The Oldest Profession

First of all, let’s make one thing clear.  A prostitute does not sell their body.  The only circumstance in which any person actually sells a body part is when someone sells a kidney.  When you sell something, the buyer takes permanent possession of it, and the seller can not get it back.  The new owner can do anything they want with their purchase, because it is now their property.  This does not describe the prostitute / client transaction at all.  Even when people accepted indentured servitude arrangements they were only offering themselves on a long-term lease, not actually selling themselves.  A prostitute normally only allows her (or his) clients limited use of a portion of their body for a short, usually designated time period, an hour perhaps, maybe a few. 

This is not just semantics.  It’s a very important distinction.   

Really, what the transaction consists of is a person agreeing to engage in a specific activity for a specified time period which they otherwise might not do, to the benefit of another person who offers compensation for the time and labor involved.

Which, if you think about it, kind of describes every job.

Why is sex a special case? 

Post- effective contraception, women’s liberation, and sexual liberation, (and beyond that to a modern world heading towards equality for homosexuals and acceptance of transsexuals), most people (at least people whose opinion is worth considering) have normalized sexuality, accepted it as a natural part of life and, frankly, not really such a big deal as people used to make of it (and some still do). 
It’s how we – and all multicellular life – reproduce, and it also happens to be enjoyable (except, not “happens to” – it is enjoyable specifically in order to get us to do it, because otherwise we wouldn’t). 

Non-reproductive sex is basically like chocolate cake with ice cream, or roller-coasters, or movies.
They are all examples of ways we have learned how to deliberately activate our own pleasure sensors - originally designed with some evolutionary function or other - but we can skip past all that survival of the specie nonsense and use our intellect to make life more pleasant for ourselves.  Sometimes there end up being negative side-effects, but plenty of times there aren’t.  When there aren’t any negative side-effects, there is no good reason why we shouldn’t.

EDIT:
My first two comments on this were both very similar.  They both addressed some commonly held ideas about the real world working conditions of prostitutes - specifically "street walkers" - currently, in the United States.  This is not an essay about what "is".  It is about what "could be" - perhaps even should be.  I believe that the REASON conditions are so bad for those women, and the reason many of them have backgrounds of addiction and/or childhood abuse is BECAUSE of both the illegality and the social stigma.  The same degree of correlation does not exist, for example, in the porn industry, which is a legal version where a person has sex in exchange for money. Some correlation still exists, but then again, the social stigma is there even if the criminality isn't.
However, given that this is what probably many people will be thinking about upon seeing the topic, I should address it early on.

Many people simply accept it as a given that the majority of prostitutes are being exploited by pimps, that they were abused as children, or that they began working as prostitutes as children. 
As is often the case, common knowledge does not fully match up to even current reality in the first place:

"a Miami study found that only 7 percent had pimps"
"studies that compare matched samples of street prostitutes and non-prostitutes [regarding childhood abuse] show mixed results; some find a statistically significant difference in experience of family
abuse, while others find no difference."
"victimization is apparently not nearly as prevalent, even among street prostitutes, as the oppression model asserts."
"An estimated 20 percent of all prostitutes work on the streets in the United States."
"indoor sex workers are less likely to experience violence from customers than those who work on the streets. For example, Church found that few call girls and sauna workers had experienced violence (only 1 percent had ever been beaten, 2 percent raped"
"compared to streetwalkers, indoor workers have lower rates of childhood abuse, enter prostitution at an older age, and have more education. They are less drug dependent...Sexually transmitted diseases are fairly rare among call girls, escorts, and women who work in brothels"
"Research finds that many indoor workers made conscious decisions to enter the trade; they do not see themselves as oppressed victims and do not feel that their work is degrading. Consequently, they
express greater job satisfaction than their street level counterparts. And they may differ little from nonprostitutes: A study by psychologist Sarah Romans and colleagues comparing indoor workers
and an age-matched sample of nonprostitute women found no differences between the two groups in physical health, self-esteem, mental health, or the quality of their social networks."
 
http://www.umsl.edu/~marinap/DOCUMENTS/problemsurbancomm/mail/Prostitution-%20Facts%20and%20Fictions.pdf

