Cities became the centers of industrial manufacturing and production, and they were quickly ravaged by disease and poverty. The Progressive movement emphasized education and instituted new government controls over the activities of the general population. The movement introduced the prohibition of alcohol, which was banned from 1919 to 1933, vested government with increased power over the lives of poor persons, and created a host of new criminal laws, including laws on prostitution. Prostitution increased during this period, and it was seen as one of the biggest threats to public health because of its potential to spread debilitating venereal diseases such as syphilis and gonorrhea. Prostitutes were viewed as moral failures. The male customers of prostitutes were not held up to scorn, but the women who practiced prostitution were seen as responsible for increases in crime and the general decay of social morals.

Commercial Sex: Repression or Legalization?

In the United States, 49 states make prostitution a crime. The only exception is Nevada, which permits brothels to operate in specific areas of the state. Since the 1970s, advocates of reform have called for either the legalization or the decriminalization of prostitution. Proponents see these approaches as a way of preventing women from being punished for making a choice on how they want to earn an income. Opponents of these changes dismiss the idea that women voluntarily choose this type of work and claim that prostitution is yet another part of the U.S. commercial sex industry, which systematically subordinates women.

Proponents of decriminalization argue that it would remove the stigma associated with prostitution and increase profits. They contend that decriminalization would also relieve the police of the costly and futile effort to stop an unstoppable practice.

Legalizing prostitution would mean regulating it. Supporters contend that this would allow the government to collect millions of dollars annually in taxes, reduce collateral crime, and protect the public from sexually transmitted diseases. Proponents point to Nevada, where the use of brothels facilitates testing for diseases and reduces the number of street prostitutes.

Other supporters of decriminalization and regulation challenge what they see as the paternalistic argument that women need to be protected from sexual exploitation. This argument, they claim, is nonsensical because it means that to protect women from exploitation, society must imprison them for engaging in prostitution.

In addition, those who favor decriminalization note that the worst form of exploitation suffered by prostitutes is from pimps. If prostitution were legal, women would generally conduct business on their own, free from the parasitic and abusive conduct of pimps.

Decriminalization supporters also cite the difference between the lax policing of off-street prostitutes and the harsh treatment of street prostitutes. These observers argue that the enforcement disparity is a matter of race and class: most street prostitutes are members of historically oppressed groups, whereas off-street prostitutes generally have middle-class backgrounds. They argue that it is unfair for society to tolerate and even promote escort services while regularly jailing street prostitutes.

Opponents of legalization of prostitution have traditionally based their opposition on the immorality of commercial sex. However, modern feminist thought has developed other arguments against the removal of legal barriers to selling sex.

Many feminists have attacked the "career-choice" argument. They see it as a corruption of feminist values that otherwise favor the economic liberty of women. They contend that, from a limited range of options constrained by economics, education, sexual harass-ment, and abuse, the decision to sell one's body cannot be deemed a choice. Even if a woman makes a conscious decision to enter prostitution, this does not redeem the trade from being the worst form of gender-based exploitation.

The "choice" argument is also undercut, argue the opponents of legalization, by the fact that the average prostitute starts working at the age of fourteen and suffers sexual abuse, drug dependency, violence at the hands of customers, and emotional control by pimps. From this point of view, women are victims of commercial sex work.

More radical feminist critics of legalization argue that prostitution, like pornography, is an example of the unequal status of women in the United States. The right to privacy arguments advanced by legalization proponents may sound reasonable, contend critics, but they mask the systematic subordination of women. Noted feminist legal scholar catharine a. mackinnon has defined pornography as "the graphic sexually explicit subordination of women, whether in pictures or words," especially in a violent or degrading context. Prostitution is worse than pornography, contend these critics, because women are subjected to sex in violent and degrading contexts.

For these more radical critics of legalization and decriminalization, making commercial sex legal would legitimize the subordinated position of women in U.S. society. Just as the legalization of casino gambling has caused a dramatic increase in the number of people gambling and the amount of money wagered, the legalization of prostitution would give the commercial sex industry the opportunity to legitimately expand. Critics argue that in a consumer culture already permeated with sexual imagery, legalization is not the answer.

Legalization critics have acknowledged, however, that prostitutes are prosecuted for their acts while their male customers usually are not. In the 1980s and 1990s, many state and local governments have sought to end this double standard by enacting laws that target customers of prostitutes. This legislation has also been triggered by residents of local communities who have grown tired of enduring the presence of customers who visit their neighborhoods. These so-called anti-john laws seek to discourage customers by impounding their cars, and, in some cases, notifying their spouses of their arrest.

Many police departments have also increased their use of police decoys—officers disguised as prostitutes who lure unsuspecting customers into arrest. In addition, customers who have been arrested may find their names listed in the local newspaper or photographs broadcast on a local cable television station.

It is unlikely that prostitution will be legalized or decriminalized because few politicians would relish being associated with so morally explosive an issue as commercial sex. It is also unlikely, given prostitution's persistence throughout history, that efforts by law enforcement to prosecute prostitutes and their customers will bring an end to prostitution.

further readings

Kuo, Lenore. 2002. Prostitution Policy: Revolutionizing Practice Through a Gendered Perspective. New York: New York Univ. Press.

Law, Sylvia A. 2000. "Commercial Sex: Beyond Decriminalization." Southern California Law Review 73 (March).

Lefler, Julie. 1999. "Shining the Spotlight on Johns: Moving Toward Equal Treatment of Male Customers and Female Prostitutes." Hastings Women's Law Journal 10 (winter).

cross-references

Feminist Jurisprudence; MacKinnon, Catharine.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, states began to encourage the arrest of prostitutes for such crimes as vagrancy and loitering. Congress passed the Mann Act in 1910, which criminalized interstate prostitution, and state legislatures made prostitution a distinct criminal offense. The prostitute, not the customer, was the first to be penalized on the state and local levels; statutes that criminalized the solicitation of prostitution were passed later.

Historically, the enforcement of prostitution laws focused on apprehension of the prostitute. In the 1960s and 1970s, perhaps as a result of heightened social discourse on the issue of prostitution, police departments became more vigilant in their pursuit of customers. Local police in urban areas now regularly conduct "sting" operations designed to catch solicitors through the use of undercover agents posing as prostitutes. Many states have forfeiture statutes that give law enforcement agencies the power to seize and gain ownership of vehicles used by customers of prostitutes, and alleged customers may find their pictures published in the local newspaper.

