REFLECTIONS ON THE SAD PROFESSION

FOR a while, everybody sounded a little hysterical. New York City Criminal Court Judge Morris Schwalb, exasperated at the extent of prostitution, arbitrarily ordered two girls to be locked up without bail. "Streetwalking prostitutes contribute to disease," the judge declared. "They are responsible for serious crimes." An attorney for the New York Civil Liberties Union, on the other hand, denounced Schwalb for "an utterly outrageous exercise of judicial power." Mayor John Lindsay, like so many mayors in such embarrassing circumstances, ordered yet another "crackdown on vice." But as the police began rounding up streetwalkers, 50 militant Women's Liberationists picketed the criminal court, and one of their placards charged: PROSTITUTION: MEN'S CRIME AGAINST WOMEN.

That was last month. Now things are returning to normal, with the girls once more patrolling the streets. Still, the midsummer thunderstorm about the world's oldest profession raises anew one of the world's oldest questions: What can or should society do about the sale of sex?

The whole subject of prostitution is full of ambiguities and hypocrisies. Even to define the word is not so easy as it might seem. We generally think of the transfer of money as the element that makes prostitution a crime (although money plays a subtle part in all sorts of sexual relationships). Yet in a number of states, as well as in Webster's newest dictionary, the definition of prostitution includes not only the exchange of money but also the rather vague concept of promiscuity. Ohio law, for example, forbids both getting paid for sex and "the offering of the body for indiscriminate sexual intercourse without hire." But what is "indiscriminate"? St. Jerome decried women who had known "many men," and monks argued over the number that would warrant condemnation; one said 40, another 23,000.

In a harlot's life, the matter of how much varies as widely as how many. A former Miss Denmark who received $1,500 for one night's entertainment undoubtedly considered herself far removed from the black girls who charge $15 on the neon-lit streets of Boston's South End. One notable sniper at hypocrisy, George Bernard Shaw, was fascinated by this matter, and he is supposed to have asked a lady at dinner one night whether she would go to bed with him for -L- 10,000. The lady hesitated but agreed, so Shaw asked if she would do the same for -L-2. "Certainly not!" the lady cried. "What do you take me for?" "We have already established that," said Shaw. "What we are trying to establish now is the price."

All in all, police in the U.S. make about 100,000 arrests a year for prostitution. Anything resembling an exact figure is obviously impossible to get, but estimates on the total of full-time professional prostitutes in the U.S. run as high as 500,000, and reports indicate that the number seems to stay fairly constant in relation to the population. The most comprehensive if not the most trust-inspiring figures originated with the late Dr. Alfred Kinsey, who reported back in 1948 that 69% of the men he interviewed had visited a prostitute at least once, and that 15% to 20% did so several times a year. From this, one team of investigators has boldly inferred a grand total of 315 million episodes of commercial sex per year, for a collective payment of $2.25 billion.

Despite such evidence of vast private support, prostitution is illegal in every state except Nevada. An effort to legalize it in California last month died in the state legislature. But when laws are so widely broken, it seems reasonable to ask whether the laws should not be changed. It was not so long ago, after all, that placing a bet and buying a drink were punishable as crimes, yet now the Government generally accepts such behavior and even sponsors it, via state liquor stores and lotteries. As to prostitution, then, may we not rely on the good sense of St. Thomas Aquinas? "Prostitution in the towns is like the cesspool in the palace," he said. "Do away with the cesspool, and the palace will become an unclean and stinking place."

Even in our permissive society, many people would reply that prostitution is not like the other vices. The familiar objections are social (it spreads crime and disease), paternalistic (it corrupts youth) or aesthetic (it befouls whole districts with its invitations to debauchery). But the most fundamental objection is simply that--St. Thomas or no St. Thomas--prostitution is immoral. The Bible says so quite clearly and condemns it emphatically. Of the countless reformers who tried to do something about the Christian injunction that lust is a primary tool of the devil, King Louis IX of France may be taken as archetypal. Before setting out on a Crusade to Palestine, he ordered all brothels closed. Many of the prostitutes simply joined the Crusade, serving as camp followers on the way to the Holy Land.