Update: that link seems to have gone bad.  Try:
http://www.hivlawandpolicy.org/sites/www.hivlawandpolicy.org/files/Prostitution%20Facts%20and%20Fiction.pdf

(or web search for "prostitution: facts and fictions" by Ronald Weitzer)

Street walking is the most visible form to most people, and the form that critics always point to, but there is absolutely zero reason to assume that it represents anything inherent about prostitution.  Understand that all through-out this essay, I am referring to prostitution philosophically, removed from the social elements in day to day practice in the United States which are largely a result of both it being illegal, and the social stigmas which are a direct result of the sort of collective beliefs we hold about sexuality that I am addressing in this essay.

Back to the question at hand.  Why is sex a special case, when really all employment involves renting yourself out?  What does it say about our assumptions about sexuality, our own lingering hang-ups and inappropriate moralizing if using ones hands to stimulate another’s back for money is ok, but using ones hands to stimulate another in certain other places is not?  Are we still going to claim that a woman’s sex parts are what make her valuable?  If not, why is it any more or less demeaning for her to use those parts to stimulate her client than it would be to use her hands?  What does it say about our own beliefs about female sexuality if any act of sex is somehow inherently degrading?

Man provides money, woman provides sex.  This describes a large part of the traditional model of home life.  If a live-in prostitute also cooks and cleans, does that somehow make it less scandalous?  How about if a man has sex with his live-in maid? What separates her from a housewife? What if the two feel a genuine affection for each other? At this point the lines get very blurry between a sugar daddy / sugar baby relationship – which is technically legal – and straight prostitution.  (link to playboy article, if available).  What separates this  arrangement from any other childless couple consisting of a breadwinner and a housewife?  One could answer that a wife need not submit on demand, but remember that for most of history, she generally was expected to.

A masseuse makes their client’s body feel good, using their own body.  The only thing differentiating massage from prostitution is sex part contact (though, of course, that is not always a difference.  It seems the two go together quite naturally.  Yet neither always implies the other). But masseuse is just most obvious analogy, how about a chiropractor?  Or any doctor for that matter. How about a model? They are renting out their body as well. Or a construction worker, who is paid to do particular things with their hands all day, which they wouldn’t be doing on their own?  Moreover, any one who does any work with their hands, is renting their body to whoever employs them.  Professional thinkers are not off the hook.  They are being paid to think about some particular topic, no matter what they might prefer to have on their minds.  They are renting out their brains to their employers or clients.  And the brain is an organ of the body, just like every other.  The temporary use of your body is what you get paid for.  If you weren’t using your body in some way that someone else wanted, no one would give you any money.  Unless you are unemployed, you rent out your body.  Most people spend the majority of their waking hours renting out their bodies to someone else.  And while there are a few fringe anarchists who think that is always immoral, most people see no problem with it, so long as it is a voluntary arrangement.

The one exception we have is for children (and perhaps people with the mental capacity of a child).
But in the case of sex, an awful lot of people don’t feel its ok even if the professional prostitute is an adult, and choose that line of work voluntarily.  What does this say about our hidden beliefs about female agency?  Can we assume that no one would ever voluntarily make that choice, therefore they must be a victim?  No other profession carries with it an assumption that the worker must be being forced or manipulated into taking the job.  I would never voluntarily work in a sewage plant, a landfill, a slaughterhouse, a coal mine, or wearing a giant advertising character suit.  Yet I don’t assume that anyone who does those jobs was traumatized in their past, is on drugs, or is being manipulated or threatened by their manager.  I just see that for the right price, different people choose to rent themselves out in different types of employment.  For unskilled or semi-skilled labor, the most unpleasant jobs tend to pay pretty well. 

As was established earlier, due to obvious evolutionary reasons, sex feels pleasurable.  It does for both genders, for the same reason.  On average males tend to have a stronger sex drive than women, but it is none-the-less pleasurable for females – if it wasn’t, they would never agree to it, and the specie would have died out millions of years ago.  Contrary to what much of society has claimed for centuries at least, women even have sexual desire of their own, independent of their partners, and most of them have orgasms at least occasionally.  So, unlike being a sanitation worker or a coal miner, the day to day (or night to night) business of being a prostitute is at least potentially pleasurable, and at the same time, the pay can be competitive with the crappiest of jobs. 