All jurisdictions have made their prostitution statutes gender-neutral, but the prostitution relationship still usually consists of a man paying a woman for sex. There are occasional variations of the sexual identities of the participants in contemporary society, but, by and large, a prostitute is still more likely to be a woman or a girl. An increasing amount of prostitution occurs off the street by organized escort services, and prostitutes from these services have some measure of control over their lives. However, many prostitutes still work on the street, living a desperate, brutal, dangerous life at the mercy of a promoter, or pimp. Because the prostitute usually is a woman or a girl, and because prostitution can wreak havoc on the life of the prostitute, the issue of prostitution has become a matter of concern for women's rights advocates.

Hollywood Madam

The Los Angeles prostitution prosecution and conviction of Heidi Fleiss, dubbed the Hollywood Madam by the press, raised issues that went beyond the sensational elements of the case. Feminist groups criticized Los Angeles prosecutors for continuing the familiar pattern of targeting female prostitutes while ignoring their male customers.

Heidi Fleiss, the daughter of a prominent California pediatrician and a schoolteacher, was arrested in June 1993 for running an expensive call-girl business. Fleiss was charged with pandering, or providing prostitutes to customers. It was alleged that seventy women worked for her and that her clients included Hollywood actors, U.S. politicians, and rich foreign businessmen.

The tabloid press had made Fleiss a minor celebrity before her arrest by occasionally discussing her and publishing photographs of her. Her notoriety led the Los Angeles police to conduct a "sting" operation, in which an officer posed as a customer, hiring prostitutes at a rate of $1,500 each for a supposed party. When the women arrived for the party, they and Fleiss were arrested.

In the months that followed, titillating details emerged about Fleiss and her alleged customers. At one point Fleiss offered to reveal the names of the wealthy men who used her services if she was paid $1 million. As the case neared trial, her attorney alleged that Fleiss had been selectively prosecuted and that her male customers, whose names were in her address book, would not be charged with any crimes.

The judge dismissed Fleiss's arguments, and she was convicted of pandering on December 2, 1994. The Los Angeles chapter of the national organization for women and some feminists charged that the failure to prosecute the rich and powerful customers demonstrated the double standard at work in the criminal justice system regarding prostitution offenses.

further readings

Clements, Tracy M. 1996. "Prostitution and the American Health Care System: Denying Access to a Group of Women in Need." Berkeley Women's Law Journal 11.

Conant, Michael. 1996. "Federalism: The Mann Act, and the Imperative to Decriminalize Prostitution." Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy 5 (winter).

Flowers, R. Barri. 2001. Sex Crimes, Predators, Perpetrators, Prostitutes, and Victims: An Examination of Sexual Criminality and Victimization. Springfield, Ill.: C.C. Thomas.

Hanna, Cheryl. 2002. "Somebody's Daughter: The Domestic Trafficking of Girls for the Commercial Sex Industry and the Power of Love." William & Mary Journal of Women and the Law 9 (fall).

Hauge, Carol H. 1995. "Prostitution of Women and International Human Rights Law: Transforming Exploitation into Equality." New York International Law Review 8 (summer).

Kuo, Lenore. 2002. Prostitution Policy: Revolutionizing Practice Through a Gendered Perspective. New York: New York Univ. Press.

Lucas, Ann M. 1995. "Race, Class, Gender, and Deviancy: The Criminalization of Prostitution." Berkeley Women's Law Journal 10.

McCoy, Amy. Summer 2002. "Children 'Playing Sex for Money': A Brief History of the World's Battle Against the Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children." New York Law School Journal of Human Rights 18 (summer).

cross-references

Sex Offenses; Vice Crimes.

PROSTITUTION

PROSTITUTION, the exchange of money for sex, was not regarded as a serious social problem in the United States until the last part of the nineteenth century. Previously, Americans had followed the practice of English common law in ignoring prostitution, which regarded it as a crime only when it became an offense to public decency. In most areas of America during the colonial and early national periods, prostitution was a more or less irregular occupation for a few women. Only where men greatly outnumbered women, as in the French colonies on the Gulf of Mexico, was it in any way institutionalized.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the growth of industrial cities and the opening of the western frontier had led to an increase in prostitution, which tended to be concentrated in tacitly accepted "red-light" districts. The growth of these districts and the mounting concern over venereal disease resulted in two differing approaches to dealing with prostitution. One group, led by the New York physician W. W. Sanger, wanted to require compulsory medical inspection of prostitutes and to confine all prostitution to the red-light districts. During the Civil War some army commanders adopted such plans, but the only city to do so was Saint Louis between 1870 and 1874. Agitation against the Saint Louis plan came not only on moral grounds but also on public health grounds after an increasing number of physicians began to have doubts about their ability to detect venereal disease during the required inspection.

The second group wanted to abolish prostitution altogether. Josephine Elizabeth Butler, an English reformer, greatly influenced their efforts, but the group also had strong ties to the woman's suffrage movement. Many of the activists of the pre–Civil War antislavery movement joined the cause, and an increasing number of cities and states acted to curtail prostitution in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. The movement to outlaw prostitution gained immeasurably when a number of venereal specialists, especially Prince A. Morrow of New York, decided that the consequences of syphilis and gonorrhea were so horrible that traditional attitudes and institutions had to be changed. The result was the formation of the American Social Hygiene Association, which gave "scientific" backing to the movement to abolish prostitution. The Iowa Injunction and Abatement Law of 1909 took direct aim at law enforcement officials who were reluctant to move against established houses, and other states widely copied its provisions. Under this law any taxpayer might institute an action in equity against property used for prostitution. The U.S. federal government also entered the field in 1910 with the Mann Act, or White Slave Traffic Act, which outlawed procuring and transporting women across state borders for immoral purposes. The army's decision in World War I to inspect soldiers rather than prostitutes bolstered the campaign against tolerated houses. By the 1920s legally tolerated districts had mostly disappeared. For a brief period prostitution became a source of income for organized crime, but the difficulties of monopolizing what was essentially a free-lance occupation made prostitution only a minor aspect of the underworld's activities.

After the end of World War II, when effective cures for many venereal diseases had been developed, legal attitudes toward prostitution came under question again. The American Law Institute and the American Civil Liberties Union argued that sexual activities between consenting adults should not be subject to criminal penalties and advocated a return to the earlier common-law regulation of prostitution. In the mid-1970s several states considered action in this area, but only in Nevada did a state legally tolerate prostitution. Thirteen of the state's sixteen counties legalized the activity, but subjected it to careful regulation. In the context of changing sexual norms and more effective contraceptives, some authorities argued that even if legalized, prostitution would continue to decline because of the country's changing moral standards. As women began to gain equality—economically, politically, and sexually—the idea that prostitution was a necessary evil increasingly came under challenge.

