Making Work, Making Trouble is a gloriously sociological work, firmly grounded in a theoretical perspective which argues that "social problems" are socially constructed from stem to stern. From the microcosm of how prostitutes understand their own lives to the macrocosm of the social institutions attempting to regulate their work, Deborah Brock offers a kaleidoscope of shifting definitions of the nature of the "problem" and the vain attempts of policy analysts and policy makers to find its "solution.
Here, we find rational human beings making choices, selecting from an extremely limited range of options, alternatives of unpleasantness. As Deborah Brock explains " Admittedly, it is not a great line of work, but it can be "a little easier than waitressing," as one respondent put it. If one has children, to have some control over one's working hours is of no negligible benefit.
Of course, prostitutes are not all working-class adult women, and this book meticulously documents the deliberations of the Committee on Sexual Offences Against Children and Youth the "Badgley Committee," report released and the resulting moral panic over juvenile prostitution in Canada.
This conceptual problem of how to distinguish between categories of licit and illicit sexual socioeconomic connection is an old issue in feminist thought that has attracted renewed attention since the s. Two hundred years ago, Mary Wollstonecraft described a wife's status as "legal prostitution" p. To Emma Goldman in the early twentieth century, "it is simply a question of degree whether [a woman] sells herself to one man, in or out of marriage, or to many men" p.
And for Simone de Beauvoir writing at mid-century, a wife is "hired for life by one man; the prostitute has several clients who pay her by the piece" p. Since the s many studies have focused closely on the gender politics of prostitution law and its enforcement.
Although the Model Penal Code endorses gender neutrality by drawing no distinction between males and females accused of prostitution section Markets in sexual services performed by men as well as women and directed toward male consumers are very widely attested.
Yet, though it is easy enough to imagine a prostitution market aimed at female consumers, the virtual absence of reports of established markets selling sexual services to women is a robust sociological fact that has compelled a reconsideration of the gender effects of prostitution markets Pateman.
Poor women became prostitutes because it provided a source of income at a time when they had few other options for jobs. Some prostitutes worked for themselves on streets and in hotels and other establishments, and other prostitutes worked in legal brothels in many US cities. During the Civil War, prostitutes found many customers among the soldiers of the Union and the Confederacy; the term hooker for prostitute comes from their relations with soldiers commanded by Union general Joseph Hooker.
After the Civil War, camps of prostitutes would set up at railroad construction sites. Many US cities had legal brothels into the early s. Beginning in about , however, religious groups and other parties increasingly spoke out about the immorality of prostitution, and in addition claimed that middle-class girls were increasingly becoming prostitutes.
Their efforts succeeded in shutting down legal brothels nationwide. Her clientele included many leading politicians and businessmen of San Francisco and nearby areas. Despite or perhaps because of her fame from being a madam, Stanford was later elected mayor of Sausalito, a town across the bay from San Francisco. Estimates of the number of prostitutes in the United States range widely between 70, and , Streetwalkers comprise about one-fifth of all prostitutes.
No one really knows how many prostitutes we now have. Prostitutes are not eager to be studied, and because their work is illegal, the federal government does not compile statistics on their numbers as it does for physicians, plumbers, teachers, and hundreds of other legal occupations. One well-analyzed estimate put the number of female prostitutes at 70, and further concluded that they engage in an average of acts of prostitution with male customers annually, or almost 50 million acts of prostitution overall each year Brewer et al.
Regardless of the actual number, prostitution is very common. These figures translate to about In , police and other law enforcement agents made almost 63, arrests for prostitution and commercialized vice Federal Bureau of Investigation, Most of these arrests were of prostitutes, but some were of customers.
Women accounted for almost 69 percent of the arrests in this entire category. Several types of prostitutes exist. Although streetwalkers are the subjects in most studies of prostitutes, they in fact compose only about one-fifth of all prostitutes Weitzer, The remaining 80 percent of prostitutes generally work indoors.
Call girls work as independent operators in their homes or fairly fancy hotels and charge a lot of money for their services, which include sex but also talking and dining. Their clients are typically businessmen or other wealthy individuals. Escorts work for escort agencies, which often advertise heavily in phone books and on the Internet.
Although they may actually act as an escort to a dinner or show, typically their services include sexual acts. They, too, are generally well paid for their work, but do not earn nearly as much as call girls because they have to give at least 30 percent of their earnings to their agency.
Call girls and escorts rank at the top of the prostitution hierarchy Weitzer, Below them, but above streetwalkers, are three other types of prostitutes. Brothel workers , as the name implies, are prostitutes who work in brothels. The only legal brothels in the United States today are found in several rural counties in Nevada, which legalized prostitution in these counties in Workers in these brothels pay income tax.
Massage parlor workers , as their name also implies, work in massage parlors. Many massage parlors, of course, involve no prostitution at all, and are entirely legal. They make contact with a customer in these settings and then have sex with them elsewhere. The lives and welfare of streetwalkers are much worse than those of the five types of indoor workers just listed. As sociologist Ronald Weitzer , p. A good number of streetwalkers also began their prostitution careers as runaway teenagers and were abused as children.
In contrast, indoor workers begin their trade when they were older and are less likely to have been abused as children. Their working conditions are much better than those for streetwalkers, they are less likely to be addicted to drugs and to have STDs, they are better paid, and they are much less likely to be victimized by their clients.
Studies that compare indoor prostitutes with nonprostitutes find that they have similar levels of self-esteem, physical health, and mental health. Many indoor prostitutes even report a rise in self-esteem after they begin their indoor work Weitzer, By definition, prostitution involves the selling of sex. This means that money is the key feature of prostitution. As such, money is also the major motivation for women who become prostitutes, as most of them come from low-income backgrounds.
For indoor workers, and especially call girls, prostitution is a potentially well-paying occupation. Streetwalkers hardly get rich from prostitution and suffer the many problems listed earlier, but prostitution still provides them a source of income that they are unlikely to receive through legal occupations because they have few marketable job skills.
Despite this financial motivation, most women do not become prostitutes, and scholars have tried to understand why some women do so. Because prostitutes are not eager to be studied, as noted earlier, we do not yet have studies of random samples of prostitutes, and probably never will have such studies.
As also noted earlier, most studies of prostitutes involve streetwalkers, even though they compose only about 20 percent of all prostitutes.
Several of these studies cite high rates of child abuse in the backgrounds of streetwalkers, but other studies find that their rates of child abuse are similar to those of women from similar sociodemographic backgrounds who are not prostitutes Weitzer, Leads me to write about the social values, and moral values that contradict the acceptance of legalizing Prostitution within the United States.
My opinion will be opposing the notion of any support in legalizing such immoral acts that threaten the moral fabric of the United States of America. So the issue is whether. Sexuality social problems began to emerge. There are many different social problems that gain attention to investigation as well as solutions or intervention. Prostitution is one of those social problems, and a large one at that. Prostitution is the act or practice of engaging in sexual activity indiscriminately, especially for money; the crime of engaging in such activity Merriam-Webster.
One of the oldest professions around is prostitution. What are the consequences associated with prostitution? Does prostitution benefit our society at all? There are many risks involved in the profession of selling sex. I personally do not believe prostitution can be stopped due to the length of time the profession has been around, as well as the demand for sex in society today.
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