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.

Explicitly-defined 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.)

Prostitution and marriage

Feminist analysis has frequently pinpointed traditional (heterosexual patriarchal) marriage as a type of prostitution, or analogous to prostitution.

Points of similarity include: (1) marriage in many cultures has primarily or significantly involved male access to female sexuality; (2) women are less free to do other occupations and therefore marriage to a man is their primary means of support, and in fact marriage has been frequently defined as an economic compact; (3) women are frequently "sold" in marriage by their fathers or male relatives (analogous to pimps).

Points of dissimilarity include: (1) marriage is not limited to sexuality but also includes access to and control over women's reproduction, labor, and physical well-being.

This is a class-based analysis; here, marriage is a type of prostitution that particularly applies to middle-class and upper-class women, who by social convention may have been more restricted from paid work "outside the home". Access by those women to financial resources compared to working class women may have been more limited in some instances (e.g., entailed estates), and less limited in others (e.g., personal inheritances; ability to engage in unpaid work; male family members who supported women's education).

In the west, legal reforms and social changes throughout the 19th and 20th centuries eradicated many of the points of similarity. These "married women's reforms" included:

• the rights of married women to own or earn property in their own name;
• the rights of married women to refuse sex (e.g., criminalization of "marital rape");
• the rise of "companionate marriage" -- the view of marriage as a love partnership not solely or primarily an economic arrangement, and the view of marriage as a complementary or equal partnership;
• gradual elimination or minimization of sexual double standards that approved of multiple partners for males and simultaneously disapproved of multiple partners for females;
• increase of the "age of consent" to eliminate the practice of "child brides";
• elimination or decrease of marital economic transaction practices such as "dowries";
• increase in women's access to education and employment, specifically including reduction or eradication of legal barriers.

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

• Wikipedia entry

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