Thus ever after. The Catholic Church more or less came to accept the idea of sin as inevitable until the Protestant Reformation once again demanded ruthless punishments. Another crusade, this one in the American West and aimed at the new Holy Land of the frontier, drew its camp followers just as surely. The sporting house and the saloon became the social centers of many an outpost and booming new metropolis from the Alleghenies to the Yukon; most splendid of them all was the famous Everleigh Club, a 50-room mansion in Chicago, where for $50 a night minimum, guests were regaled with champagne from golden buckets and fountains gushed perfume at regular intervals.

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."

The housewife's lot is perhaps not quite so grim as Miss Atkinson thinks, and the same may be said for that of the prostitute. Last week, the New York Times conducted a survey on prostitution and interviewed a 27-year-old blonde named Jackie, who lives in a luxurious apartment, dresses in Puccis, winters in Puerto Rico, and says of her life: "I love it." Is there some truth after all in that age-old legend of the good-time girl, the Sally Bowles of Cabaret or the girl played by Melina Mercouri in Never on Sunday! Most sociological and psychological studies reject the theatrical stereotype and offer no support at all for the kind of chauvinism expressed by H.L. Mencken: "The truth is that . . . the prostitute commonly likes her work and would not change places with a shopgirl or a waitress for anything in the world."

Whether prostitution is immoral or not, there remains the question of whether the Government can or should try to suppress whatever it considers immoral--in short, can sin be outlawed? Generally speaking, we acknowledge the state's right to make laws protecting the family and the safety of children. But as for sexual activity in private between consenting adults (in the jargon of the new permissiveness), the gradual trend has been toward the abandonment of official interference. For one thing, suppression has never worked well, even though punishments for prostitution have at times included mutilation and beheading. For another, the whole apparatus of vice squads, entrapments, bribes and the imprisonment of women who may well not have done any harm to anyone--all of this makes one feel that the police could be more usefully employed.

Legalized prostitution can produce its own complications and contradictions, however. In many European countries, for example, the individual sale of sex is not illegal, but brothels are. A combination of postwar idealism and the desire to prevent underworld exploitation of women brought about the closing of the bordellos that once flourished in France --and the closing brought the consequences that St. Thomas had foreseen. The prostitutes expelled from the once-regulated houses drifted out into the streets and continued the traditional business on their own. Reported cases of syphilis rose from 1,200 a year to 6,000. By now, even Marthe Richard, who once led the fight against the houses, admits that she "would not be against reopening if--I say if --women are not slaves in them." Laws on morals change slowly, however, and it is sometimes more practical for officials simply to evade them. Thus in Germany, which banned brothels in the 1920s, several major cities now have hotel-like Eros Centers, which are technically legal because the girls remain independent and just rent rooms there.

But even if we accept the argument that the Government should not intervene in private morality, legalized prostitution inevitably has social and aesthetic consequences. If there are no restraints on streetwalkers, they may swarm through the cities, accosting strangers and creating an atmosphere of general corruption. The compromise, as in London, permits prostitution to exist but not to organize; there can be no pimping and no open solicitation. There is much hypocrisy in this solution--the hypocrisy of looking away from what we find unpleasant--but it has the virtue, at least, of compelling private behavior to remain private.

Some day, it has been said, this problem will partly solve itself because more and more people will find it increasingly easy to obtain their pleasure without paying for it. Now that we have the Pill, the coed dorm and the commune, what need is there for the streetwalker, much less the bordello? So far, though, these predictions have not come true; even in societies that have long been considerably more libertarian than ours, somehow the appeal of prostitution stubbornly remains. In emancipated Sweden, where premarital sex is considered a civil right, there are very few streetwalkers nowadays, but Stockholm still has hundreds of massage parlors, modeling studios and other such institutions.

Besides, universal promiscuity hardly seems a perfect solution, for we would just be changing our rules and definitions for the act we now call prostitution. In fact, there is no perfect solution to the disparity between needs and satisfactions. Even under the best of circumstances, random sexual encounters will inevitably contain elements of squalor and violence. But it is reasonable to conclude that the sale of sex in America is not so much an immoral business as a sad and shabby one, and that legal permission plus a measure of supervision would be a genuine improvement.

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