Despite these changes, however, most states continued to enforce laws against prostitution and closely associated crimes, including pandering (procuring prostitutes) and pimping (living off the earnings of prostitutes). Between 1975 and 1991 there were an average of 89,000 annual arrests in the United States for male and female prostitution. Prostitution is now overwhelmingly an urban phenomenon, with most arrests in cities of more than 250,000 people. Unlike cities like San Francisco, where neither police nor prosecutors actively pursue prostitutes, most cities unofficially enforce a policy that confines sexual commerce to red-light districts. Most Americans do not worry greatly about prostitution unless activity is nearby. Prosecution can be politically advantageous for local politicians, but it is usually inconsistently pursued. Raids are often little more than symbolic gestures. Critics of current law enforcement policies also argue that prosecution and incarceration expenses should be applied to drug treatment and job training. In the politics of the United States, however, legalization of prostitution in the 1990s was as remote a possibility as it was in the 1890s. Officers arrest an average of 62,000 women, but few of their customers, each year.

Female prostitution tends to be hierarchical and male dominated. At the top are call girls, available by appointment through a madam or a high-class male pimp. Fees may run into thousands of dollars. A similar system involves escort services, through which customers may hire someone for companionship or sex. Escort services operate superficially within the law and may even advertise in newspapers or telephone directories. Far below escort services are strip joints and massage parlors, which often function in tawdry, unsanitary conditions. A related activity is telephone sex, which insulates both parties from disease, particularly AIDS, while providing customers with verbal stimulation. At the bottom of the hierarchy are streetwalkers. Protected only by a pimp, streetwalkers charge little, accept nearly all customers, and perform their work in cars, alleys, or cheap hotels. New York City authorities estimate that one-third of street prostitutes carry the HIV virus, which causes AIDS. Streetwalkers comprise only 10 to 20 percent of all prostitutes, but account for 90 percent of arrests; a disproportionate number of those who are detained are women of color.

Prostitution superficially involves a mutually agreed-upon transaction. Many young men still regard visits as rites of passage; older men ostensibly work out marital and sexual difficulties. Customers include disabled, single men unable to find legitimate sex partners. Women enter prostitution for myriad reasons, the fundamental nature of which is controversial. Some argue that prostitutes seek financial gain otherwise unavailable, or that they are pushed into this life because of high unemployment, particularly among minority women. Few still believe prostitutes are oversensual females, but a link with childhood sexual abuse at home is accepted. Prostitution is recurrently connected to other criminal activities, including credit card forgery and extortion. Little joy seems attached to the work, and interviews emphasize ancillary entertainment over sexual pleasure.

Despite disagreements within the feminist movement over whether prostitution should be legalized (women controlled by the state) or decriminalized (permitting women to control this oldest of professions themselves), the institution has entered politics. In 1973 Margo St. James, a San Francisco prostitute, organized COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics), urging decriminalization through the magazine COYOTE Howls. Priding itself as a union local, PONY (Prostitutes of New York) also favors decriminalization and works with United Nations groups to fight international trafficking in women and children. WHISPER (Women Hurt in Systems of Prostitution Engaged in Revolt) opposes prostitution, while other groups offer counseling to help young women quit the life. The political and legal impact of these organizations has been minimal. The most significant organization at the street level remains the exploitative control of the pimp.

The world of male prostitutes is more shadowy. They tend to be lone individuals, although many maintain connections with escort services. Arrests of male prostitutes and their male partners are on the rise, in part because law enforcement has become more gender-neutral as public acceptance of homosexuality has increased, giving homosexual prostitutes more visibility, and in part because male prostitution often has links to drug trafficking. Male prostitutes, like their female counterparts, work in a range of related areas, such as pornographic productions, strip houses, and phone sex.

The most notorious type of prostitution involves the child prostitute, who has left or been exiled from home, often fleeing sexual abuse or other mistreatment. The AIDS epidemic has made child prostitutes more desirable for customers who incorrectly believe that children are less likely to pass on the disease. Increasing numbers of streetwalkers are runaway children. In New York City in the early 1980s, the streets adjacent to the Port Authority Bus Terminal, the arrival point for many runaway children, became known as the "Minnesota Strip" because so many runaways worked there as prostitutes. In contrast to its ambiguous treatment of adult pornography, the Supreme Court grants no constitutional protection to child pornography, and because many of these children also work in child pornography media, police are especially vigilant toward child prostitution.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Barry, Kathleen. Female Sexual Slavery. Revised ed. New York: New York University Press, 1994.

Burnham, John C. "Medical Inspection of Prostitutes in America in the Nineteenth Century." Bulletin of the History of Medicine 45 (1971).

Davis, Nanette J., ed. Prostitution: An International Handbook on Trends, Problems, and Policies. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993.

Ennew, Judith. The Sexual Exploitation of Children. New York: St.Martin's Press, 1986.

Miller, Eleanor M. Street Woman. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986.

Riegel, Robert E. "Changing American Attitudes Toward Prostitution." Journal of the History of Ideas 29 (1968).

Steward, Samuel M. Understanding the Male Hustler. New York: Haworth Press, 1991.

Vern L.Bullough/c. w.

See alsoAcquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome ; American Civil Liberties Union ; Antislavery ; Common Law ; Crime ; Crime, Organized ; Epidemics and Public Health ; Mann Act ; Narcotics Trade and Legislation ; Pornography ; Progressive Movement ; Sexually Transmitted Diseases ; Suffrage: Woman's Suffrage .

Prostitution

PROSTITUTION AND GENDER RELATIONS

INDOOR PROSTITUTION, STREET PROSTITUTION, AND MALE PROSTITUTION

TRENDS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Prostitution involves the exchange of sex for money or other material compensation. The most common type of prostitution involves women who provide sex to male customers.

Prostitution has a long history, and is sometimes called “the oldest profession.” It has not always been condemned and stigmatized. In ancient times, some forms of prostitution were viewed positively. Sacred prostitution, where a temple priestess had sex with men, was a way of worshiping the deity. In ancient Greece, prostitution was an accepted part of life. The highest-status prostitutes, the hetaerae, were valued for their intellect and companionship, and at their salons they entertained politicians, artists, and scholars. The hetaerae enjoyed much more freedom and mobility than other Greek women of the time.

PROSTITUTION AND GENDER RELATIONS

For most of history, however, prostitution has been condemned, and gender bias has been marked: Prostitutes have been blamed for a large number of social problems, but male customers and profiteers were rarely chastised. This double standard continues to this day.

