What You Always Wanted to Know About Prostitution in America

 The “business” of prostitution attracts women from all areas of the country and from all economic and ethnic backgrounds.      There is a mistaken belief, deriving especially from the folklore of the religiously dominated heritage of the United States, that all ladies who pursue this most popular of professions are “fallen women.” The indication of such terminology is that prostitutes are women who once enjoyed all the benefits that this democratic country could afford (or at least that such benefits were within their reach, if only they would pursue “honest” work with true Yankee determination), but have, through some basic weakness of character, stumbled and are astray on a path of sin.      This is an obviously romanticized picture of the prostitute, most often portrayed as the “whore with a heart of gold,” essentially a good woman, but one who has been unable to resist the temptation of the flesh and/or of easy money, and has accepted the easy way out of some personal dilemma. In line with this picture, however, she can never forget the real society which is the world outside her house, a society and a world which are better than her own, and to which—as a whore—she can pay only humble homage.      That such delineations are erroneous can be seen in the normal daily newspaper coverage of women arrested for prostitution. Often these articles trace (without using her name or any personal identification) the history of a particular woman who works as a prostitute. Frequently such a woman is one who comes from a relatively typical middle-class background, brought up with all the usual values and dreams so long romanticized in print and on film or video tape. Usually there was nothing in her background to indicate that she might some day turn to prostitution for a living.      That she did is not remarkable, however, at least when one considers not particularly her personal history, but the history of her society. Repeatedly two principal themes recur, both partially based in the “Puritan ethic” of our forefathers: (1) the search for greater wealth, at the expense of the least possible effort; (2) the quest for individual sexual satisfaction, and the belief that such satisfaction is necessarily sinful or “wrong.”