Prostitution

• 1. Introduction

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  Prostitution is sometimes referred to euphemistically as "the world's oldest profession" in the English-speaking world. A 2011 report by Fondation Scelles counted about 42 million prostitutes living all over the globe. Estimates place the annual revenue generated worldwide at over 100 billion dollars. Yet behind those figures sits a practice that no two societies have ever agreed on. In one country it is a regulated profession with windows and unions. In another it is punishable by death. The same act of exchanging sexual services for payment can be an enforced crime, an unenforced crime, a decriminalized activity, or a legal but unregulated one. Who is selling, who is buying, and what the law should do about either question has divided lawmakers, feminists, and faiths for centuries. What words do we use for the people involved, and why do those words carry such weight? Why does one nation jail the seller while another jails only the buyer? And how did a practice this old come to be measured in millions of people and billions of dollars?

• 2. The Weight Of Words

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  The word prostitute derives from the Latin prostituta, which some sources break into "pro," meaning up front or forward, and "stituere," meaning to offer up for sale. The Online Etymology Dictionary notes that "sex for hire" is not inherent in the root, which rather suggests one "exposed to lust" or sex "indiscriminately offered." The English word whore traces back to the Old English hora and a Proto-Indo-European root meaning "desire," the same root that gave Latin carus, dear. Most sex worker activist groups have rejected the word prostitute since the late 1970s, preferring sex worker instead. In Germany, however, many prostitutes' organizations deliberately use the word Hure, whore, because they feel that prostitute is a bureaucratic term. The slang term hooker is often tied by popular etymology to Joseph Hooker, a Union general in the American Civil War. The more likely origin is the concentration of prostitutes around the shipyards of the Corlear's Hook area of Manhattan in the 1820s. Buyers carry their own vocabulary. They are called johns or tricks in North America and punters in Britain and Ireland, and the name john may have come from customers giving "John" as a false name to stay anonymous. The labels reach beyond literal meaning. In The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield says of his brother writing screenplays in Hollywood, "Now he's out in Hollywood, D.B., being a prostitute," meaning the job is morally debasing. That metaphorical sting has a long political life, which is where the term travels next.

• 3. A Political Insult

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  Joseph Stalin once attacked Leon Trotsky by calling him a "political prostitute." The metaphor has long been a staple of Russian political rhetoric, signifying inconstancy, unreliability, and a lack of firm values. Trotsky used the same weapon himself, describing German Social Democracy as engaged in "political prostitution disguised by theories." He aimed it at the Comintern in 1938, charging that Stalin had brought it "to the last stages of political prostitution" in pursuit of an alliance with the imperialist democracies. The insult was not reserved for individuals. A 2007 Russian caricature depicted the Baltic states as three "ladies of the night," "vying for the attentions of Uncle Sam, since the Russian client has run out of money." The usage crossed into other lexicons too. A Huffington Post contributor said Donald Trump was "prostituting himself to feed his ego and gain power" during his run for President. Joe Biden reached for the term in a 1974 television interview about campaign finance, recalling that he "was ready to prostitute myself" for money, only to be told, "Come back when you're forty, son." Sex work researcher Gail Pheterson links these usages to a Christian moralist tradition in which the term became synonymous with debasing oneself for ill-gotten gains. That moral charge has older roots, found in how earlier eras tried to define and contain the practice itself.

• 4. Defining And Marking

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  The first known definition of prostitution appears in Marseille's thirteenth-century statutes, in a chapter titled De meretricibus, "regarding prostitutes." The Marseillais designated prostitutes as "public girls" who, day and night, received two or more men in their house. A fourteenth-century English tract, Fasciculus Morum, insisted the term applied only to women "who give themselves to anyone and will refuse none, and that for monetary gain." Medieval authorities often saw the practice as a necessary part of life. St. Augustine claimed that "the removal of the institution would bring lust into all aspects of the world," suggesting prostitutes spared honest women from male appetites. Sumptuary laws became a tool for setting prostitutes apart from respectable women. Courtesans might be required to "wear a shoulder-knot of a particular color as a badge of their calling," with yellow often serving as a color of shame. In the 14th century, London prostitutes were only tolerated when they wore yellow hoods. Marking returned in other settings; in the Russian Empire, prostitutes working out of government-sanctioned brothels were given yellow internal passports and subjected to weekly physical exams. The Church held a three-fold stance: acceptance as an inevitable social fact, condemnation of those profiting from it, and encouragement for the prostitute to repent. Around the twelfth century the idea of prostitute saints took hold, with Mary Magdalene among the most popular. Religious houses known as Magdalene Homes offered asylum and reformation, peaking in the early fourteenth century. The next century brought a harder mood, driven in part by disease.

