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By sociological and legal definition a prostitute is an individual who indiscriminately provides sexual relations in return for money payments. The practical interpretation of the term emphasizes the fact that a prostitute accepts a sexual relation with almost anyone, stranger or acquaintance, who offers to pay, and that the payment is in currency rather than in goods or services.

It is impractical to confine the term to those persons who derive their whole living or any particular part of it from prostitution, for a very high number of the females who engage in such activities do so as a minor adjunct to their regular occupations. The person who is specifically paid for a single sexual relation is, for that particular occasion, a prostitute.

The definition requires that payment for a sexual relation be in currency and be made for each particular contact. If the term prostitution were to be applied to all sexual acts for which either participant received some valuable consideration, it would be impossible to draw a fine between the most obvious sort of commercialized prostitution and the relationships of every husband and wife. The girl who has to be taken to dinner or to an evening’s entertainment before she will agree to intercourse with her boy friend or fiancé is engaged in a more commercialized relationship than she would like to admit. The gifts that are bestowed by males of all social levels upon girls with whom they keep company may be cloaked with fine sentiments, but they are, to a considerable degree, payment for the intercourse that is expected.

At lower social levels there is often an elaborate arrangement by which the girl in the pre-marital or extra-marital relation is provided with stockings, dresses, fur coats, and other materials of value, for sexual relations which would be immediately stopped if the male failed to provide such gifts as the girl considered commensurate with her contribution, and with his ability to pay. In some lower levels it is quite customary for the male to share his pay envelope with the girl from whom he is securing regular intercourse, and at all social levels there may be some sort of regular contribution to the support of the girl’s home, if the sexual relation is continued over any period of time. It is difficult to characterize such relationships as prostitution. It is even more misleading to apply the term to the case of the wife who demands payment in coin of the realm each time she engages in intercourse with her husband (and such arrangements are recorded in the histories). But it is only rarely that there is any difficulty in recognizing the situations that do deserve to be called prostitution.

There are four types of prostitution. The commonest involves heterosexual relations for which the female is paid. This is the type of prostitution with which the present chapter is concerned.

There is, however, a homosexual prostitution among males who provide sexual relations for other males; and such homosexual prostitutes are, in many large cities, not far inferior in number to the females who are engaged in heterosexual prostitution. Male homosexual prostitutes less often derive their main income from such activities, and less often engage in prostitution for any long period of years.

There is also a heterosexual prostitution in which females pay males for sexual relations, but this situation is not common.

The rarest of the four types of prostitution involves females who are paid for the homosexual relations with which they supply other females.

Any extensive treatment of the subject should cover all four types of prostitution, and should analyze the basic elements in all of them. But the present chapter is not concerned with prostitution as a social institution, nor with prostitutes.

This is not the place to make any detailed study of the way in which prostitution is managed, how its contacts are made, and the types of relations which it offers. It is appropriate in this volume, however, to note certain situations that arise when persons of diverse social levels, the prostitute and her client, undertake to have sexual relations together. Most prostitutes originate in lower social levels, from which they have acquired lower level patterns of behavior. These lower level attitudes still persist even after a girl goes into prostitution. Some of her trade comes from her own social level, and then her own patterns of coitus suffice; but a large part of her trade is, as we have seen, from the high school level, and a smaller but financially very significant part of it comes from the college level. In their pre-coital and coital techniques, both the high school and college groups want something that is usually foreign to the prostitute’s background. For the sake of her trade, she may agree to such overt activity as these males desire but, interesting to note, she still would refuse to use such techniques with her husband or boy friend.

Specifically, elaborated pre-coital petting, kissing, oral manipulation of the breast, and mouth-genital contacts are taboo in the level from which the girl comes. The introduction of nudity in intercourse is often foreign to her previous experience. Variety in coital positions and, in fact, all techniques which involve anything except simple genital union may be, in her estimation, perversions, “freakish,” or “queer.” Even the prostitute who goes furthest in supplying variety for the upper level male, may never accept such things as normal or right. She may not be particularly worried about her own behavior—that is a necessary part of the business—but she does not respect the male who wants such things. There are, of course, exceptions. A few of the lower level prostitutes consider that a male should be allowed any sort of sexual activity for which he pays, and a few prostitutes become erotically interested in the full variety of activities in which they engage. There are a few who are better educated, with high school or even college backgrounds; and there are some who are physically energetic, mentally alert, and intelligent. They more readily accept and provide the variety of techniques which the upper level males find most satisfactory, and some of these girls may develop long-time relations which make them full-fledged mistresses.

The lower level prostitute more often learns to accept the high school or college male’s desire for nudity during intercourse, and his desire for intercourse in the light. These things are usual in relations with prostitutes today, although they were far from being so in past generations. In a certain number of cases, the prostitute may provide mouth-genital contacts.

The cheaper prostitute restricts each sexual relation to a minimum of time. This, again, is part of the pattern of her social level and is, of course, more convenient for her. In the days of established houses, contacts were often limited to five minutes or less, and extra payment was demanded for any extension of activity. The educated male’s interest in protracted relationships which involve social contacts and pre-coital petting is likely to go unsatisfied with most prostitutes. Only the occasional girl in the more expensive house of prostitution, or the still more expensive partner maintained by the financially richer male, has been willing to make a prolonged social performance of each contact.

As a result of the more recent drives against organized prostitution, many of the better houses have been closed. The poorest houses have been the ones that have most often survived. As noted previously, most prostitution has become a matter of an individual girl operating on her own. These girls often have no place to take the men except to the back alley, to their own very poor homes, or to the cheap hotels to which they have entrance. Consequently, the conditions under which the sex relations are now had are still less satisfactory to the upper level male than they were in the older generation. The sexually expert and socially more effective girl who remains in prostitution operates for very high fees and restricts her contacts to a very limited clientele with which she has had long-time acquaintance.

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