I propose that the real reason for the cultural stigma of prostitution may have actually originated from somewhere quite different – nearly opposite – than the purported reasons of today (protecting women), and it ties in with the housewife analogy I made earlier.

Our species is slightly sexually dimorphic – that is, males and females have slightly different characteristics aside from those which directly affect reproduction.  For example, males have furry faces, females do not. Males also tend to be slightly larger in stature and stronger physically than females.  Whatever the reasons this dimorphism originally evolved, as humans formed ever larger and more complex social groups, we tended to set up arrangements where males used their strength for hunting and protection.  This gave them a social advantage, since they had something to offer that females need - protein - while males were capable of gathering plant food as well if need be (and frequently did, during the long periods of waiting that hunting involves). 

Meanwhile, the long human gestation period and even longer time to parental independence means a female has reason to be much more selective in mates than other species, while for a non-monogamous prehistoric male there is still the same biological incentive towards promiscuity that there is for any creature (of either sex) which doesn’t have to take the time and resources to care for offspring.  This tends to leads to a situation in which the male human’s sex drive is much stronger than the human females – not just in terms of frequency, but, more importantly, in terms of the sensation of urgency.

And there lies the equalizer to the power dynamic caused by our sexual dimorphism.  For females sex is pleasurable, but for males sex is (or at least feels like) a necessity. 

As obsessed as our particular society is with rape, in practical terms, barring the use of weapons, bondage, or drugs (none of which had been invented yet) to force submission, it’s simply challenging to do successfully.  Imagine trying to get a key into a doorknob while someone on the inside keeps turning the handle.  Now imagine instead of just turning the knob, the other person has the knob out of the door, and they are spinning it and waving it all around, and also punching you in the face and kicking you in the crotch at the same time you try to get the key in the keyhole.  The difficulty in practical terms is reflected in how rarely rape is successful by total strangers who don’t use any sort of weapons, drugs, or other means to force submission.

This is reflected by real life statistics.  Depending which study you look at, 70-90% of rape victims knew the attacker personally, and the vast majority of these happen inside the home of one of them.  In these cases there are a myriad of social and psychological factors that affect power dynamics, so in order to determine any inherent gender based power imbalance, we have to focus on only those rapes committed by strangers.
Among all rapes, in 54% the victim was intoxicated, and while many of these coincide with the cases of known assailants, at least one study suggests that women raped by strangers are more likely to be under the influence of drugs or alcohol at the time of attack.  Of rapes committed by strangers, 20% brandish or use weapons, and 20% have more than one assailant.  These 3 factors will no doubt have some overlap, but it means somewhere between 60% and 90% of the time there is something other than just physical strength differences involved.  Of what remains, a very significant number of victims do not resist.  This is likely from a mistaken belief (one which has been actively promoted by well meaning but misinformed professionals) that resistance will increase the violence used against them, when in fact "resisting victims are less frequently and less seriously injured after taking some kind of protective action than non-resisting victims"
When a potential victim offers physical resistance before rape has occurred, it is effective 85% of the time.
Another study found violent physical resistance prevents rape up to 86% of the time it is attempted and simply running away is effective up to 85% of the time.
Apply that 85% of the time an attacker is unable to overcome resistance to the up to 90% of the time when physical strength is the only advantage the attacker has, and the reality matches up with the thought experiment - outside of modern social and technological factors, the physical power imbalance between the genders is much smaller than we commonly assume: considering only cases where a single, unarmed male attacker tries to force a fully sober female potential victim to submit, and that female uses any form of physical resistance, he fails up to 98.5% of the time.

So that leaves female choice as the deciding factor in when, or if, a male gets to have the sex which he (feels he) needs.  This balances out the power dynamic, as females have almost total control over something males need; something that they are not realistically able to do without.

