Wherever we find evidence of human culture, we find evidence of

prostitution. When the earliest known human societies emerged in the

fertile crescent of Mesopotamia, the sex trade evolved alongside
temples, customs, markets and laws. Beginning in the third millennium
B.C, the Sumerians, the first major inhabitants of ancient Mesopotamia,
worshiped the goddess Ishtar, a deity that would remain a constant
throughout Mesopotamia’s Babylonian and Assyrian empires. Ishtar
was the goddess of love and war, symbolized by the planet Venus, and
was born anew as a maiden every morning only to become a ‘whore’
every evening – the etymology of the word lying in the Indo-European
root meaning ‘desire.’

Ironically, Mesopotamian religious practices gave birth to the prostitution

trade, as women in Ishtar’s service would help men who offered money
to her temples with the ‘sacred’ powers of their bodies. Achieving a
priority of communication with the goddess from their fertility, only
women enjoyed this religious position. Thus Ishtar temples became
knowledge centers concerning birth, birth control, and sexuality.
Priestesses became the nurses and sacred sex therapists of these early
societies. Men of all rank could hire these women and, in turn, make an
offering to the goddess from whose temple the prostitute came. The
king would also take part in certain sacred sex rituals with the high
priestesses in conjunction with grain harvests: the fertility of the earth
was secured through a ritual that celebrated the fertility of the womb.
The king, regent of the earth, and priestess, regent of the goddess,
coupled in this highly symbolic manner that celebrates the sexual
process that brought both grain and people into being. Thus Ishtar
became known as the protector of all prostitutes. Prostitution, or at least
the religious prostitution involved in these sacred sex rituals, existed
without taboo or prohibition, as evidenced in some of our species’
earliest literary works.

In one such work, The Epic of Gilgamesh, we are introduced to a

nameless Harimtu woman – a term used by famed lawgiver Hammurabi
which denoted lower-class prostitutes – who lavishes Gilgamesh’s rival
Enkidu with many variations of love, from the maternal and mystical to
the sexual and orgiastic. The prostitute emerges not just as a purveyor
of sex but as a force of civilization: the harlot literally educates the
savage in love and care of the body. This is certainly antithetical to the
stigma prostitution harbors today, where the trade itself is seen as
sexually primitive, an unfortunate remnant of a less civilized and more
phallocentric past. The goddess of love was also seen as being
connected to the prostitutes – including males – that operated beyond
the temples, often under the supervision of a madam. Theologically, all
were seen as being in service to the goddess of love, but in Babylonian
law there remained legal distinctions between the priestesses and the
roadside/inn prostitutes.

Prostitution also arises in the accounts of Herodotus, who recounted his

observation of this originally Sumerian religious sexual practice among
the Babylonians thousands of years later in the 5th century B.C. He
noted that most young women lost their virginity in the temples of Ishtar
to unknown men. Similarly, he tells of Syrian women who offered their
bodies for money so that they would be able to take their earnings to
their own love goddess, Astarte.

Interestingly, prostitution seems to have been an imported practice in

Ancient Egypt, and was practiced apart from their patriarchal religion.
The trade persisted in the region through the Hellenic and Roman
periods.

So how did the sex trade transition from the scared procession of fertility
cults to the most sordid of commercial transactions? In the West at
least, this history will involve a traversal through a new period of
religious zealousness. The overall distinction here is between the early
Semitic nomads, whose economy was more cattle-oriented, and who
gave primacy to a single male god, and the pantheistic agricultural
societies that worshiped the female fertility that they linked to the fertility
of the field.

The first account of prostitution in the Bible is found in Genesis, where

Judah – one of Jacob’s twelve sons, descended from Abraham – paid
the bride price, in accordance with Israelite custom, for Tamar and gave
her to his eldest son. Long story short, she eventually went to the
second son, who refused to copulate with her. Through no fault of her
own, Tamar was sent back to her relatives in shame as a poor
investment, as she produced no children. Determined to prove that the
fault lay with Judah’s sons, she approached his tents disguised and
exchanged sex with Judah for a goat. Tamar became pregnant, and
avoided harsh punishment for being a pregnant widow that shamed
Judah and his sons by revealing keepsakes given to the prostitute
employed by Judah. Through prostitution, Tamar proved that it was her
husbands who failed in conception.

These narratives demonstrate that a bride’s ability to produce offspring,

especially of the male variety, was integral to her social value. Rape
was thus seen as a violation of property, not of person. The sale of
wives and daughters was commonplace, as was informal sex, in
Canaan. Since tribal honor was in some measure tied to the fidelity and
fertility of the women, only foreign prostitutes were tolerated. Thus the
Semitic prostitute had to practice from sufficient distance from her male
relatives with clients that were unknown to her brothers and fathers.

