"Prostitution has an unusual feature: it is well paid despite being low-skill." (Well, I can name several ladies I've seen that I would NOT describe as low-skill. LOL!)

"The key to this puzzle may lie in the following observation: a woman cannot be both a prostitute and a wife. Combine this with the fact that marriage can be an important source of income for women, and it follows that prostitution must pay better than other jobs to compensate for the opportunity cost of forgone marriage market earnings."

Well, yes, but ...

I quote from "The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating", by David M. Buss, Basic Books, page 87.

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The benefit of economic resources from casual sex is most starkly revealed in extreme cases such as prostitution. In cross-cultural perspective, many women who become prostitutes do so out of economic necessity, because they lack suitable opportunities for marriage. Women who have been divorced by a man because of adultery, for example, are often unmarriageable among cultures such as Taiwan, Hokkien or the Somalis. Women among the Chinese, Burmese, and Pawnee may be unmarriageable if they are not virgins. Women among the Aztec and Ifugao are unmarriageable if they have diseases. In all these societies, unmarriageable women sometimes resort to prostitution to gain the economic benefits needed for survival.

Some women, however, say that they turn to prostitution to avoid the drudgery of marriage. Maylay women in Singapore, for example, become prostitutes to avoid the hard work expected of wives, which includes the gathering of firewood and the laundering of clothes. And among the Amhara and Bemba, prostitutes earn enough through casual sex to hire men to do the work that is normally expected of wives. Immediate economic resources, in short, remain a powerful benefit to women who engage in temporary sexual liaisons.

-----

That is sort of the same facts, but it certainly is viewed through a different lens.

"... for the purpose of this paper, we shall argue that a prostitute sells nonreproductive sex, which we shall call 'commercial sex,' whereas a wife sells reproductive sex (i.e., sex plus children)".

And, "Critical to our model is the assumption that women sell and men buy: hence we start by motivating this assumption."

Buss deals with both the definition and issue of who buys and who sells in a single sentence, "Prostitution, the relatively indiscriminate exchange of sexual services for economic profit, is another reflection of men's greater desire for casual sex."

Need we go on for a page and a half to find a purely economic reason why men buy and women sell?

There is still the question of whether or not "wives sell reproductive sex." Somehow that doesn't sound quite right to me, perhaps it is the word "sell."

I need to reread the paper, but at first glance it seems to accept marriage as the normal state of affairs and only require an explanation for prostitution.

To quote Buss again, "Why men marry poses a puzzle. Since all an ancestral man needed to do to reproduce was to impregnate a woman, casual sex without commitment would have sufficed for him. For evolution to have produced men who desire marriage and who are willing to commit years of investment to a woman, there must have been powerful adaptive advantages, at least under some circumstances, to that state over seeking casual sex partners."

So Buss, at least, does think that an explanation is required for marriage.

Back to the paper.

"... married men also consult prostitutes. This begs the question why married men go to prostitutes (rather than buying from their wives, who presumably would be low-cost providers considering that they can sell nonreproductive sex without compromising their marriage).

There may be several possible reasons for this empirical regularity. For instance, there may be some value to promiscuity and love of variety might be more widespread among males (for instance, from greater reproductive rewards thereof). Alternatively, women and men are equally inclined, but women would have a higher opportunity cost of exercising the promiscuity from its incompatibility with marriage."

Huh?

Jared Diamond (in "Why is Sex Fun?: The Evolution of Human Sexuality", Basic Books, page 38) weighs in, "Sex differences in the genetic value of parental care to the parent provide a biological basis for the all-too-familiar differing attitudes of men and women toward extramarital sex. Because a human child virtually required paternal care in traditional societies, extramarital sex is most profitable for a man if it is with a married woman whose husband will unknowingly rear the resulting child. Casual sex between a man a married woman tends to increase the man's output of children, but not the woman's. That decisive dfference is reflected in men's and women's differing motivations. Attitude surveys in a wide variety of human societies around the world have shown that men tend to be more interested than women in sexual variety, including casual sex and brief relationships. That attitude is readily understandable because it tends to maximize transmission of the genes of a man but not of a woman. In contrast, the motivation of a woman participating in extra-marital sex is more often self-reported as marital dissatisfaction. Such a woman tends to be searching for a new lasting relationship: either a new marriage or a lengthy extramarital relationship with a man better able than her husband to provide resources or good genes."

I guess it is inevitable that an economist is going to see everything in terms of opportunity cost.

If the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

Perhaps the same can be said of Buss and Diamond, but I find them more convincing.


-- Modified on 5/5/2004 3:22:52 AM

That makes sense. Since the economy here in Denver took a shit a few years ago, there are 4 times as many escorts posting on local ASP sites. When the economy was strong there were a few really good ASP's making a lot of money. Now there is so much competition here, some of the prices have dropped, but also there is more to sift through to find the gems.

Lucky

a very typical article on prostitution, loaded with opinion without a shred of fact or proof. many embedded links seemingly promising factual evidence; did you follow any of the links? there's nothing of substance there at all! the only logic offered in this article is "B follows A, therefore A caused B".

... the weakest point of the paper is the commodity assumption: e.g. prostitution is a "low skill occupation".  Every man posting here knows the assumption is incorrect.  The assumption is convenient in an economic analysis.  I think the fact that it doesn't hold in reality kills several of the conclusions.  

Commodity assumptions, even where they are known to be incorrect, are useful in situations where imperfect information exists (you know little or nothing about the lady you are seeing).  TER and other review boards will tend to add information (of the YMMV type) wiich will invalidate the commodity assumption.  

This analysis might be useful in a world of streetwalkers and brothels:  something else is going on with the ladies we are talking to here.  What it might do is explain the ATF phenom:  we choose people because we like the encounter and minimize the uncertainty and risk.

Regarding marriage:  any of you ladies want to tie the knot with me?  I don't think any of you have forclosed your chances at marriage if that is what you want.

Harry

the day you started in this business you lost your chance at marrying Bill Gates.