Group Blog for Western History and Culture: Prostitution has a history?

Prostitution Has a History?

By: Madison Anderson

Prostitution has long been a service since the earliest professions. But just like many other aspects of our current society it is thought to be more modern and less traditional, in a sense. When in fact prostitution is one of the oldest services and has even been referenced to in the Bible.

Prostitution dates back as far as 2400 B.C. It has been found in the Sumerian Records that were dated at that time along with many other professions and of what I would consider shocking but also transvestites![1]So even though prostitution is not the oldest profession it is most certainly among the oldest. I guess this has been something on my mind because of the amount of times prostitution, rape and murder have been referenced to when speaking about the end of the world. We so often are mistaken about our history and how in actuality we live in a much better society today compared to that of two thousand years ago. When I hear about today the occurring cases of prostitution and rape then afterwards comes the sentence the world is coming to an end, it aggravates the snot out of me. The people who state this defiantly do not know a lot about history and what saddens me more are those who are Christians and in the Bible there is drunkards, raping, prostitutes and murder all the time. What is even more shocking to me is that women were not even charged with prostitution in America until after World War I. It was not even against the law yet in America to be a prostitute. However; as we have learned there were crimes for sexual immorality or sex outside of marriage. Rather they would be charged with night walking.[2] If society understood the history of prostitution they might would look at it more as in this is a social norm and not as the world is ending, literally. In all actuality rates of prostitution have dropped in the last ten years and because prostitution has been made illegal it only continues to drop but arrest rates are still fairly high. [3] This paper is not saying the prostitution is okay but rather explaining that prostitution is not distinctly a new profession but rather one of the oldest. If we looked at prostitution in this light it would help for us to understand that today’s world and crimes are not any different from that of thousands of years ago.