The proliferation of foreign gods, temples and priestesses also led to a

rise in the sex trade on the Canaanite periphery. Prostitution began to
become more pejorative, a sign of immorality, corruption, and foreign
deities. One of the Semitic peoples’ most impervious enemies was a
lecherous woman: the foreign Queen Jezebel, married to King Ahab,
favored the foreign gods Baal and Ashera, and was subsequently
depicted as purveying orgiastic cults and being both sexually and
commercially covetous. According to the story, she spawned a religious
war that ended with her defeat at Elijah’s hands. Prostitution became
part of the rhetoric of the religious war between the adherents of
Yahweh and those of Ashera and Baal. Prostitutes were accorded more
power, Succubus-like in their ability to lure young men astray. Semitic
prophets utilized this image of the prostitute in their thunderous
proclamations and condemnations.

The women of Ancient Greece were also similarly ensnared in the

domestic sphere: even during the period of Athenian democracy, only
adult males were considered full citizens. Sexual schools rose in the
Greek city states, where girls would be purchased from slave markets
and trained to provide revenue by selling sex. Many young slaves
prostituted themselves to earn money, which meant that, being women
or slaves, prostitutes consisted of those excluded from Athens’ Popular
Assembly.
The famed homosexuality of Ancient Greece was not without its own
strictures: while it was acceptable to enjoy the sexual company of
younger males – often through the insertion of the penis through
clenched thighs – it was always feminizing, and thus degrading, to be
placed in the position of the woman, in the position where one was
penetrated and not penetrating. Thus it was much more taboo for men
to ask for money in return for sex.

As in Sumerian and Babylonian societies, there existed a hierarchy of

prostitutes. The elitehetaerae – a term always denoting female
prostitute entertainers – made substantially more money, and had to be
freeborn; this meant that slave prostitutes were motivated to earn
enough money so that they could purchase their freedom and thereby
increase their income. However, the expenses of this upper class were
also greater: they offered symbolic gifts to the gods and had to maintain
beautiful bodies and homes. Besides reading, maintaining physical
beauty consumed much of their time. The hetaerae also enjoyed a
social influence that far exceeded that of the non-prostitute women:
some became famous for their clientele, others for their beauty, and
they and their interactions were often recorded in some manner.
The pornai, on the other hand, could be either male or female and were
accessible to all classes of men.

The Roman Republic shared many commonalities with the Hellenes,

and prostitution was among them. During the Empire, however,
prostitutes were increasingly comprised of the overwhelming slave
class. Roman prostitution was also highly categorized, yet legal and
licensed. While being a prostitute could indicate your membership in the
lowest social, economic and political rank, this same connotation of
status did not apply to your patron: those of a higher social status could
purchase the service without incurring major consequences. However,
men of such status would usually have the economic means to engage
the more professional service of a learned courtesan who themselves
could become independently wealthy. As we will see in Japan, these
sex workers were skilled in the arts and could become coveted party
guests. Brothel owners could include those were only renting rooms to
prostitutes or those who oversaw the women and their business more
strictly. Actors, dancers, and other members of the lower entertainment
class were also seen as people from whom sex could be purchased. As
with many earlier periods of our history, the moral valence of prostitution
was not nearly as strong as it is today.

In Mesoamerica, the Aztecs called buildings where prostitution was

permitted by political and religious authority cihuacalli, meaning ‘house
of women.’ Centered around the goddess of ‘filth,’ these brothels were
closed compounds. As seen throughout most of our history, prostitution
is ‘ghettoized,’ relegated to specific spaces and increasingly treated as
a (sometimes necessary) vice.

Despite Islam’s strict forbidding of prostitution, sexual slavery persisted

and, some would say, persists today. Slaves served as concubines in
the harems of the East, while fixed-term marriages – where the length of
marriage was outlined at its inception – allowed for a persistence of the
sex trade following the proliferation of Islam. During the Ottoman
Empire, the famed Turkish baths existed as places where masseurs
(often young men) could work as sex workers. We can again see the
trend of prostitution being subsumed under another trade to keep it
within a contained urban and social space.

Prostitutes also enjoyed a particular status within Hindu religious

practice. Devadasis were girls who were symbolically married, and thus
pledged, to a deity; their responsibilities included the care and
maintenance of the temple. Many also exercised religious prostitution,
and this practice proliferated as the arrival of West Asian invaders
precipitated the decline of the temple status and the turn towards
prostitution as a means of income, as the temples lost their patron
kings. This system of religious dedication was outlawed in India in 1988.