Prostitution reflects larger, traditional gender relations between men and women. First, for the most part, it is men, not women, who typically pay for sex, which is an outgrowth of the broader worldwide pattern of objectification of women. Customers’ motives for buying sex differ, including satisfying a “need” for sex, inability to find a conventional partner, desire for a certain type of sex or sex with a certain type of woman, fulfilling a fantasy, or engaging in risky behavior (Monto 2004). Second, reflecting women’s subordinate status in society, gender inequality is pervasive in prostitution. Female prostitutes are paid for their services, but often not under conditions of their choosing. For those who have male managers (pimps, brothel owners, etc.), the women have little if any control over their working conditions and are subject to significant economic exploitation.

Third, prostitutes are vulnerable to victimization, and this victimization is gendered. Male customers, pimps, and other men sometimes engage in violence and other types of abuse. A significant number of prostitutes report that they have been robbed, raped, or assaulted at some time in their career, and serial killers prey on streetwalkers. Because no study of sex workers is based on a representative sample, it is impossible to tell how frequently they experience violence, but it is clearly an occupational hazard. Customers are sometimes robbed and assaulted as well, but most of the victimization is directed at female prostitutes. Fourth, gender inequality is also the norm in the criminal justice system’s treatment of prostitution. Where prostitution is illegal, prostitutes continue to be arrested much more often than their male customers. Unequal justice is less pronounced in some cities than in others, and some cities periodically target customers but, overall, the police tend to focus on prostitutes (Weitzer 1999). Fifth, gender bias is apparent in portrayals of prostitution in the mass media. Films, television shows, popular music, and literature usually depict prostitution negatively, although it is occasionally romanticized. There are, of course, some realistic or sympathetic portrayals in popular culture, such as Sting’s 1999 song, “Tomorrow We’ll See,” but such depictions are rare exceptions to the rule.

INDOOR PROSTITUTION, STREET PROSTITUTION, AND MALE PROSTITUTION

There are exceptions to this general pattern of gender inequality. Not all prostitutes are exploited or victimized. Indoor workers who sell sex in brothels and massage parlors, as independent call girls, or as employees of escort agencies are less likely to be abused by customers than street prostitutes, and the indoor workers are also less economically exploited, express greater job satisfaction, and have higher self-esteem than their street-level counterparts (Vanwesenbeeck 2001; Weitzer 2005). Research shows that some indoor workers have quasi-romantic encounters with customers—not limited to sex but including conversation, cuddling, emotional support, and intimacy (Lever and Dolnick 2000). Indoor prostitutes are also less likely than streetwalkers to use addictive drugs and are at significantly lower risk of sexually transmitted diseases (Plumridge and Abel 2001). There is one important exception to this portrait of indoor prostitution: Women who are recruited by force or fraud and trafficked to work in brothels are at high risk for subsequent exploitation and victimization.

Gender inequality is absent in the case of male prostitutes, who sell sex to other men, who comprise a significant minority of the sex trade. Male prostitutes may be sexually objectified in the same way as female prostitutes, but compared to female streetwalkers, male prostitutes have greater control over their working conditions (few males have pimps); are less likely to have been abused as children, to be forced into prostitution, and to experience violence from customers; are more likely to enjoy their work overall and to derive sexual gratification from it; and are less susceptible to arrest or harassment by the police (Aggleton 1999; West 1993).

In sum, workers in different sectors of the sex trade, as well as male and female workers, experience different kinds of working conditions and varying degrees of victimization, exploitation, freedom, and job satisfaction. The type of prostitution is extremely important.

TRENDS

Today, the sex trade is a huge business worldwide, with numerous providers, customers, and third-party profiteers. Since prostitution is illegal in many places and stigmatized everywhere, it is impossible to determine exactly how prevalent it is or whether it is increasing, but a significant number of men admit to having bought sex from a prostitute. According to a 2000 survey, 17 percent of American men have paid for sex at some time in their lives, compared to 16 percent of Australian men (in 2001) and 9 percent of British men (in 2000). The real numbers are likely higher, given the tendency to underreport disreputable activity.

The Internet offers unprecedented new opportunities for sex workers to communicate with clients and set up appointments. Several major Web sites contain message boards that offer a wealth of information for customers: what to expect in terms of services and prices; “reviews” of a certain worker’s appearance, demeanor, and performance; and the offerings of specific establishments (e.g., a massage parlor, an escort agency). Customers’ chat rooms and message boards provide a fascinating window into the reasons why men buy sex, what they are looking for in a provider, norms regarding appropriate treatment of workers, and clients’ general views about paid sex and the sex industry.

Another trend is the growing internationalization of the sex trade. Sex tourism involves persons who travel from one country to another for the purpose of having sex with a prostitute in the destination country. Most sex tourists are men, but a small number of female tourists buy sex from local men in the Caribbean and elsewhere. Travel companies around the world promote sex tourism, providing information to prospective customers and offering package tours.

In some places, such as Holland, sex tourism accounts for a significant share of the country’s tourism revenues. One study found that the sex industry accounted for between 2 and 14 percent of the gross domestic product in Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines (Lim 1998). Customers pump a substantial amount of foreign currency into these economies, which explains why these governments tacitly support the sex trade. In Thailand alone, prostitution earned $23 to $27 billion from 1993 to 1995 (Lim 1998).

Among the reasons why international travel for sex is seen as attractive, compared to buying sex in one’s own country, are anonymity and low risk of detection, low prices, and a desire to have sex with a member of a particular racial or ethnic group. In Thailand, for example, most of the foreign customers are affluent and come from Australia, Germany, the United States, and Japan, and most of the workers are Thai or Filipino women, many of whom originally came from poor rural areas and sell sex to support their families back home. There is, therefore, a striking class disparity between most workers and most foreign customers.

Some sex tourists travel to other countries with the specific purpose of having sex with minors. Doing so in certain foreign countries is seen as far less risky than engaging in such conduct in a customer’s home country. Some nations, including the United States and Canada, have passed laws prohibiting their citizens from buying sex from minors outside the home country, though these laws are difficult to enforce.

SEE ALSO Patriarchy; Pimps

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aggleton, Peter, ed. 1999. Men Who Sell Sex: International Perspectives on Male Prostitution and HIV/AIDS. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Lever, Janet, and Deanne Dolnick. 2000. Clients and Call Girls: Seeking Sex and Intimacy. In Sex for Sale: Prostitution, Pornography, and the Sex Industry, ed. Ronald Weitzer, 85–100. New York: Routledge.

Lim, Lin Lean. 1998. The Sex Sector: The Economic and Social Bases of Prostitution in Southeast Asia. Geneva: International Labor Office.

Monto, Martin. 2004. Female Prostitution, Customers, and Violence. Violence Against Women 10: 160–168.

