The essence of prostitution is not sex, but rather something different, and that is the commodification of certain aspects of our being that are desired by others for exploitation without an appreciation of the whole person to which those qualities belong. It is said that prostitution is the world’s oldest profession, but that statement conceals as much insight as it provides. After all, what is degrading about prostitution is not specifically sex itself, but the fact that such sex is turned into a commodity, a service to be provided for cash divorced of any sort of covenantal or emotional bond.

Such a commodification of sexuality is recognized to be degrading, but traditionally it is only the provider of the service (the prostitute) that is seen as degraded by it. In reality, both parties are degraded, but while one party suffers the social stigma of the degradation, as well as the full awareness of it, the other party suffers are worse moral degradation, for it was their demand for sex as a commodity that led to the exchange in the first place. After all, an endless supply of sex workers–exotic dancers and prostitutes, will not induce demand where there is none (I’ve never had a personal interest in such transactions, despite having grown up in a pretty whorish area of the world, the Tampa Bay area). On the other hand, a demand for such services will induce supply in those whose existing levels of self-respect and dignity are not that high to begin with, or whose lust for money exceeds their moral scruples.

Despite having talked about such matters elsewhere [1] [2] [3], I thought it necessary to talk about them at length here today because of the struggles of some friends of mine that I wished to place in some intellectual context. It is not so much the question of sex that is fundamental, but the question of people as whole beings or as commodities, that leads to difficulty. There is no doubting that human beings are economic beings, dealing with scarcity and seeking to profit from their control of valuable resources, but the extent to which we are seen or judged as property or as whole beings is a different matter entirely.

After all, prostitution is not just about sex. The same dynamics of prostitution exist wherever people are judged for qualities and where they are rewarded on those qualities (or a list of qualities) and not on their whole person. Additionally, we find that such transactions tend to serve unequal power dynamics that seek to place a large part of the risk (as well as most of the social disapproval when things go wrong) on the side of the ‘prostitute’, while placing a large part of the profits on the part of those who market or “pimp” the product, and the bulk of the enjoyment on the consumer in the transaction.

Sports is a common place where this sort of transaction takes place. Both cheerleaders and athletes, for different reasons, are treated as commodities. Cheerleaders are the modern version of vestal virgins, marketed for their beauty, often highlighted by seductive dancing as well as graceful maneuvers that highlight their sexuality even as they are supposed to remain unmarried (and are viewed almost invariably as single) and therefore (at least mentally) available for the lustful audience. But the commodification is not limited to the cheerleaders. The athletes themselves are commodities, prized for their “bulk” or “speed” or “hands,” and whose bodies bear most of the risk of the athletic exercise even as owners (and fans) complain about the high costs of player salaries and even as owners refuse to pay the long-term costs of health care for players after they are no longer serving to profit themselves.

Similarly, actors and actresses were technically considered whores and vagrants even into the time of Shakespeare and beyond. The same sort of plasticity of character that was (and is) valued in actors, the ability to take on roles convincingly, also attracts (for understandable reasons) moral blame and the fact that actors and actresses (and entertainers in general, like musicians and dancers) often live lives of moral dissipation means that the connection between entertainers and high-class prostitutes is fairly well established with a long historical pedigree. Every palace had its dancers and poets and singers, after all, and temples had their temple musicians as well as their temple prostitutes. Everything sort of blends together–including the fact that it is the entertainer that suffers moral blame and takes the risk while the owner/temple/palace profits off of it and the consumer of the entertainment has fun.

Wherever we see this triad where one party in a transaction seeks to receive all (or most) of the profits while placing the risk and degradation onto another party (especially if they refuse to accept any responsibility for the long-term consequences of actions performed for their economic benefit) for the pleasure of a customer (whose money drives the profitability of the whole exercise), there is prostitution and injustice. This is true whenever people–be they sales employees or typists or anyone else–are valued for their stats or numbers or income and not as people. It does not take much investigation to see that this problem is widespread in our society.

What is the solution to this problem? Most often the fighting about these issues occurs on the economic level. No doubt in many cases the distribution of profits and risks is highly skewed and unjust, but that is a secondary injustice the primary structural evil present in most of our society’s institutions in the first place. As great as is my desire to be paid fairly for whatever risks I incur in my economic life, it is not my desire to be seen as or treated or feel like a high-class prostitute as opposed to a low-class one. I don’t want to be seen as a commodity at all, but as a human being.

Ultimately, even though prostitution of any kind is an economic transaction, it is a moral issue. The moral issue is viewing people for their qualities and seeking to profit off of the qualities of others, reducing human beings to numbers or qualities or statistics rather than viewing them as whole beings with spiritual and intellectual and moral and emotional worth above and beyond their economic profitability or their entertainment value to fickle-minded consumers. When we view people as people, then we can appreciate each other for all that we are, and develop genuine relationships with people, rather than economic transactions where we struggle to avoid exploitation in numbers while submitting to it in concept by virtue of the networks and structures of our society.

The fundamental change we need to make is in our minds, in our worldviews, in how we see others and in how we demand to be seen ourselves. Once we change that, the fundamental basis of our problems of exploitation in our world, then the other changes can follow from the inside out. If we genuinely see people for all that we are, then we will change our behaviors, economic and otherwise, as a result of that change of worldview. Then, once we wrestle with the structure of our institutions that currently reflect our view of people as commodities, we can better address the secondary concerns of economic justice once we have met the moral requirements of viewing people as ends and not merely as means to our own ends. It will require much work on all of our parts, though, to create such a better world, and the work has to start inside of our own minds in how we see others and ourselves.

[1] https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2011/11/22/book-review-super-freakonomics/

[2] https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2011/11/05/virgins-and-whores/

[3] https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2011/06/05/the-whores-of-northern-malaysia/