Prostitution
Prostitution is the exchange of sexual services for remuneration; a type of sex work.
Prostitution is a activity that manifests across an extremely broad range of forms, relations of productions, contexts and cultural significations.
It is intimately linked to power dynamics, however, because, as a type of industry, it belongs to the tertiary sector: that of services provided by humans to other humans. It is therefore contingent on the ability of the recipient of those services to pay for them, or to coerce the providers into performing these services (exploitation). (The difference in the nature of the compensation for the service and of the service itself distinguishes prostitution from a reciprocal sexual exchange.)
The distribution of the relative roles of recipients and providers of sexual services usually falls across hierarchical lines in society. Those at the top of a hierarchy have the means of remunerating people in inferior positions; whereas those at the bottom of a hierarchy may be constrained into offering sexual services because they are prevented from relating to the dominant persons in other ways, or engaging in other types of labour.
Prostitutes therefore tend to be found in the lower economic classes, among members of an oppressed gender (women), and of legal minorities (such as children and slaves). Conversely, the patrons tend to be economically solvent, politically enfranchised, adult men.
There is an intermediary position between prostitutes and their patrons, which is that of the purveyors of sexual services. (The terms for surch purveyors tend to be marked according to gender: men are pimps, women are madams.)
See also
- Pornography
- Prostitution in SF
- List of non-female sex workers in SF
- List of female sex workers in SF
- The Frank Miller test
- Rape
External links
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