Plumridge, Libby, and Gillian Abel. 2001. A Segmented Sex Industry in New Zealand: Sexual and Personal Safety of Female Sex Workers. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health 25: 78–83.

Vanwesenbeeck, Ine. 2001. Another Decade of Social Scientific Work on Prostitution. Annual Review of Sex Research 12: 242–289.

Weitzer, Ronald. 1999. Prostitution Control in America: Rethinking Public Policy. Crime, Law, and Social Change 32: 83–102.

Weitzer, Ronald. 2005. New Directions in Research on Prostitution. Crime, Law, and Social Change 43: 211–235.

West, Donald. 1993. Male Prostitution. Binghamton, NY: Haworth.

Ronald Weitzer

prostitution is widely described as the world's oldest profession; the practice of selling sex for cash or other immediate compensation has existed across cultures and times from the ancient Greeks, through religious servitude, to today's madam scandals that have rocked the British Parliament, America's Hollywood, and America's east coast Blue Bloods. Prostitution also crosses class lines, from the poor ‘streetwalkers’ with their stereotyped drug habits and abusive pimps to the high-class brothel and escort service workers with their designer clothes and stylish apartments.

While the prostitute technically sells a service, namely sexual intimacy, the ways in which prostitution is discussed suggest that, at least to modern sensibilities, she or he is selling far more than that. Common euphemisms for prostitution in English include ‘selling her body’ and ‘selling herself’: conflating the body and the self with sexual intimacy suggests that sexual intimacy both defines and controls the body and the self. What one does, then, defines who one is. A whore is always a whore.

A common misconception of prostitution is that a significant majority of prostitutes are women. While women's prostitution is far more easily talked about, male homosexual prostitution has existed alongside female heterosexual prostitution at least since the time of the ancient Greeks, but it is rarely discussed or studied. Nearly all of prostitution, however, serves the sexual needs of men; very little prostitution services women of any class.

Most analyses of prostitution suggest that both men and women enter prostitution, either professionally or temporarily, as relative amateurs, for economic and monetary reasons. Certainly, through most of history there were few professions open for women, especially if they had little family support or they lacked the education or class status to aspire to the few professions that respectable women could participate in. Conversely, many people who are advocating a departure from the shame culture surrounding sex in a variety of arenas, including sex work, argue that some prostitutes work in order to challenge repressive gender roles which restrict women's sexuality to a romantic ideology and oppressive patriarchal marriages. As these activists are also working to change women's opportunities and thus eliminate prostitution as a forced, last-ditch option for staying alive, they are not simply romanticizing prostitution but complicating it by forcing the world to consider the positive choices of sex workers.

The economic argument, however, has been boosted in the past two decades by the development of the East Asian sex trades, which form significant portions of the economies of countries such as Thailand. American military installations during the Vietnam War helped begin the sex trades as military officials organized R&R for their soldiers. As the global economy forced previously agrarian cultures to move towards a capitalist, cash-based system, the sex trades boomed as young girls were sold or forced into urban prostitution in order to support families in more rural areas. Currently, it is common for men from First World countries to join tours in East Asian countries that consist entirely of patronizing the sex industry.

Although the East Asian sex industries have brought the issue to prominence recently, the issue of child prostitution has always been a rallying cry for those interested in eradicating sex work. The mythologies surrounding virginity — including the regenerative powers of having sex with a virgin, the idea that virgins could cure sexually transmitted diseases, and the thrill of the power differential between an experienced man and a young, inexperienced girl — have always ensured that young girls, sometimes as young as six, will be included in the sex industry. As prostitution frequently involves an economically exploitative relationship with a pimp or a madam, young girls are at even higher risk of abuse and exploitation than their older counterparts.

Forced prostitution, beyond families selling their girl children into sexual servitude, has also become a political issue recently as the Korean women forced to serve as ‘comfort women’ for Japanese troops in World War II have demanded restitution and apology from the Japanese Government. Repeated rape as a form of terrorism and war crime often blurs the line between rape and prostitution as women are forced to provide sex to ensure their very lives.

Social tolerance for prostitution has varied widely; some cultures and times have accepted it as a natural part of life, regulating it to prevent the spread of disease or illness, and to prevent the abuse of women. Other cultures and times have turned a blind eye, criminalizing it but not enforcing the law. Still others, notably Victorian England and contemporary America, have actively worked to eliminate the practice altogether through raids, undercover police work, moral exhortation, and prosecution. While prostitution necessarily involves two people, elimination efforts have focused on the prostitutes themselves, and not their customers.

International feminist coalitions are working to eliminate prostitution on the grounds that sex work is an extreme manifestation of patriarchally-enforced gender roles, whereby women's social position is necessarily one of subservience to men, and women's work is often connected to the sexual or domestic servicing of men in order to achieve financial and social support. Further, prostitution helps to maintain the old dichotomy of the good girl/bad girl; women are either asexual, moral creatures, above reproach, or they are the sexual and dirty things that men go to for the relief of unbearable urges. These feminists argue that the elimination of prostitution would allow women to renegotiate gender roles and sexual experience because they would have a valuable bargaining chip.

Whores' rights activists cite the same problem ‘the virgin/whore dichotomy’ but argue that legitimizing sex work undermines the distinction by highlighting the ways in which women's gender roles are based upon sex as a valuable commodity. They also argue that sex work provides a valuable service that should be granted more respect. Groups like COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics) are interested in changing the moral value of sex, and thus the moral value of prostitution as well, while at the same time undermining the idea that consenting adults are any more exploited than they would be in another industry.

While activists and politicians today disagree about whether sex work between consenting adults is legitimate, there is little question on the official level that child prostitution and forced prostitution should be eradicated.

Julie Vedder

Bibliography

Barry, K. (1995). The prostitution of sexuality. New York University Press.
Evans, H. (1979). Harlots, whores and hookers: a history of prostitution. Taplinger Publishing Company, New York.

PROSTITUTION

Until the mid-eighteenth century, Russian authorities treated prostitution as a crime against morality and public decorum, and enacted laws and decrees to keep prostitutes invisible and isolated. Nevertheless, contemporary observers often remarked the presence of prostitutes in Moscow and, by the early eighteenth century, in the new capital of St. Petersburg. In the late 1700s prostitutes became regarded more as sources of venereal disease, and policies changed accordingly. The first attempts to reduce the medical danger associated with prostitutes took place during the reign of Catherine the Great, with the designation of a hospital in St. Petersburg for their confinement.

