Legal Prostitution and Sex

Patrick Lee

Recently Ann Landers opined that the time to legalize prostitution has come. The well-known exploitation and abuse that accompany prostitution, she maintained, result from its illegality not from anything quintessential to prostitution. My riposte to Lander’s opinion is to put the premises of her conclusion to the test by examining the results of the move to legalize prostitution in the Netherlands. This essay attempts to answer two questions. What can the Netherlands experience teach us? And, more importantly, what do these results tell us about the very nature of sexual activity?

The Netherlands Experiment and a Separatist View of Sex

Rather than leading to a decrease of exploitation, abuse and violence perpetrated against defenseless women and children, the legalization of prostitution in the Netherlands has resulted in the exact opposite. Countries of Central and East Europe, Russia, and Africa have all recently felt compelled to take measures against the trafficking of women and children from their countries to the Netherlands. In 1991 even the Netherlands saw the need to strengthen their penalties for trafficking of women and children. Additionally, many European states have sought stronger measures to combat pornography involving children. The conspicuous fact, here, is that the child pornography rings that have been apprehended are often centered in the Netherlands. Consequently, there is evidence that the drive toward depersonalization, if condoned by a society, does not stop with legalized prostitution. It spawns increased disease and violence, abuse of children, and slavery. In short, evidence from the Netherlands demonstrates that legalizing prostitution does nothing to sanitize the practice of sex-for-pay.

Over and above historical evidence, common sense and simple logic could—and do—predict where the legalization of prostitution will take us. Objectively speaking, prostitution turns sexuality into a commodity. Sadly, many in society actually condone this kind of commodification—or depersonalization of sex—whether wittingly or unwittingly. On the one hand, our culture still generally disapproves of prostitution and its legalization. But, on the other, the same culture not only approves of, but also denounces as narrow and intolerant those who disagree with, pornography, masturbation, fornication, and homosexual acts. Given this inconsistent standard, the existent cultural disparagement of prostitution and its legalization is bound to wear thin very quickly. So, for a culture that has already separated sex from real bodily and personal communion, it is only a matter of time before society defines sex as something outside the person and fair game for casual pleasure and, logically, something people should be allowed to sell.

But why is prostitution wrong? Why not divorce sex from genuine love? In prostitution both the prostitute and the customer alienate their bodies from their total, bodily persons. The body is treated as a replaceable commodity, reduced to the level of a mere thing. This is clearly so even if, perhaps especially if, the prostitute cheerfully consents to the degradation. Hence, legalizing prostitution in this country would merely add to the already predominant depersonalization of sex. It would solidly confirm the message our culture already projects by its promotion of soft pornography in the popular media and by its condoning of extra-marital sex in general.

An Integral View of Sex

What’s saving us is that there are many people who recognize that sexual acts are not just an insignificant occasion of pleasure or escape from boredom. Sex does have a special kind of significance not shared by activities we readily perform together with strangers, children, parents or pets. Singing, listening to music, watching movies, even non-sexual massages—all of these we unhesitatingly participate in with strangers, children, etc. But whether we approve or not, there is something about sexual acts that makes most of us hesitate to engage in them with strangers, children, parents or pets. So, what makes sex unique?

First, sex is unique because sexual desire involves an attitude toward the bodily person precisely as bodily. In truth, the human body is personal and the human person is bodily. But it is possible in sexual desire to act against that truth. To pursue sex apart or isolated from an act that embodies personal communion is to treat the body as an extrinsic tool for gratification—this is true whether it is done for pleasure or for profit. If John uses Susan’s body as a means of obtaining pleasure, or even to obtain the experience of real personal communion without its reality, then in his choice he divorces Susan as body from Susan as person. And in that case, by the very structure of John’s act, Susan becomes a replaceable object. If the sexual act is not an expression and embodiment of his personal communion precisely with Susan, then what he obtains from her could be obtained equally well, or perhaps better, from any number of other women. Hence such a choice includes in itself a certain contempt for the body, both his own and Susan’s. In truth the human person’s body is an essential part of the self. In sexual acts that do embody a personal communion, the person as bodily is united to the person as a free, intentional agent.

Perhaps some might say that prostitution and casual sex are wrong, but that sex between those who have a genuine affection for each other—who have something "special," as TV talk shows would have it—can have morally upright sexual acts together. However, if sex is not inherently connected to a real bodily union, a two-become-one-flesh—in other words, marriage—then it really is a slippery slope from there to the approval of prostitution, casual sex, group sex, and bestiality. If sex is just a fun activity, then there can be no reasonable objection to engaging in it with strangers, with groups, with one’s pets, or even with one’s children. There is nothing about an intensely pleasurable activity as such that will indicate it should only be done with those people one knows, or with one person at a time, or with one’s own species, or even not with one’s children.

Second, sex is unique because sexual intercourse can consummate or renew marriage. How can sexual acts ever express or embody a personal communion? The answer is simple: by embodying marriage. And that is because marital acts, according to Divine design, are not merely occasions for pleasure and not just signs or symbols of a personal union as if the relevant personal union were purely spiritual and the sexual acts extrinsic to it. There does not, after all, seem to be anything necessarily wrong with changing the meaning of an extrinsic sign or symbol. Within marriage sexual acts do symbolize or express marriage and love, but they do so only because they first of all are real, biological unions. In the sexual intercourse of a husband and a wife, a real organic union is established. The two do become one flesh. They literally become a unitary subject of a single organic action. And this biological union is part of, not merely an extrinsic sign or instrument of, their personal communion. It consummates (completes) or renews the bodily, emotional and spiritual union that is their marriage.

Third, sex is unique because in marital intercourse the husband and the wife become one precisely as man and woman, precisely as potential father and mother. So in this act they share their procreative power (even if some condition distinct from their sexual act makes procreation impossible). The full exercise or fulfillment of this potential would include conception, gestation, bearing and raising the child, the concrete prolongation and fruit of their love, to physical, emotional, intellectual, and moral maturity. Thus in their sexuality, in the procreative potential which spouses share with one another, there is a dynamism toward fatherhood and motherhood, and so, a dynamism which extends the present unity of the spouses indefinitely into the future. This reality is the basis for the profound significance that, as already stated, most people sense or feel is attached to sexual intercourse.

So, if sexual acts do not embody a real personal communion, they are instances of treating another person’s body and/or one’s own as a mere tool or extrinsic instrument and therefore involve a contempt for the body. And sexual acts embody a personal communion only if they embody marriage, the multi-leveled personal communion between a man and a woman that is open to, and naturally fulfilled by, the mutual bearing and raising of children.

Conclusion

In sum, only two views of sex actually vie for our acceptance. On one view sex is merely instrumental in relation to other goals, whether expression of affection or pleasure. On this view sex in itself is only an intensely pleasurable activity with no inherent significance. As a consequence there is no reason why it should be confined to marriage, or even to close friends, and no reason why it should not be sold. This in the concrete leads to the legalization of prostitution, pedophilia, the trafficking of women and children, to increased violence against women and children. According to the other view, the body is an integral aspect of the human person, sexual acts express or embody the person and belong within marriage. True, on this view we must rein in our sexual desires, but only this view leads to respect for marriage, for women, and for children.