Prostitution ends only by eliminating its economic and social causes

Evidence

It is not their moral and psychological situation that makes prostitutes’ existence miserable. It is their material condition that is deplorable for the most part. Exploited by their pimps and hotel keepers, they have no security, and three-quarters of them are penniless. After five years in the trade, around 75 percent of them have syphilis, says Dr. Bizard, who has treated thousands; among others, inexperienced minors are frighteningly susceptible to contamination; close to 25 percent must be operated on for complications resulting from gonorrhea. One in twenty has tuberculosis; 60 percent become alcoholics or drug addicts; 40 percent die before forty. It must be added that in spite of precautions, they do become pregnant from time to time, and they are generally operated on in bad conditions. Common prostitution is a hard job where the sexually and economically oppressed woman—subjected to the arbitrariness of the police, humiliating medical checkups, the whims of her clients, and the prospect of germs, sickness, and misery—is really reduced to the level of a thing. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1680 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

In all these countries, one of the consequences of the “honest wife’s” servitude to the family is prostitution. Hypocritically kept on society’s fringes, prostitutes fill a highly important role. Christianity pours scorn on them but accepts them as a necessary evil. “Getting rid of the prostitutes,” said Saint Augustine, “will trouble society by dissoluteness.” Later, Saint Thomas—or at least the theologian that signed his name to Book IV of De regimine principium—asserted: “Remove public women from society and debauchery will disrupt it by disorder of all kinds. Prostitutes are to a city what a cesspool is to a palace: get rid of the cesspool and the palace will become an unsavory and loathsome place.” In the early Middle Ages, moral license was such that women of pleasure were hardly necessary; but when the bourgeois family became institutionalized and monogamy rigorous, man obviously had to go outside the home for his pleasure. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 214 (#expands, via linked claim)

While cases of the “white slave trade,” where she is dragged into the spiral by violence, false promises, mystifications, and so on, are relatively rare, what happens more often is that she is kept in this career against her will. The capital necessary to get her started is provided by a pimp or a madam who acquires rights over her, who gets most of her profits, and from whom she is not able to free herself. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1669 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Poverty and abandonment, not choice, drive most women into prostitution — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1660; The institutionalization of monogamous bourgeois marriage created the demand for prostitution — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 214; Prostitutes’ misery stems from material exploitation, not moral character — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1680 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Prostitutes’ misery stems from material exploitation, not moral character #corroborates (0.85) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1680
• The institutionalization of monogamous bourgeois marriage created the demand for prostitution #expands (0.80) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 214
• Economic dependence on a pimp traps prostitutes more than violence does #expands (0.75) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1669
• Socialism is only one possible means to a psychological end #qualifies (0.75) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 762