{"id":37542,"date":"2017-03-05T04:00:56","date_gmt":"2017-03-05T09:00:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=37542"},"modified":"2017-03-03T12:00:20","modified_gmt":"2017-03-03T17:00:20","slug":"the-three-kinds-of-prostitution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2017\/03\/05\/the-three-kinds-of-prostitution\/","title":{"rendered":"The three kinds of prostitution"},"content":{"rendered":"

Kim du Toit<\/a> on the world’s oldest profession:<\/p>\n

The problem is that there are in essence three kinds of prostitution: the age-old \u201cselling yourself on the street kind\u201d \u2014 i.e. to all comers [sic]<\/em> \u2014 and the more formal transactions, whereby women contract for sex on a more formalized basis, or marry for money. In all cases, the motivation is the same: women are trading themselves to men for financial support, only the first kind is frowned upon by society, the second kind winked at, and the last is pretty much the glue whereby society is held together. (As my friend Patterson once commented: \u201cAll<\/em> women fuck for money if they\u2019re going to be honest about it, but they seldom are.\u201d)<\/p>\n

And, of course, as with all things, there is a murky area between these two extremes: the \u201ccontracted\u201d kind whereby young women (and it seems to be mostly the young ones, for obvious reasons) rent their bodies out to wealthy men in order to pay off college loans, or get through some other adverse financial circumstance \u2014 hence the popularity of websites like Sugardaddy. This is what I call a \u201cpart-time prostitute\u201d, and the exchange is quite cynical \u2014 as are most transactions of this kind. But this is different from the \u201cbrief encounter\u201d or street-corner type of prostitution, because older men (usually older, because younger men don\u2019t have the financial wherewithal to pay a young woman thousands of dollars a month just for \u201ccompanionship\u201d) set up an ongoing financial support system, buying Little Miss Hotbody expensive clothing, jewellery, cars and even sometimes a condo. (Note that I\u2019m not saying that this is better<\/em> than the street-corner kind of prostitution, just that it\u2019s different. The process is the same \u2014 women having sex for money \u2014 but the terms of congress, as it were, are dissimilar.) If I\u2019m going to be really cynical about it, I\u2019d call this kind of prostitution a \u201chalfway house\u201d between street-corner sex and marital sex.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

We can argue all day about the morality of the activity of women selling their bodies for sex, and about the disappearance of public morality which allows Sugardaddy.com to exist, nay flourish, but this is where we find ourselves today, for better or for worse. As the modern idiom goes, it is what it is, and it seems like we pretty much have to live with it.<\/p>\n

Fine. Let us at least acknowledge that street-corner prostitution presents a greater danger to women \u2014 slavery, forced prostitution, human trafficking, violence and murder \u2014 than does the Sugardaddy – and Anna Nicole-style prostitution. (We can leave class out of it because, as with most Marxist thought, that\u2019s just an overlay of political theory on an age-old situation, and no class warfare is ever going to \u201csolve\u201d or end street-corner prostitution.) I do think, however, that in this regard there is a real need for law enforcement attention, simply because of the many dangers to which poorer women are exposed. Honestly, though, I think that the law should go after the management<\/em> of the street-corner prostitution industry \u2014 that would be the pimps and procurers of women \u2014 rather than the actual participants (the women and their clients), because the former are the ones who generally cause real harm to the hapless women under their control. I\u2019m not advocating State-run brothels because both the concept and likely execution are going to be foul. (To put it in perspective: imagine a State-run restaurant, e.g. managed and staffed by the same kind of people at the average DMV office, and you\u2019ll see why I think State-run whorehouses are a bad idea.) Nevertheless, they are the lesser evil than those managed by the (illegal) private sector, who as a rule do not have the interests of their employees at heart.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kim du Toit on the world’s oldest profession: The problem is that there are in essence three kinds of prostitution: the age-old \u201cselling yourself on the street kind\u201d \u2014 i.e. to all comers [sic] \u2014 and the more formal transactions, whereby women contract for sex on a more formalized basis, or marry for money. In […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[831,9,10],"tags":[58,520,417],"class_list":["post-37542","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-law","category-liberty","tag-internet","tag-prostitution","tag-victimlesscrime"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-9Lw","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37542","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37542"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37542\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37543,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37542\/revisions\/37543"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37542"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37542"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37542"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}