(3 of 5)
What seems to have made that era so comfortable for vice, apart from the occasional luxury, was the old double standard, the neat if uncharitable belief that some women were just bad, and no real harm in that. But high-minded ministers and pious women soon assaulted this view with the fierce preachment that everyone must be good. By the early 1920s, after two generations of struggle, the reformers had won the official prohibition of commercial sex (and liquor as well).
Today, religious arguments carry less weight but modern morality still condemns many of the old sins for psychological or humanistic reasons. Harold Greenwald, author of The Call Girl: A Social and Psychoanalytic Study, states the argument in typical terms. He calls prostitution "the extreme form of a relationship in which the members are interested only in exploiting each other." He calls it a form "of selling out—selling out what we believe in."
This assumes, however, that we live in a Utopia in which everyone is free to do as he pleases, in which nobody uses money to make other people do what they otherwise would not do. It also assumes that in this Utopia all sexual partners give themselves freely out of love for one another. But even if such an ideal state really existed, would it be fair to condemn anyone who failed to live up to the ideal? To condemn, that is, the soldier far from home, the traveling salesman, the frightened student, and the old and the ugly and the neurotic—all the victims of circumstance or life's perversities? Prostitution at best makes no pretense of being a substitute for a happy marriage, but is simply an escape from loneliness and misery or a relief for concupiscence.
That may be fine for men, the moral condemnation continues, but prostitution nonetheless degrades and abuses women, particularly poor women. Certainly there was once a time when, as Shaw wrote in Mrs. Warren's Profession, society was "underpaying, undervaluing, and overworking women so shamefully that the poorest of them are forced to resort to prostitution to keep body and soul together." Today, when hunger is a reasonably rare motivation and "white slavery" is nearly forgotten, many arrested prostitutes need money because they are addicted to drugs (though the statistics used may simply show that police tend to corral street-corner addicts rather than call girls).
Apart from financial need, however, there are psychopathic explanations for women selling themselves. As Kate Millett wrote in Sexual Politics: "Prostitution, when unmotivated by economic need, might well be defined as a species of psychological addiction, built on self-hatred." And in an ironic reversal of that view, Ti-Grace Atkinson has argued that "prostitutes are the only honest women left in America, because they charge for their services rather than submit to a marriage contract which forces them to work for life without pay."