• 5. Disease And Regulation

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  An outbreak of syphilis in Naples in 1494 later swept across Europe and may have originated from the Columbian Exchange. By the early 16th century, the association between prostitutes, plague, and contagion had emerged, and secular authorities began outlawing brothels and prostitution. William Acton's 1857 work, Prostitution, Considered in Its Moral, Social, and Sanitary Aspects, estimated that the County of London had 80,000 prostitutes and that 1 house in 60 was serving as a brothel. The British government tried to manage the health risk directly through the Contagious Diseases Acts, which mandated pelvic examinations for suspected prostitutes and remained in force until 1886. The French government, rather than outlawing the practice, treated it as a necessary evil and introduced a "Morals Brigade" onto the streets of Paris. These responses point to a recurring problem. Lack of condom use among prostitutes and their clients has been cited as a factor in the spread of HIV in Asia. One study found that encounters with prostitutes produced 84 percent of new HIV infections in adult males in Accra, Ghana. Banning the practice tends to drive it underground, making safe sex promotion, treatment, and monitoring more difficult. Registering prostitutes, critics argue, makes the state complicit while ignoring the health risks of those who go unregistered. These tensions feed directly into the modern legal debate, where countries have split into rival camps.

• 6. Four Legal Camps

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  Decriminalization treats prostitution as labor like any other, with the sex industry not subject to special regulation. New Zealand follows this path, where laws against operating a brothel, pimping, and street prostitution have been struck down. Amnesty International is one of the notable groups calling for decriminalization. Legalization instead treats the work as a legitimate business that is legal but regulated, the situation in the Netherlands, Germany, most of Australia, and parts of Nevada. The degree of regulation varies sharply. In the Netherlands prostitutes are not required to undergo mandatory health checks, while in Nevada the rules are very strict. Abolitionism keeps the sale of sex legal but bans the surrounding activities such as public solicitation, brothel-keeping, and other forms of pimping, the broad approach in Great Britain and Italy. Neo-abolitionism, also called the "Nordic model," treats the practice as inherently abusive and prosecutes clients and pimps but not prostitutes. After lobbying by a coalition of feminists and Christians, Sweden criminalized the buying, not the selling, of sex in 1999. It has since become law in places including France, Norway, and Iceland, with Norway's version forbidding even sex with a prostitute abroad. In 2014, the European Parliament voted 343 votes to 139, with 105 abstentions, in a non-binding resolution favoring this model. A 1949 UN General Assembly convention had already declared prostitution and trafficking "incompatible with the dignity and worth of the human person." Beneath these legal frameworks runs a harder question about who enters the trade by choice and who is forced.

• 7. Coercion And Survival

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  Sex trafficking uses coercion or force to move an unwilling person into prostitution or other sexual exploitation. The United Nations stated in 2009 that it is the most commonly identified form of human trafficking, estimating that about 79 percent of reported human trafficking is for prostitution. Kul Gautam, deputy executive director of UNICEF, described sex trafficking as "the largest slave trade in history." US Government-sponsored research completed in 2006 found that roughly 800,000 people are trafficked across national borders each year. The US Department of State estimated in 2008 that about 80 percent of transnational victims are women and girls, and up to 50 percent are minors. A separate driver is survival sex, when a person is pushed into the trade by a need for food or shelter. Researchers estimate that among homeless youth in North America, one in three has engaged in survival sex. In internally displaced persons camps in northern Uganda, where 1.4 million civilians were displaced by conflict with the Lord's Resistance Army, Human Rights Watch reported in 2005 that women and girls were engaging in survival sex with camp residents, local defense personnel, and government soldiers. Children form their own grim category. In India, federal police say around 1.2 million children are believed to be involved in prostitution, and a CBI statement cited estimates that about 40 percent of the country's prostitutes are children. In Bangladesh, charities say 90 percent of prostitutes in legalized brothels use the steroid Oradexon to look older. These figures sit alongside the everyday economics and forms the trade takes around the world.

• 8. Markets And Forms

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  Daulatdia, sometimes called the world's largest brothel, is an entire village in Bangladesh dedicated to prostitution, where many were born as the children of prostitutes. The trade takes many shapes beyond such communities. In escort prostitution the act may take place at the client's residence or hotel room, called out-call, or at the escort's place, called in-call. Street prostitution puts the seller on corners that pimps and prostitutes alike call "the track." Window prostitution, common in the Netherlands, lets a prostitute rent a window and workspace from an operator for a day or part of a day while recruiting her own customers. In Russia and other former USSR countries, an open-air market called a "tochka" parades women in front of car headlights for a client to select. Prices swing with the economy and with whoever takes a cut. High-end prostitutes can earn upwards of 5,000 dollars per client, and virgins may receive even higher payments, while pimps, brothel keepers, and madams take a slice of the income. Advertising adapts to local law, from "tart cards" in telephone enclosures to euphemistic ads offering "massages." In 2009, Craigslist came under fire for its role in facilitating online prostitution and was sued by some 40 US state attorneys general and other officials. The internet reshaped the oldest of trades faster than any law could, with prostitutes and clients now warning one another about danger on escort review boards built for the purpose.