The nineteenth century brought the rise of a system of medical and police regulation to control prostitutes in terms of both their public behavior and the threat they represented to public health. In 1843 Tsar Nicholas I's minister of internal affairs subjected prostitution to surveillance based on a European model of inscription, inspection, and incarceration. Ministry guidelines called for licensing brothels, registering streetwalkers, regular medical examinations for women identified as prostitutes, and compulsory hospitalization for those apparently suffering from venereal disease. Prostitution remained officially illegal, but the ministry's regulations superseded the law so long as prostitutes registered their trade and brothels were under police supervision. Thus, medical-police regulation was in place even before Russia's serfs had been emancipated and before Russia's cities grew in response to policies promoting industrialization in the late nineteenth century.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Russia's burgeoning civil society considered both prostitution and its regulation major social and political problems. Physicians, jurists, feminists, socialists, temperance advocates, philanthropists, and elected local authorities seized on this issue to advance their political agendas and to aid working-class women. Nonetheless, despite charges that regulation fostered police corruption, oppressed women from the lower classes, and made little sense in light the lack of an effective cure for venereal diseases and the lack of controls over prostitutes' clients, medical-police surveillance remained official policy until the Provisional Government that emerged in February 1917 declared its abolition. The Bolsheviks also rejected regulation, heeding its critics and, like other socialist theorists, considering prostitution a transient symptom of industrial capitalism.

Prostitution, however, did not disappear during the Soviet era; it remained a viable source of income and favors. During the Civil War of 1917–1922, authorities were known to treat prostitutes as "labor deserters," but a more laissez-faire attitude emerged during the New Economic Policy (NEP, 1921–1928), with its toleration of private trade. Under the presumption that prostitutes could be rehabilitated through manual labor, the Soviet government dispatched former prostitutes to sanitariums and made a distinction between prostitutes, who were regarded as victims, and other individuals who profited from the sex trade. Yet authorities still associated prostitutes with disease and disorder; repression became the practice once NEP ended. Soviet officials claimed that prostitution disappeared, but it simply went underground, prosecuted under categories pertaining to labor desertion and illegal income.

Not until the 1980s, during the relative openness of Mikhail Gorbachev's tenure, was prostitution again acknowledged as a social problem. Economic instability, persistent gender inequality, and prostitution's attraction as a source of income all combined to increase the numbers of prostitutes in late- and post-Soviet Russia. Correspondingly, some municipal authorities resurrected regulation, presuming that it would prevent the spread of AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases.

See also: feminism; glasnost

bibliography

Bernstein, Laurie. (1995). Sonia's Daughters: Prostitutes and Their Regulation in Imperial Russia. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Engel, Barbara Alpern. (1989). "St. Petersburg Prostitutes in the Late Nineteenth Century: A Personal and Social Profile." Russian Review 48:21–44.

Engelstein, Laura. (1988). "Gender and the Juridical Subject: Prostitution and Rape in Nineteenth-Century Russian Criminal Codes." Journal of Modern History 60:458–495.

Healey, Dan. (2001). "Masculine Purity and 'Gentlemen's Mischief': Sexual Exchange and Prostitution between Russian Men, 1861–1941." Slavic Review 60:233–265.

Stites, Richard. (1983). "Prostitute and Society in Pre-Revolutionary Russia." Jahrbűcher fűr Geschichte Osteuropas 31:348–364.

Laurie Bernstein

PROSTITUTION

Prostitution is defined as "the act or practice of engaging in sexual activity for money or its equivalent" (Garner 1999, p. 1238). Except for parts of Nevada, it is a criminal act in the United States. Prostitutes are also referred to as commercial or public sex workers. It is estimated that over 92,000 men, women, and juveniles are arrested yearly for prostitution (FBI, 2000). The number of juveniles engaging in prostitution is estimated at between 100,000 and 300,000 per year.

The greatest health consequences of prostitution are drug abuse, violence, and sexually transmitted infections, including HIV/AIDS (human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immunodeficiency syndrome), gonorrhea, pelvic inflammatory disease, and syphilis. The risk for HIV infection is increased because of multiple partners and limited safe sex practices—some customers are willing to pay more for a sexual encounter if they do not have to use a condom. Based on research conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the rate of HIV infection for prostitutes is three times higher if they smoke crack cocaine. Intravenous drug use also increases the risk of HIV infection for a prostitute.

Prostitutes are often victimized by the person for whom they work, and by their customers. Other health issues related to prostitution are early pregnancy for juveniles, rape, tuberculosis, post-traumatic stress disorder, assault, and other acts of violence—including murder. There are also negative consequences besides those related to health issues. In places where it is common, prostitution lowers the value of property. It also degrades the status of women. Published research studies concerning prostitution as a public health issue in urban communities have come primarily from developing countries. It is a topic in need of more research in the United States.

Kathy Akpom

Tammy A. King

(see also: Addiction and Habituation; Crime; HIV/AIDS; Public Health and the Law; Sexually Transmitted Diseases; Violence )

Bibliography

Baseman, J.; Ross, M.; and Williams, M. (1999). "Sale of Sex for Drugs and Drugs for Sex: an Economic Context of Sexual Risk Behavior for STDs." Sexually Transmitted Diseases 26(8):444–449.

Booth, R. E.; Watters, J. K.; and Chitwood, D. D. (1993). "HIV Risk-Related Sex Behaviors among Injection Drug Users, Crack Smokers, and Injection Drug Users Who Smoke Crack." American Journal of Public Health 83(8):1144–1148.

Federal Bureau of Investigation (2000). Uniform Crime Reports. Preliminary Figures, 1999. Washington, DC: United States Department of Justice. Available at www.fbi.gov/ucr/htm.

Garner, B. A., ed. (1999). Black's Law Dictionary, 7th edition. St. Paul, MN: West Publishing Co.

Jones, D. L.; Irwin, K. L.; Inciardi, J.; Bowser, B.; Schilling, R.; Word, C.; Evans, P.; Faruque, S.; McCoy, H. V.; and Edlin, B. R. (1998). "The High-Risk Sexual Practices of Crack-Smoking Sex Workers Recruited from the Streets of Three American Cities." Sexually Transmitted Diseases 25(4):187–193.