Once agriculture is invented, though, women are less dependent on men for sustenance, and the power balance shifts in their favor.  To try to compensate, men formed strict social roles that attempted to keep women dependent, all the way to the fairly recent era of housewives and breadwinners – a female may be just as capable physically and mentally as doing whatever job her husband does, but if she is capable of supporting herself, what incentive does she have to stay with him and continue providing him sex?  (Incidentally, this is perhaps reflected in that, since female employment has become normal and wide-spread, the majority of divorces are initiated by women).

Then, perhaps largely to that end, at some point in our history, cultures all over the world invented marriage. 

This is very good in an important way for females, as it mandates males to stay put and provide time and/or resources necessary to sustain the helpless human offspring they helped to create. 

But it also takes away the one source of power that they had, as (up until about 1979), the deal also mandated that a wife satisfy her husband sexually anytime he wanted.  It allowed females themselves to be commoditized, a possession originally owned by her father, later transferred to her husband in a match the father arranged. 
Most important of all, it was good for social cohesion and society as a whole, and allowed a mechanism by which one group could form alliances with others nearby.

Prostitution bypasses that mechanism.  Societies’ leaders don’t like it, because having authority over sexual acts gives them power over individuals, and because illegitimate children are hard to fit into organized social structures. Illegitimate children confuse issues of inheritance, dowries, and kinship. 

Males don’t like it because it gives females power.  Sex (as opposed to the women themselves) is again commoditized, which means the female can demand a fair market price for it, rather than being forced to provide an unlimited amount.  A prostitute can even turn down a client she isn’t interested in. 

Non-prostitute females don’t like it because their promise of sexual availability to their male partner was supposed to be the trade off for sexual exclusivity from their partners, guarantying the male isn’t tempted to spend resources on offspring produced with some other female (like the prostitute).

Yet, despite all of the various social arrangements prostitution circumvents, it remains a worthwhile transaction for the parties involved.  What can the leaders of society – those creating the fundamental beginnings of culture, that which would continue to affect our collective consciousness for the rest of foreseeable time – do to prevent two consenting individuals from engaging in what they determine to be a mutually beneficial transaction?
Before there was any such thing as law, there was only one thing societies leaders could do.  Invoke a religious based morality, one which needs no justification or explanation, because it is claimed to come directly from the mouth of “god(s)”.  Prostitution, along with all non-procreative sex, gets condemned universally.  In a world with no technology and no law enforcement, where individuals may live any distance from anyone else, and where the majority of families are responsible for their own sustenance, there isn’t much leverage a society’s leader has over the people.  If individuals can be convinced that there is something fundamentally bad about the pleasure of sex, that it is permissible only in the context of an officially sanctioned marriage, then those who control marriage control an important aspect of individuals lives – and of course marriage is universally controlled by religious or government officials, those same entities which have attempted to maintain control over people for as long as people have lived in groups.  Every expression of sexuality outside of it then becomes expressly forbidden – per-marital, adultery (even if its consensual, including the consent and/or participation of the spouses), incest, prostitution, and even masturbation – by way of the false “morality” of religious decree. 

Of course any sane person, told that, for example, enjoying the sunshine on your face on a sunny day, or enjoying a delicious orange, or enjoying music, or laughing with friends was actually immoral and angered “god(s)”, not for any particular reason, but just because (S)He says so, would immediately disregard such utter non-sense, and probably disregard pretty much everything else the priest who made that claim said as well.  It has to go beyond just a decree.  It has to be a universal condemnation of any pleasurable aspect of sexuality which is drilled into every single individual from the moment they learn to speak, if not sooner.  Herein lies the birth of the concept of nudity and its inseparable concepts of indecent exposure, modesty, and shame.  Never allowing any person to see one’s sex parts outside of the family unit creates a subtle anti-sex message to a new human trying to make sense of the world even before they are old enough to speak. 

