 Why
is it that prostitution is so relatively well-paid?
It is documented that in diverse cultures and over many centuries,
prostitutes have indeed made much more, sometimes several multiples more,
than comparably (un)skilled women would make in more prosaic occupations.
From medieval France and imperial Japan to present-day Los Angeles and
Buddhist Thailand, this income differential has persisted, although its size
depends on various factors.
Prostitution Diminishes Marriage ChancesTwo economists, Lena
Edlund of Columbia University and Evelyn Korn of Eberhard-Karls-Universitat
Tubingen, have published an intriguing paper, A Theory of Prostitution
Developing the consequences of their mathematical model, Edlund and Korn
argue that the primary reason for the income differential is not the risk
sometimes associated with the practice of prostitution but rather that
prostitutes greatly diminish their chances for marriage by virtue of their
occupation. Men generally don't want to marry (ex)prostitutes, and so women
must be relatively well-compensated in order to forgo the opportunity to
marry.
Employing market concepts, doing some calculus and assuming that "women sell
and men buy," the authors also conclude that prostitution generally declines
as men's incomes increase.
Wives and prostitutes are competing "commodities" (in the reductionist view
of economists, that is), but wives are distinctly superior in that they can
produce children that are socially recognized.
Thus, if men have more money, they tend to buy the superior good and, at
least when wives and prostitutes come from the same pool of women, tend to
buy (rent) the cheaper good less frequently.
More obvious perhaps is that prostitution generally declines in areas where
women's incomes and opportunities are greater.
Putting these two tendencies together suggests that if one wishes to reduce
prostitution, increasing the incomes of both men and women is likely to be
more effective than imposing legal penalties.
Sex Ratios, Foreign Prostitutes and Cultural Factors
Another consequence of the authors' model is that a high ratio of men to
women tends to increase prostitution's relative profitability (versus
marriage).
If the surplus of men over women is temporary, say, because of war or
upheaval, then the surplus usually leads to an even greater incentive to
prostitution.
As permanent residents in a location, men are potential participants in both
the marriage market and the sex markets, whereas if they're visitors, only
the latter market is generally available and the supply of prostitutes and
their incomes rise. The authors cite the example of modern sex tourism.
The model also predicts that how much a woman damages her chances to marry
by becoming a prostitute depends on how likely it is that she'll be exposed
as one.
The likelihood shrinks if the woman leaves home and migrates to a different
part of the country or to a different country altogether. This would also
explain why foreign prostitutes are likely to be cheaper than domestic ones.
More generally, the abundance of foreign prostitutes shouldn't come as a
surprise. Immigrants generally have difficulty finding employment and,
except at the high end of the scale, prostitution does not place much of a
premium on language skills. As in other parts of the economy, globalization
is controversial and is one reason the number of women trafficked for sexual
purposes is exaggerated. (It is considerably smaller than the number of
people trafficked for nonsexual labor.)
There are good reasons — from academic studies to the sheer ubiquity of
prostitutes — to believe that trafficking is relatively isolated and that
only a small fraction of prostitutes are coerced into prostitution.
One last prediction the model makes is that the income differential paid to
prostitutes will rise with the status the culture accords wives.
That is, if wives are valued highly, would-be prostitutes are giving up a
lot by becoming prostitutes and will require more money to do so. And if
wives have few privileges, would-be prostitutes aren't giving up much to
become prostitutes and thus need less inducement to do so.
Cultural tolerance, of course, is a determinant not only of the income
differential but also of the number of women who become prostitutes.
Compare, for example, Thailand and Afghanistan.
Bottom Line
Like any statistical model, this one ignores the diversity of real people
and the complexities of love and pleasure, changing social mores, et cetera.
Still, once all its equations have been solved, a simple fact remains: Most
women enter prostitution for the money.
This being so, legalizing it, regulating it (strictly enforcing laws against
pimping, child prostitution, public nuisance and so forth) and improving the
economic prospects for women seem to me a greatly preferable approach to it
than moralistic denunciation. |
