Considering Every Facet of the Issue of Prostitution

The issue of prostitution has long been a controversial one. With the growing objectifying of women’s bodies, as well as the purchasing and selling of sexuality as a commodity, there is an “even more pressing need to understand the commodification of sex in the range and diversity of forms that prostitution is taking, and to analyze the significance of and impact of these developments on women’s status” (Barry 1994). Counter arguments to this claim that prostitution is “a practice of women’s resistance to sexual liberation from norms and traditional moral principles of sexuality that have served to control and subordinate women (Jeffreys 2009).” Thus, prostitution is said to be a form of liberation rather than a form of oppression. However, feminists argue that prostitution oppresses women sexually because it perennially sets into place patriarchal definitions of women as “having a primary function to serve men sexually (Bell 1987; Barry 1994).” It must hence be recognized that there are two sides to every coin, and the issue of prostitution will thus be treated as such. This essay aims to consider every facet of the issue of prostitution – the conundrum of whether it should be a women’s choice will be thoroughly analyzed via the different views of feminists regarding prostitution, sexual construction of men and women, women’s choice and agency in prostitution, and the economic sides of prostitution.

Firstly, the impacts of taking prostitution to be women’s choice will be taken into account. This argument states that engaging in prostitution is to be taken as a woman’s autonomous. This argument is further perpetuated by “prostitutes and prostitutes’ rights” which “vigorously assert the possibility of women’s agency in prostitut...

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...the ongoing system of discrimination of one group of human beings for the benefit of another group of human beings, i.e.: men in preference to women. In a nutshell, prostitution violates the fundamental human right to physical and moral integrity by the alienation of women’s sexuality that is turned into a thing to be bought and sold. Prostitution cannot be said to mirror women’s right to choose – as highlighted above, it simply provides society with the illusion of free choice. In reality, women who engage in prostitution are forced to resort to it because of certain socioeconomic circumstances. The very crux of prostitution serves to objectify and dehumanize women, because men are given the authority of what women can and cannot do, and thus, simply serves to preserve the most stereotypical of gender roles in which men are viewed as dominant and women, subservient