by Robin Baker
After the judge died, conversations with some of her fellow professionals led her into trying the streets for a while. In many ways, she had enjoyed her time on the streets more than any other phase of her career. It had certainly paid well. Eventually, however, she gave it up. After a few close shaves, a bad experience with a particularly violent customer had put her in hospital for a few days. After that, she had moved into the relative security of a bordello, which she also enjoyed. She only left when her looks began to fade and she could no longer compete in open parade with the younger girls. At least with her ‘Model – first floor’ method of recruitment, men had already half committed themselves by the time she opened the door. Anyway, she was still attractive enough for most to accept her price rather than walk away when they saw her.
She was going to retire soon. She knew she had been lucky and that she should quit while she was winning. Despite several thousand sexual partners in her lifetime, she had only had three bouts of disease and all had cleared up quickly with the help of antibiotics. She had been beaten up a few times, but no serious damage had been done. Most importantly, though, she had managed to avoid the drugs that had been, and still were, the ruination of so many of her fellow prostitutes. For all these years she had been making as much money each night as most people make in a week, or even a month. There had been overheads, of course – protectors to pay and places to rent. But even so, she could have retired years ago and still have lived comfortably off the interest from her savings. And the reason she hadn’t retired was simply that she enjoyed her job too much. She would be loath to leave it all behind. In fact, she was seriously considering starting her own escort agency or bordello when she did eventually decide it was time to stop.
The taxi pulled up outside her home – a large detached house on the outskirts of town. Her partner shouted from the kitchen that it was good timing – the dinner was nearly ready and the children were already in bed. She went upstairs, douched herself, then had a bath. While she lay back in the warm water, her partner brought her a glass of wine, then went back downstairs to finish the cooking. Before going down to join him, she looked in on her four children, each in their own bedroom. It would be interesting to know who their fathers were. She liked to think that the two daughters, now ten and eight, were fathered by the politician and the judge, but she couldn’t be certain. Her elder son was conceived while she was in the bordello, and could be anybody’s. Many of the clients were men of wealth and status and there were several she wouldn’t have minded being his father. Her younger son should be her partner’s. She gave up working for a while specifically to conceive his child, but she became pregnant so quickly they still couldn’t be entirely certain he was the father.
Her partner was five years younger than her. An ex-student and an ex-client, he had volunteered to look after the children in exchange for his keep and sexual access. They had been together now for five years.
After the meal the couple drank, and talked. For the first time that week, they had sex before going to bed.
Biologically, a prostitute is an individual who offers other individuals sexual access in exchange for one or more resources. In humans, the resource sought and offered is usually money, but it might just as well be food, shelter or protection. Nowhere is sperm warfare more rife than in the reproductive tract of active female prostitutes. By the end of a night’s work, the number of sperm armies waging war inside a prostitute’s body often runs into double figures. And, from time to time, the winner of that war claims the prize of fertilisation.
Prostitutes reproduce. Often, like the woman in the scene, they reproduce very successfully. Why do some women abandon fidelity, or secret infidelity, and openly pursue their reproductive success via prostitution? When they do, how does their reproductive success compare with that of women who pursue more conventional strategies?
Female prostitutes have been, and are, an almost universal feature of human societies. Anthropologically, only 4 per cent of societies claim not to contain any. The remainder acknowledge their presence. It is difficult, though, even in these societies, to estimate what proportion of women engage in prostitution at some time during their lives. Estimates of the number of overt prostitutes active at any one time range from less than 1 per cent of women in Britain in the late 1980s to about 25 per cent of women in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1974. Such estimates, however, are unreliable and are probably underestimates. More women than this will sometimes engage in prostitution.
Part of the problem lies in the lack of a precise definition. Overt, promiscuous sex in exchange for money is, in many ways, simply the least ambiguous exchange of sexual access for resources or ‘gifts’. Throughout human history and culture, there are examples of men giving the woman (or her family) a ‘gift’ around the time of their first intercourse, without the woman being categorised as a prostitute. Often the exchange is ritualised, as during marriage ceremonies. Even on the wedding night, money may be demanded by the woman or her family before intercourse is allowed to take place.
Clearly, there are degrees of prostitution. In principle it is difficult to know where to draw the line between a traditional prostitute exchanging insemination for money and a woman in a long-term partnership exchanging insemination for support, protection and ‘gifts’. The woman in this scene is clearly a prostitute, but what about the woman in Scene 18?
It is similarly difficult to decide for other animals just what is prostitution and what is not. At one extreme, there are clear acts of prostitution – like the female empid fly who trades sex for food. For a male empid to be given the opportunity of mating, he first has to find a swarm of gnats, catch one, wrap it in silk from his salivary glands, then find a waiting female and offer it to her. While she unwraps and then eats her meal, he is allowed to mate. The larger the gift, the longer it takes her to feed, the longer the male is allowed to mate, the more sperm he transfers, and the more eggs he fertilises. Once he has gone, the female waits for the next male to bring her food and to mate. In some species, females are so successful as prostitutes that they never need to find food themselves.
