What's Wrong With Prostitution?

In Carole Pateman's article “What’s Wrong With Prostitution?”, she raises many key points and objections to both legal and social stipulations surrounding prostitution. One of the objections that is consistently brought up throughout the piece is the debate about what a prostitute is actually selling. A sentence on page 59 reads, “A prostitute must necessarily sell ‘not her body or vagina, but sexual services. If she actually did sell herself she would no longer be a prostitute but a sexual slave.’” I found this statement to be very thought-provoking, and to be entirely frank I’m not positive where I stand on it. I find it difficult — as do many, according to the amount of objections raised even just in this piece — to grasp the concept of being able to sell sexual services without selling the body that is providing those. Now, that’s not to say I think it is inherently wrong to sell your own body. It harkens back to Beauvoir’s housewife dilemma — is the happy housewife truly happy and doing what she pleases autonomously, or because she’s trying to fill her place in society and is receiving pleasure from successfully conforming? I think we cannot rely on the idea that a prostitute is selling services and not her body — in a way, does this not devalue her consent? As in our discussion of Baron’s writings, perhaps refusing to see prostitution as a woman claiming her right to her body is saying her bodily autonomy is invalid. This is where I take issue with the phrase “sexual slave”… this is also where the lines can become blurred and tough to define. As someone who inherently believes that as long as you’re not hurting anyone (yourself included), you should be able to do whatever you want, I want to deny the concept of sexual slavery if we’re working with the idea of a woman who decided to enter the “sex work” industry as a prostitute. At the same time, Beauvoir’s ideology here does keep coming into my head, and considering that this can indeed be a dangerous line of work, I find objections can be made either way. While I think prostitution is hard to define/work with legally, I think perhaps it is even tougher to discuss socially, in that a conclusion can be hard to come by. I do, however, think we cannot say a prostitute does not sell her body, but perhaps we can remove the stigma of that being something so negative. Let us not declare invalid a prostitute’s ability and/or willingness to make her own decisions, even (and especially) in regards to her body and her work.