Prostitution and sexology

Abstract

Often referred to as the “oldest profession,” prostitution has been the subject of centuries, if not millennia, of scrutiny, moralization, derision, sanction, and legislation, and yet men (and to a much lesser degree women) persist in regularly exchanging money for sex with men and women around the world. This entry gives an overview of the past two centuries of Euro‐American studies of sex on the topic of prostitution. Beginning in the nineteenth century, the entry focuses on the questions that those people who studied sex—later referred to as sexologists—asked, the studies they conducted, and the findings they made about the women and men who sell sex. Continuing into the twentieth century, as the social purity and municipal vice campaigns of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries subsided, the entry reviews the methods and findings of the Kinsey reports of the mid‐twentieth century and ends on a study conducted in the late twentieth century. Ultimately, as the entry shows, although the social, economic, and political context within which each study was conducted may have been different, many of the studies asked similar questions with similar results.