The Importance Of Prostitution

Prostitution is sometimes described as the oldest profession, and has been debated upon for years. Generally, most people deem it to be morally unacceptable and that it should be eliminated. However, it has continued to thrive, with some countries even legalizing it. In this essay, I will delve deeper into the ethics of the practice itself. Commonly found reasons as to why people consider prostitution to be immoral is that they believe it is coercive, exploitative and degrading, and that it perpetuates social inequality between men and women. In this essay, I will extrapolate on these preconceived reasons and then argue that prostitution is in fact not more coercive, exploitative or degrading than any other generally morally acceptable job,

Prostitution, simply put, is the commission by a person of any natural or unnatural sex act, in return for monetary compensation or any other thing of value. Therefore, a prostitute is defined as an individual who exchanges sexual favours for money, or other desirable commodities.

In broad terms, there are three distinct groups of prostitutes. Debra Satz elaborates on these three types, namely female prostitutes under the care of a pimp, call girls, and male prostitutes. The first kind is the ‘traditional’ type of prostitute, the streetwalker, mostly depicted in films and mainstream discourse. The streetwalker prostitute is uneducated, poor, and requires the security of a pimp . This category of prostitutes almost never has autonomy over who they get to have sex with and are usually required to follow instructions from their pimp, lest they get abused.

The second type of prostitute are call girls. They differ from the first mainly due to the fact that they do not have a pimp dictating their actions. In fact, they have an unusually high degree of independence and most of them consciously opt for this line of work by choice. They are mostly college graduates, and can earn up to $100,000 per month in this line of work . In other words, they are not crippled by poverty, and on the contrary, achieve high extents of financial

Before tackling this problem, there is a need to define what is meant by coercion in this context. Coercion in prostitution refers to the use of force towards prostitutes that collectively harms human welfare, be it the prostitute’s well-being, be it physically, financially or emotionally, or even the client’s well-being , because people do risk contracting sexually transmitted diseases and tarnish the trust of their loved ones.

Having established that, it is obvious that this type of coercion is only relevant to the first category of prostitutes, who do not freely decide to become prostitutes and are under the control of a pimp. These women in question are usually driven to the profession by desperation, poverty and a lack of other opportunities for employment, and thereafter forced into prostitution. Their pimps largely dictate their actions, who they engage in sexual activities with, and by extension, how their whole lives will