Migratory birds occupy a position at the other extreme of the prostitution scale. Males return to the breeding areas first and compete for the best territories – those in which they and a female can most successfully raise their young. Females arrive later and inspect the different territories and the males who defend them. Each female then makes her choice of the best compromise (Scene 18) between territory quality, male quality and availability (because the best territories and males are quickly snapped up by the earliest females). Eventually, a female will allow a particular male to have sex with her. In exchange she is allowed to share his territory. If the male is ousted by another, the female does not leave with her former partner, but allows the new male to mate with her in exchange for being permitted to carry on living in what is now his territory. The female is intent on living in a particular territory and is prepared to mate with any male who successfully lays claim to that territory in order to do so. In principle, this is still prostitution – the trading of sex for resources – even though it is taking place within a monogamous relationship. As such it is little different from the behaviour of the majority of women around the world, few of whom would consider themselves to be prostitutes.
Men, also, of course can prostitute themselves. The young gardener in Scene 18 is an example. In most circumstances, however, it is much more difficult for a man to find a woman who is prepared to pay, in whatever sense, for sexual access to his body. Most men are only too willing to have sex with a woman without any reward other than the sexual opportunity itself. In contrast, for all the reasons we have discussed in this book (see particularly Scene 28), women have much more to lose from any single sexual encounter than men and usually need some sort of pay-off to balance the potential cost. Only when a woman is eager to collect a particular man’s genes might she be prepared to pay in some way for the privilege.
However we d
efine prostitution, though, the woman in Scene 32 is clearly at the ‘empid fly’ end of the scale we have just described rather than the ‘bird’ end. For her, prostitution is a way of life. Biologically, it is also a strategy for reproduction – and, moreover, a highly successful one. By her mid-thirties she had had four children and had earned more than enough money to give them a comfortable and healthy environment in which to live. Each child had a different father, at least two of whom could have been men of status. What all of the fathers had in common was that they produced very competitive ejaculates: sperm armies able to defeat those of many other men. The woman’s sons, her grandsons, and any later male descendants should also have an above-average chance of producing competitive ejaculates. In later generations, many people in the population would inherit her genes because of the competitive success of her male descendants.
This advantage of prostitution as a reproductive strategy is the same advantage gained by any woman who promotes wholesale sperm warfare in her tract (Scene 21). It is just that prostitutes exploit this technique more often than any other category of women in the population. Few other women, except those who suffer gang rape (Scene 34) or who seek out group sex (Scene 21), are ever likely to contain the sperm from as many different men at the same time.
The success of prostitution as a reproductive strategy means that most of us will contain the genes of a prostitute among our ancestors. On average, we should each need to go back through our family tree no further than the 1820s (seven generations) before finding an ancestor who was born to a prostitute (assuming, conservatively, that only 1 per cent of the population is conceived by overt prostitutes).
As a way of life, however, prostitution has many risks. First and foremost, as we have discussed on numerous occasions, there is a high risk of contracting sexually transmitted disease. This factor alone can condemn a prostitute to early infertility and death. Many try to reduce the danger by using condoms but are forever fighting against male aversion (presumably for the reasons discussed in Scene 29). Prostitutes report men trying surreptitiously to remove the condom that they have agreed to wear. Even since the advent of AIDS, the majority of clients prefer not to use a condom. So strong is the male body’s preference for insemination that, like the woman in Scene 32, many prostitutes are prepared to settle for simply exploiting the situation by charging more for intercourse without a condom.
There is also the danger of being injured or killed by a client. Prostitutes attempt to reduce this risk by gathering together in a brothel or massage parlour, by paying a man or men to watch over them and provide protection, or simply by having a chaperon (often their mother or father).
By far the biggest danger to prostitutes, however, is drug addiction – a danger both physically and financially. Despite sometimes having to pay rent on the room from which they work, or for protection, prostitutes have an earning capacity that most other people can only fantasise about. Yet few prostitutes are rich. In part, this is as a result of exploitation: young girls are first introduced to the drug scene and then ‘encouraged’ into prostitution as the only means of earning enough money to support their habit. The agents then take their own commission for providing ‘protection’. Such sad cases inevitably incur the costs of prostitution without reaping the benefits.
Not only is prostitution a reproductive strategy for women, the visiting of prostitutes is also a reproductive strategy for men. In ancient Greece and Rome, almost all men inseminated a prostitute at some time in their lives. In the USA in the 1940s, 69 per cent had inseminated a prostitute at least once and 15 per cent did so on a regular basis. In the UK in the 1990s, 10 per cent of men between forty-five and fifty-nine years old have paid for sex at least once in their lives. Apart from the occasional priest, the average man who pays for sex usually has other reproductive outlets – in the UK, for example, they are also more likely to have an above-average number of unpaid partners.