In a society where women are property, a young girl’s value is inherently tied up with her virginity.  No family wants to arrange a marriage for their son with a girl who is already pregnant with someone else’s child, nor does a man want to spend his resources raising a child that doesn’t have his genes.  But hundreds of thousands of years before modern technology, the only way to be absolutely sure a woman or girl isn’t already pregnant is if she is a virgin.  Therefore, from the point of view of her parents, who have her to trade, her virginity is valuable.  However, from her own point of view, any child she may get pregnant with has her genes, and more immediately relevant, any sex she has is potentially enjoyable to her.  So there is a conflict between her acting in her own interests, and what her parents want her to do.  Much like with the leaders of societies' desire to control all of society by limiting who has sex with who, individual parents have incentive to prevent their daughters from having sex with anyone other than who they designate, and they have the same problem of how to actually enforce that.  The solution is the same: make sure that she feels guilty about her own sexuality from as young an age as possible, and constantly reinforce the idea that her value as a person is intrinsically tied up with who she has sex with.  Make her feel that refraining from sex makes her a virtuous person, and slander the words “slut” and “whore” as the two worst possible insult that can be given to a female.  Tie up her self-esteem with her sexuality (or rather lack-thereof), and reinforce that so persistently that she completely and fully internalizes it.  Eventually everyone is so affected and it gets reinforced by social pressure so thoroughly that many thousands of years later people still assume that if a female chooses to have sex with several different people, she must have a low sense of self-worth, and similarly sex-workers of any kind – not just prostitutes, but also escorts, porn actresses, strippers, and even nude models, are all often just assumed to be victims of abuse, drugs, or desperation.

Even though, in the years between then and now, quite a few totally game-changing events have happened.  Women have regained recognition by males as people.  Women have ceased to be legally property.  Rape is no longer a crime against a woman’s father or husband, as it was in the Bible, but instead a crime against her.  Women have been included in democracy, allowed to vote and hold office. 
Another sea-change in human culture is religion lost its strangle-hold on society.  It still has plenty of adamant followers, and even among non-believers its influence on world-view can be rather dramatic, but it is no longer a serious rival to secular government in making Laws which must be obeyed by all.  That leaves open for questioning all of the “moral” rules handed down by it which have no actual basis in the fundamental ethics of harming or helping sentient beings which real morality is based on, and nearly all of them have indeed been questioned by secular liberals, and occasionally even secular conservatives and religious liberals.  In dramatic contrast to the religious past, homosexuality is widely tolerated, if not accepted outright, gambling is a problem only if it leads to addiction or crime, blasphemy is just a figure of speech, and Family Guy is aired nightly on broadcast television with nothing more than a brief message of parental advisory.
The third gigantic change – one which may actually have had significant affect in helping the other two occur – was the invention of forms of contraception which actually worked.  People have been using methods to try to enjoy the pleasure of sex without the inconvenience of reproduction since before anyone thought up the wheel, but “actually worked” are the key words.  That invention completely dissolved most of the original reasons for centralized authoritarian control over individual sexuality – managing fertility and kinship in order to manipulate social relationships.  The main reason left for anyone to want to control an individual female’s sexuality is the power imbalance caused by sex being a necessity for men but a nicety for women.  Now that she can have sex without the risk of having to raise a child without paternal support, she has substantially more power.  Couple that with women’s substantially increased rights, and women gain control over their own sexuality from both men and from biology; and in doing so gained a huge amount of power over men.  As religion lost strength and contraception became cheaper, easier to access, and more effective, many of the sexual morays which pretended to be morality but were really about controlling fertility and maintaining power structures began to melt away.  While it’s not exactly dinner conversation, it’s pretty much understood that most normal healthy people masturbate at least at some point in their lives.  "Swinging" or open relationships are seen as choices a couple makes.  Premarital sex has become the norm – who in modern society would marry someone they had never had sex with?  Homosexuality, once seen as the gravest of sins, is no longer a capital offense, no longer a mental illness, and in many places, nothing to be ashamed of at all.  All of these things which we take for granted were once considered capital offenses.  Regardless of the consent of all parties involved, the punishment for any sex outside of marriage was death.