Shuter, J.; Alpert, P. L.; DeShaw, M. G.; Greenberg, B.; Chang, C. J.; and Klein, R. S. (1999). "Gender Differences in HIV Risk Behaviors in an Adult Emergency Department in New York City." Journal of Urban Health 76(2):237–246.

prostitution was an accepted feature, particularly of urban life, for centuries. In the second half of the 19th century, however, there was growing concern, reflecting fears of physical and moral contamination, with ‘the great social evil’. There was an increase in the numbers of ‘penitent asylums’ or ‘Magdalen asylums’ run by Catholic and Protestant organizations to ‘reform’ women of the streets. Meanwhile concern over the effects of venereal disease on military manpower led to the Contagious Diseases Acts (1864, 1866, and 1869) which applied to specific garrison centres, including, in Ireland, the Curragh, Cobh, and Cork city. Under these acts any woman suspected of being a prostitute could be arrested and forcibly examined. If infected she would be detained until cured, then issued with a certificate and obliged to return for periodic check‐ups. The acts were opposed, in both Great Britain and Ireland, as infringing individual liberty, legitimizing the sexual double standard, and conniving at prostitution. They were repealed in 1887. By this time the Criminal Law Amendment Act (1885) had already brought in more stringent penalties for brothel‐keepers and raised the age of consent. Protestant and Catholic vigilance associations regularly claimed success in closing down brothels in the later decades of the 19th century, though they seem often to have merely moved them on. The Legion of Mary seems to have made a genuine impact in Dublin in the 1920s, by providing temporary accommodation and crèche facilities for the women, and helping them to find work, but at this stage, due to greater supervision of youth, and cultural changes generally, comparatively fewer women were working as prostitutes.

For some women prostitution was a temporary, clandestine strategy in difficult times; others, such as the Curragh ‘Wrens’, living under furze bushes on the perimeter of the Curragh camp, or in the ‘Bush’ in Cobh, were readily identifiable and miserably poor. Prostitution flourished wherever there was both a concentration of high female unemployment and a throughput of men working in poor conditions far from their homes, if they had any—ports, garrison towns, big cities, short‐term engineering works. Prostitutes in Dublin in the 1910s and 1920s are remembered by those who grew up in the nearby tenements as good‐looking and well dressed, but virtual prisoners in the brothels, and very generous with the poor children of the locality. Only a minority of prostitutes were ever in ‘kip‐houses’, however; most were street‐walkers either working on their own initiative or controlled by men.

Bibliography

Kearns, K. , Dublin Tenement Life: An Oral History (1994)
Luddy, Maria , Women and Philanthropy in 19c Ireland (1995)

Caitriona Clear

528. Prostitution (See also Courtesanship, Mistresses.)

1. Adriana comely girl becomes prostitute to support herself. [Ital. Lit.: The Woman of Rome ]
2. Brattle, Carrie returns home reconciled after life in gutter. [Br. Lit: The Vicar of Bullhampton ]
3. Celestina old, evil procuress hired as go-between. [Span. Lit.: Celestina ]
4. Dolores and Faustine provide Swinburne with masochistic pleasure. [Br. Poetry: Poems and Ballads in Magill IV, 704]
5. Harlot’s Progress, The Hogarth engravings tracing a prostitute’s miserable career to its degraded end. [Br. Art: EB (1963) XI, 624]
6. Hill, Fanny frankly erotic heroine of frankly erotic novel. [Br. Lit.: Memoirs of Fanny Hill.]
7. La Douce, Irma leading French prostitute on Pigalle. [Am. Cinema: Halliwell, 460]
8. Lulu keeper of two others on her earnings. [Aust. Opera: Berg, Lulu, Westerman, 484]
9. Maggie innocent girl, corrupted by slum environment, becomes a prostitute. [Am. Lit.: Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, Hart, 514]
10. Mary Magdalene repentant prostitute who anointed Jesus’s feet. [N.T.: Luke 7:36–50]
11. Nana beautiful lady who thrived on a troop of men. [Fr. Lit.: Nana, Magill I, 638–640]
12. Overdone, Mistress “a bawd of eleven years’ continuance.” [Br. Lit.: Measure for Measure ]
13. Rahab harlot of Jericho who protected Joshua’s two spies. [O.T.: Joshua 2]
14. Tearsheet, Doll violent-tempered prostitute, an acquaintance of Falstaff. [Br. Lit.: Shakespeare II Henry IV ]
15. Thais notorious harlot in Malebolge, Hell’s eighth circle. [Ital. Lit.: Inferno ]
16. Toast, Joan a most saintly whore. [Am. Lit.: The Sot-Weed Factor ]
17. Warren, Mrs. raises daughter in comfort and refinement on her bedside earnings. [Br. Lit.: Mrs. Warren’s Profession in Plays Unpleasant ]

prostitution, the sale of sex for money, predominantly by females with male clients and frequently associated with criminal activity, has always been affected by cultural values. Brothels first sprang up in Southwark where Roman soldiers guarded the Thames crossing, to develop into the Bankside stews that became part of the bishop of Winchester's liberty in the early 12th cent. and were regulated by Henry II (1162); the church took a pragmatic view since the revenue was highly profitable to both bishop and king. After the outbreak of virulent syphilis throughout early 16th-cent. Europe, stricter controls were imposed and brothels briefly closed. With the Reformation, moral rather than health concerns began to prevail, so prostitutes were publicly humiliated and imprisoned for ‘correction’. Puritanism merely hardened existing attitudes. Whereas upper-class prostitutes of the demi-monde were involved in sexual liaisons outside marriage in order to gain influence and social advantage, most whores were regarded as social lepers. During the 19th cent. governments made efforts to regulate the practice, particularly around naval and military garrisons (a third of all sick cases among soldiers were venereal in origin by 1864). Female prostitutes were subject to humiliation and callous treatment under the Contagious Diseases Acts of the 1860s, only repealed in 1886 after the campaigns of Josephine Butler. Female prostitution is now legally tolerated, though with prohibition of open solicitation, but young women are still forced into the practice by poverty or homelessness. Homosexual male prostitution, particularly in large cities, is increasing.