As a reproductive option for men, prostitutes provide a target for insemination that is quick and easy. The more prostitutes a man inseminates, the greater his potential reproductive success. He may also gain in other ways, depending on his situation. For example, the young student in Scene 32 was hoping to gain experience (Scene 27) that would later be of use in his more conventional reproductive attempts with other women (on average, students lag two years behind other people in their sexual experiences). Men without a partner are simply including prostitutes in their search for females to inseminate. Occasionally, a man may find a long-term partner through his contact with prostitutes, like the woman’s partner in Scene 32. Men already with a partner are using prostitutes as targets for their infidelity.
Prostitutes are also potentially expensive, both financially and in terms of disease risk. Thus, although insemination is easy, as we have just seen, the reproductive benefits are relatively low. Any single ejaculate has a low chance of achieving fertilisation because of the intensive sperm warfare that it will encounter. In addition, even during long periods of unprotected sex, prostitutes are less likely to conceive in any given month than a woman who is having only occasional sex with a single partner. This could be due to prostitutes having a lower rate of ovulation (Scene 16) or a more efficient cervical filter (Scene 22). It could also be due to sperm warfare. Perhaps such warfare is so intensive inside prostitutes that the sperm armies from different men often neutralise each other.
A man needs to inseminate prostitutes many, many more times than he does a conventional mistress in order to produce a single child outside of his long-term partnership. Of course, no man would say that his reason for visiting a prostitute is to gain a chance of fathering a child. Nevertheless, from time to time a man will succeed in this, passing on to his child in the process the genetic program that made his ejaculate so successful at sperm warfare – prostitutes are unsuitable targets for men who are not sperm war specialists (Scenes 19, 30, and 35).
The final conundrum is why some men are prepared to form long-term partnerships with prostitutes. Clearly, such a man experiences all of the disadvantages just discussed for a prostitute’s clients. Usually, however, he trades these costs against the benefit of a share in her wealth. The man in Scene 32 traded his financial and lifestyle benefit for effectively looking after her, her home and her children. In addition, he had some opportunity to father a child with her and may already have done so. His lifestyle probably also meant that he would have a chance to inseminate other women as well. His reproductive strategy was risky. The potential gains were high, but so too were the potential costs. Apart from any other genetic characteristic he needed to benefit from such a strategy, at the very least it would have helped if he had also been a sperm war specialist (Scene 35).
Given that prostitution and the use of prostitutes are both reproductive strategies with high potential benefits and considerable potential risks, prostitutes share many similarities with bisexuals (Scenes 30 and 31). We do not know whether there is a genetic predisposition for prostitution in the same way as there is for bisexuality, but if there is, it would seem that only a minority of women possess the genes for prostitution. So it is possible that, as we concluded for bisexuality, prostitution is an advantageous strategy only as long as it remains relatively uncommon, at least in societies in which its costs are high. If all females were available to all men, the potential value of prostitution and the reproductive edge it would give each prostitute over other females would disappear. At the same time, the spread of disease would greatly increase.
If this ‘genetic minority’ interpretation of prostitution is correct, the corollary, as for bisexuality, is that on average the reproductive success of prostitutes and other women should be the same. Without a genetic analysis similar to that which has been carried out for bisexuals, however, we cannot be certain – and there is an alternative interpretation. This is that all women are potential prostitutes – but that only a few ever encounter a situation in which they judge the potential benefits to outweigh the poten
tial costs. If this interpretation is correct, the corollary is that women who judge the situation correctly and become prostitutes should have a higher level of reproductive success than other women.
This interpretation has less in common with our interpretation of bisexuality (Scenes 30 and 31) than it has with our interpretation of another high-risk, minority sexual strategy – rape. This is the subject of the next two scenes.
SCENE 33
The Predator
The man locked his car, then made his way along the dark road. As he walked, he could hear the sound of traffic a block away on the main road running through the town. It was midnight but still hot, and the pavement cafés and bars around the busy main square were still crowded and noisy, mainly with holidaymakers. Turning away from the square, he saw at the end of a narrow road the beacon he was seeking. It was a telephone booth, shining out of the darkness of a marble-tiled square outside a church.
He phoned home, checked with his partner that she and their two children were well, and told her he would see her the following night. With that, he walked a short way back down the road, stepped into the darkest of shadows, and leaned back against the cool wall of the church. After checking the flick-knife in his back pocket, he lit up a cigarette and settled back to wait. Apart from the glow of the cigarette, he was totally invisible. His throat dried and tightened in a mixture of excitement, fear and anticipation. The waiting was the part he liked best.
The girl at the pavement bar was crying. The anger had gone but the pain and worry were still there. Two tables away, laughing drunkenly with his friends, was this holiday’s sexual partner. As she sat with her friends, she could feel the flowback dampening her knickers. Scarcely more than an hour ago, they had had sex on the grass in the nearby park.
