I stumbled across this paper by two economists, Lena Edlund of Columbia University and Evelyn Korn of Eberhard-Karls-Universitat Tubingen, which claims that wives and prostitutes, in an economic perspective, are essentially chasing the same resources, but wives from a male perspective offer a superior product in that they can produce children that with some reason can be assumed to be the fathers, and are socially recognized as being thus. Prostitutes on the other hand, have to be very well paid, in comparison to other unskilled female jobs, to compensate for not being able to marry.
They also conclude that if you want to combat prostitution, rather than making it illegal, you should strive to enrich both men and women. Since when men have more money, even though they can afford more prostitutes, they’d tend to prefer to buy the superiour goods (wives) – which apparently is precisely what is being seen when you compare poorer countries with richer countries.
Can essential human activities be reduced to mere economic theories, and are their conclusions correct? A Theory of Prostitution
Wouldn’t it make more sense, if the theory is correct and the objective is to end prostitution, to enrich women at the expense of men? Then women would have no economic incentive to become prostitutes and men would not have the means to afford them. Of course this might just end up creating a lot of gigolos.
The flaw I see with this is it assumes that married men won’t visit prostitutes. Is this correct? I’d think that making a man rich enough would mean he’d “purchase” two or more goods: a wife and a whore on the side.
Is there some Golden Mean of economic prosperity where a man can afford a wife but not a wife and a prostitute? How do you stop economic growth at that point?
The flaw in this is that men don’t necessarily want children. In fact, some would see children as an added cost, not a benefit, to wives.
The same goes for emotional attatchment (that is, love). Some men demand it, and see the added intimacy as a “service” of their wives. Some men shun it, and would see it as an added cost.
And some men want to be loved some times, and fucked at others. Since their wives aren’t always willing or otherwise availiable, or for the sake of variety, these men would see prostitutes while married (or while persuing a wife).
I do agree that the only way to eliminate prostitution is to make all women prosperous enough that they’d never enter the profession out of desperation (which is a degree of social support this country isn’t prepared to accept). I suppose some still would, because they like the work. And they’d be in very high demand, so they could make quite a bit of money, which would attract more women…
By the term resources, you mean male income and wealth.
I can see the socialization of sexual resources for men. Generate a healthy economy, and apply a sex tax on men and distribute the proceeds to women. That way the wealthier men can afford in house sexual help and housekeeping while the poorer men won’t be able to convince the now adequately state supported women to prostitute themselves for them. :eek:
I don’t see prostitution as ever going away completely. What my ideal would be would be if:
(1) No one ever worked as a prostitite because that was all that they could do to survive. That is, all prostitutes chose the work, either because they preferred it, or because they liked the extra money it orovided over alternative work (or a combination of the two).
(2) There were roughly an equal number of female prostitutes providing services to men, and male prostitutes providing services to women. (Though they might identify their services as “escort services” or “companionship” rather then just “sexual services” – as might many of the women prostitutes.)
Illegal prostitutes, i.e streetwalkers, who are often looking for a quick score of cash for their next drug fix, no. Legal prostitutes, i.e. Nevada brothel workers, and semi-legal prostitutes, i.e. escorts ad “companions”, can pull down significant amounts of money for what is essentially an unskilled position.
That’s making the assumption that female sexuality is roughly the same as male sexuality. That is to say, that women would patronize male protitutes if they could. I’m not sure that would be the case.
Which would not necessarily make prostitution immoral or in unjust in and of itself.
Certainly, it’s an assumption. The differences in sex drives between men and women are influenced by many things, including societal expectation and by fear of unwanted pregancies. But my assumption is that economic equality, combined with men and women both having roughly equal sex drives, would lead to rough equality between male and female prostitution.
(In some societies, it is generally assumed that women’s sex drives are actually higher than men’s, and that’s why it’s bnecessary to place resttrictions on women’s behaviour. And in any case, women who know about the difficulties of being pregnant, giving birth and then raising children are nevertheless motivated enough to have sex regardless. Men might equally feel responsible for raising children, but they don’t suffer equally through pegnancy and chilkdbirth. So I’m not sure that my assumption is all that crazy.)
But equal sex drives does not infer equal use of prostitutes. Women may be just as desirious as men for sex in general, but may be more demanding of monogamy or a romantic context.
But it’s an moot point anyway, since social and economic equality doesn’t exist and never has, and absent that we’ll never have an answer.
Women may have very high sex drives, and we might have fantastic fantasy lives and enjoy sex with our husbands or boyfriends multiple times a day, but as a broad generalization, as well as a generalization about broads, we don’t like sex with strangers all that often. There’s exceptions, sure, but most of us want to have sex with someone we have more than a monetary relationship with.
Besides, how are you going to regulate your system? Take a census every year and conscript more men into the industry? Issue a set number of “male” and “female” and “other” licenses to whore? Socialize the whole thing?
I do agree with making prostitution legal, but I can’t see the genders ever having equal representation - unless you’re talking male prostitutes for male clients.
If one assumes an equal market among women for male prostitutes and among men for female prostitutes, why would there be prostitutes at all? Surely, in that situation, and given modern mass communication, the men and women who just wanted a no-strings-attached sexual encounter would simply seek each other out, and copulate without exchange of money at all? It’s only the fact that, in current society, men are more desirous of such unions that makes prostitution economical at all.
Because some people are less attractive than others. So (for example) the wealthy, but aging, single person can have the company of a more attractive younger person from time to time.
No regulation at all to balance the sex ratio. I remember a time when bus drivers were all men, but now many are women (though there may not yet be exact equality). That happened because the bus companies decided that women could drive buses just as well as men.
I’d guess that as long as there are abusive dysfunctional families, there will be teenage runaways who become street kids, some of whom must turn to prostitution to support themselves and possible drug habits. No amount of economic theorizing is likely to analyze this away, unless one wants to unconvincingly propose that greater economic stability eliminates the stresses that turn some parents into assholes.
I think that Lena and Evelyn are both female, and hold some very peculiar views about what women want.
From that black art of ‘revealed preference’ we can see that quite a lot of women do not want to marry (or rather stay married). A nice settlement will do nicely.
I would also widen the definition of prostitution, some years ago on an involuntary cruise I had a very interesting conversation with a very beddable female called Lady X, (the Lady bit is genuine,) she went to some lengths explaining to me that although her male companion was a bit of an old duffer, she enjoyed going on holidays with him. To be honest I rather fancied her, and I suspect that the feeling was mutual.
We also have the Gambia, and that interesting film about Jamaica.
Also I have heard about a place near my abode, but slightly off the beaten track, which runs as a sort of club. Reputedly the girls are very nice, it is more like a cocktail party, held in the afternoons so that the guys can spend the evening with their wives and kids.
I think they assume that well off married men will divorce their wives and take a younger wife – while less well-off men will have to frequent prostitutes.