Ian John Ernest Keil

prostitution, the sale of sex for money, predominantly by females with male clients, has always been affected by cultural values. Brothels first sprang up in Southwark where Roman soldiers guarded the Thames crossing, to develop into the Bankside stews that were regulated by Henry II (1162); the church took a pragmatic view since the revenue was highly profitable. With the Reformation, moral rather than health concerns began to prevail, so prostitutes were publicly humiliated and imprisoned for ‘correction’. Puritanism merely hardened existing attitudes. During the 19th cent. governments made efforts to regulate the practice, particularly around naval and military garrisons (a third of all sick cases among soldiers were venereal in origin by 1864). Female prostitutes were subject to humiliation and callous treatment under the Contagious Diseases Acts of the 1860s, only repealed in 1886 after the campaigns of Josephine Butler. Female prostitution is now legally tolerated, though with prohibition of open solicitation, but young women are still forced into the practice by poverty or homelessness. Homosexual male prostitution, particularly in large cities, is increasing.

pros·ti·tute / ˈprästəˌt(y)oōt/ • n. a person, typically a woman, who engages in sexual activity for payment. ∎ fig. a person who misuses their talents or who sacrifices their self-respect for the sake of personal or financial gain: careerist political prostitutes. • v. [tr.] offer (someone, typically a woman) for sexual activity in exchange for payment: although she was paid $15 to join a man at his table, she never prostituted herself. ∎ fig. put (oneself or one's talents) to an unworthy or corrupt use or purpose for the sake of personal or financial gain: his willingness to prostitute himself to the worst instincts of the electorate. DERIVATIVES: pros·ti·tu·tor / -ˌt(y)oōtər/ n.

prostitute † adj. offered or exposed to lust XVI; sb. XVII. — L. prōstitūtus (fem. prōstitūta as sb.), pp. of prōstituere expose publicly, offer for sale, prostitute, f. PRO-1 + statuere set up, place.
So prostitute vb. XVI. f. pp. stem of the L. vb. prostitution XVI. — (O)F. or late L.

prostitution Part of Canaanite fertility religion which the Israelite followers of Yahweh sought to suppress, though individual Hebrew women were paid for sexual favours and were not stigmatized. The most famous was Rahab, who received the Hebrew spies (Josh. 2) and who appears in the genealogy of Jesus (Matt. 1: 5).

prostitution Provision of sexual services for reward, usually money. Most prostitutes are women. In Britain, prostitution is not strictly illegal, but soliciting, living off the earnings of prostitution, and brothel-keeping are all offences.

prostitute •tracksuit • catsuit • pantsuit •Hatshepsut •sweatsuit, wetsuit •playsuit • spacesuit • swimsuit •bodysuit • drysuit • lawsuit •jumpsuit • offshoot • troubleshoot •parachute • Aleut •attribute, contribute, tribute •execute • prosecute • persecute •destitute • institute • prostitute •constitute • substitute • malamute •electrocute • hirsute

prostitution •ashen, fashion, passion, ration •abstraction, action, attraction, benefaction, compaction, contraction, counteraction, diffraction, enaction, exaction, extraction, faction, fraction, interaction, liquefaction, malefaction, petrifaction, proaction, protraction, putrefaction, redaction, retroaction, satisfaction, stupefaction, subtraction, traction, transaction, tumefaction, vitrifaction •expansion, mansion, scansion, stanchion •sanction •caption, contraption •harshen, Martian •cession, discretion, freshen, session •abjection, affection, circumspection, collection, complexion, confection, connection, convection, correction, defection, deflection, dejection, detection, direction, ejection, election, erection, genuflection, imperfection, infection, inflection, injection, inspection, insurrection, interconnection, interjection, intersection, introspection, lection, misdirection, objection, perfection, predilection, projection, protection, refection, reflection, rejection, resurrection, retrospection, section, selection, subjection, transection, vivisection •exemption, pre-emption, redemption •abstention, apprehension, ascension, attention, circumvention, comprehension, condescension, contention, contravention, convention, declension, detention, dimension, dissension, extension, gentian, hypertension, hypotension, intention, intervention, invention, mention, misapprehension, obtention, pension, prehension, prevention, recension, retention, subvention, supervention, suspension, tension •conception, contraception, deception, exception, inception, interception, misconception, perception, reception •Übermenschen • subsection •ablation, aeration, agnation, Alsatian, Amerasian, Asian, aviation, cetacean, citation, conation, creation, Croatian, crustacean, curation, Dalmatian, delation, dilation, donation, duration, elation, fixation, Galatian, gyration, Haitian, halation, Horatian, ideation, illation, lavation, legation, libation, location, lunation, mutation, natation, nation, negation, notation, nutation, oblation, oration, ovation, potation, relation, rogation, rotation, Sarmatian, sedation, Serbo-Croatian, station, taxation, Thracian, vacation, vexation, vocation, zonation •accretion, Capetian, completion, concretion, deletion, depletion, Diocletian, excretion, Grecian, Helvetian, repletion, Rhodesian, secretion, suppletion, Tahitian, venetian •academician, addition, aesthetician (US esthetician), ambition, audition, beautician, clinician, coition, cosmetician, diagnostician, dialectician, dietitian, Domitian, edition, electrician, emission, fission, fruition, Hermitian, ignition, linguistician, logician, magician, mathematician, Mauritian, mechanician, metaphysician, mission, monition, mortician, munition, musician, obstetrician, omission, optician, paediatrician (US pediatrician), patrician, petition, Phoenician, physician, politician, position, rhetorician, sedition, statistician, suspicion, tactician, technician, theoretician, Titian, tuition, volition •addiction, affliction, benediction, constriction, conviction, crucifixion, depiction, dereliction, diction, eviction, fiction, friction, infliction, interdiction, jurisdiction, malediction, restriction, transfixion, valediction •distinction, extinction, intinction •ascription, circumscription, conscription, decryption, description, Egyptian, encryption, inscription, misdescription, prescription, subscription, superscription, transcription •proscription •concoction, decoction •adoption, option •abortion, apportion, caution, contortion, distortion, extortion, portion, proportion, retortion, torsion •auction •absorption, sorption •commotion, devotion, emotion, groschen, Laotian, locomotion, lotion, motion, notion, Nova Scotian, ocean, potion, promotion •ablution, absolution, allocution, attribution, circumlocution, circumvolution, Confucian, constitution, contribution, convolution, counter-revolution, destitution, dilution, diminution, distribution, electrocution, elocution, evolution, execution, institution, interlocution, irresolution, Lilliputian, locution, perlocution, persecution, pollution, prosecution, prostitution, restitution, retribution, Rosicrucian, solution, substitution, volution •cushion • resumption • München •pincushion •Belorussian, Prussian, Russian •abduction, conduction, construction, deduction, destruction, eduction, effluxion, induction, instruction, introduction, misconstruction, obstruction, production, reduction, ruction, seduction, suction, underproduction •avulsion, compulsion, convulsion, emulsion, expulsion, impulsion, propulsion, repulsion, revulsion •assumption, consumption, gumption, presumption •luncheon, scuncheon, truncheon •compunction, conjunction, dysfunction, expunction, function, junction, malfunction, multifunction, unction •abruption, corruption, disruption, eruption, interruption •T-junction • liposuction •animadversion, aspersion, assertion, aversion, Cistercian, coercion, conversion, desertion, disconcertion, dispersion, diversion, emersion, excursion, exertion, extroversion, immersion, incursion, insertion, interspersion, introversion, Persian, perversion, submersion, subversion, tertian, version •excerption