In Japan’s Edo period (1600-1868), oiran were courtesans who were

also entertainers. Delegated to the city’s outskirts, brothels became
quarters that offered a variation of entertainment. Like the
Greek hetaerae, these women were elite prostitutes who could achieve
significant social status. Artistic skill, along with beauty and education,
determined a courtesan’s rank, and only the most highly ranked
entertainers were deemed suitable for the daimyo, the military leader of
Japan. The oiran gave way to the geisha, who was much more
accessible and did not sell sex, only entertainment in the form of dance,
poetry and music. It was, and is, a grave and offensive mistake to
attempt to purchase sex from a geisha.

With the rise of Catholic Europe, all forms of sexual activity outside of
marriage were regarded as sinful. However, prostitution persisted in
urban environments and was seen as a lesser evil that prevented other,
more deviant, sexual behaviors. The composition of the prostitute class
also moved away from slaves and was revived as a business that was
relegated to specific areas, whether it be outside the town perimeter,
confined to a particular street, or kept within a designated building.
Specific districts were allocated for the trade, and some brothels even
came to be owned, and of course used, by religious authorities.

Eventually prostitution became a prosecutable offense. As European

colonization continuously expanded, legislation increasingly enacted a
tighter control of the sex trade. Britain’s Contagious Diseases Act is one
such example of the attempt to curb the spread of venereal disease and
represented a trend of increasing political regulation over the practice.
For example, physical examinations could be compulsory and
prostitutes forced to undergo them.

The sex trade persisted, and continues to persist, in the face of moral
(and sometimes legal) condemnation. The Women’s Christian
Temperance Union (the major force of prohibition) contributed to the
outlawing of prostitution in almost all of the United States in the early
20thcentury. Countries such as Canada and the United Kingdom would
not overtly outlaw prostitution, but would enact legislature that severely
restricts the trade and the activities that surround it.

Today the sex trade continues as it always has, with many governments
officially maintaining its illegality, while some restrict certain sex trade-
related activities and others keep it legal and regulated. In a world
where we cannot, for the most part, attribute to prostitution a religious
significance, it seems that the answer in dealing with such a trade is to
allow it to persist – that is, to allow both men and women to continue to
choose their own profession, while also ensuring that such individuals
have the full support of the law in earning their living. Awareness (both
social and legal) corresponds to safety for those who choose to enter
the sex trade. So let’s be aware…that we can pay people to love us
Legal in 53; Limitedly Legal in 12; Illegal in 35; Total: 100
Country - Prostitution Status – Population – Details (and source)

NETHERLANDS – Prostitution is legal (17,084,719)

"Prostitution is legal in the Netherlands as long as it involves sex between

consenting adults. Abuses like forced prostitution, underage prostitution and unsafe
working conditions still occur."
Prostitution in the Netherlands is legal and regulated. Operating a brothel is also
legal. De Wallen, the largest and best-known Red-light district in Amsterdam, is a
destination for international sex tourism.
Let’s start with the red light district, aka one of the most famous neighborhoods of
Amsterdam. It’s also a neighborhood in which you can find coffeeshops, museums of sex,
weed, and thus plenty of tourists.
Yes, brothels, because prostitution was actually not a crime as long as it was voluntary. After
2000, it became legal to run a business in which you hire sex workers. As long as you get the
license, otherwise it is still not legal since there are some conditions to respect. It was
legalized to fight human trafficking and to protect the sex workers. There also were some
debates about the legal age to work, which is 18 but the government considered 21. This was
dropped because the girls would feel more secure to ask for help if they are not doing
something illegal.

Legal prostitution is one of the most famous things in the Netherlands, along with coffeeshops. Yes,
another thing that is legal here and not in your own country. Hence, why sex tourism is also quite important
and why it is a very profitable business here – in 2010, sexual transactions were estimated as 100 millions
US dollars. Yep. Let’s have an in-depth look at prostitution in Netherlands. Is it all pragmatic and smart? Or
does it remain a dirty business?

PHILIPPINES – Prostitution is illegal (population 104,256,076)

Prostitution is illegal under Article 202 of the Revised Penal Code 2012.

[ REPUBLIC ACT NO. 10158 ]

AN ACT DECRIMINALIZING VAGRANCY, AMENDING FOR THIS PURPOSE

ARTICLE 202 OF ACT NO. 3815, AS AMENDED, OTHERWISE KNOWN AS
THE REVISED PENAL CODE

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the Philippines in

Congress assembled:
SECTION 1. Article 202 of the Revised Penal Code is hereby, amended to read
as follows:

“Article 202. Prostitutes; Penalty. – For the purposes of this article, women who,
for money or profit, habitually indulge in sexual intercourse or lascivious conduct,
are deemed to be prostitutes.

“Any person found guilty of any of the offenses covered by this article shall be
punished by arresto menor or a fine not exceeding 200 pesos, and in case of
recidivism, by arresto mayor in its medium period to prision correctional in its
minimum period or a fine ranging from 200 to 2,000 pesos, or both, in the
discretion of the court.”