But with all these changes, certain things – particularly those with significantly less universal appeal – have kept their status as inherently “immoral” even if they don’t actually hurt anyone.  Incest between two consenting adults is still seen as inherently immoral even by otherwise secular progressives.  There is likely a biological component to this aversion, as there are a lot of regressive genes which lead to various genetic illnesses which are only expressed if a person has the same version from both parents, and statistically speaking the more closely related the parents, the higher the chance of them both having the same problematic recessive gene. However, even siblings only have about 50% of their variable DNA in common (that which can vary and still leave a being human) and all the members of a given population (especially prior to the advent of mechanized long-distance travel) are likely to have very similar genomes.  In other words, incest is not at all a guarantee of offspring with problems, nor is avoiding it a guarantee against them.  By the logic of the recessive gene argument, people should seek partners as foreign to themselves as possible, yet people (especially females) tend to seek partners of their own race (that, or seek out white partners, regardless of their own race).  In any event, the invention of effective contraception renders the entire deformed offspring argument entirely moot.  There is no objective reason for any objection for sex between two consenting adults, who are using contraception, who happen to be siblings.  And yet this persists even in the most progressive of societies as being seen as despicable, and that speaks to just how strongly the affects of past religious based “morality” continues to have indirect influence over current culture, no matter how far removed from it any particular non-believer is.

You can still hear post-sexual-liberation women use the term “slut” and “whore” as an insult against other women.  A “slut” is just a female who chooses to have sex with multiple partners without forming relationships with them first.  A “whore” is a derogatory word for prostitute, or, anyone who receives compensation from a partner for engaging in sex.  Why should these things continue to offend women?  Certainly a part of it is the same lingering religious morays that condemn incest, but there may be another factor as well.  As previously noted, much of the reason for the original subjugation of women may have been men’s attempt at undoing the power unbalance, and with women’s liberation, the power imbalance returned, and with the advent of contraception and abortion, that influence over males could be exercised with no risk of unintended offspring.  But the power shift to the entire gender is only available to any individual to the extent that she controls the only access to sex for a given partner.  Although any given couple is unlikely to make every sexual contact a squid row quo, generally both partners are expected to contribute to the relationship, and sex is frequently seen as a negotiating point in the female's favor since, as since ancient times, no matter how much she may desire and enjoy it, she can do without it, while a male can no more go without then he can without food (which is why there are so many cases of celibate priests in sexual scandals, but it is essentially unheard of among nuns). 
However, if a prostitute comes along, it diminishes that negotiating power, as her partner now has another avenue for that resource, one that comes without the explicit long-term contract of marriage or even the implicit long-term contract of a relationship.  And of course a promiscuous female is even worse, since they don’t require any form of compensation.  Obviously few if any women actually consciously think all this through when looking down on another women for their sexual choices, but I propose it may be a subconscious mechanism that explains why some people who take pre-marital sex for granted and are totally ok with homosexuality still have a distaste for prostitutes and promiscuous women.

All of this history and politics, to try to look into why sex is considered a special case, any different from any other temporary renting out of one's body, why it should have any more or less to do with self-respect than any other form of labor.  The primary reasons are obsolete.  Many of our sexual morays are relics from before birth control existed, and gradually – very gradually – societies in many parts of the world are finally changing to catch up to modern technology.  Things which have been ingrained into our collective psyche for thousands of generations often have a tendency to take on an existence of their own, independent of the original reasons they developed.  But as logical intelligent individuals, we can each think about our own true core values and separate that which we believe from that which everyone around us has always told us to believe.  If we accept that there is absolutely nothing dirty or sinful about enjoying sex in any form so long as it is by the consent of everyone involved, then all of the old “goes-without-saying” type of morays should be questioned.  Not just the ones we personally would like to violate, but also the ones we have no interest in.  There is no such thing as a perversion.  There is just differing tastes. 
And once you have removed the “non-reproductive-sex is evil” non-sense from the equation, all that is left is prostitution is a job.  A job in which you temporarily rent your body to someone, and do something you wouldn’t otherwise be doing in that particular moment.  Just like every other job that exists or could possibly exist.  If you are employed, in any fashion, if you get compensated by anyone for doing or thinking anything, that makes you, essentially, a whore.  And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.