The Rights and Wrongs of Prostitution

This essay critically explores contemporary Euro-American feminist debate on prosti-tution. It argues that to develop analyses relevant to the experience of more than just a small minority of “First World ” women, those who are concerned with prostitution as a form of work need to look beyond liberal discourse on property and contractual consent for ways of conceptualizing the rights and wrongs of “sex work.” Feminists are deeply divided on the issue of prostitution, and debate between what might loosely be termed the “sex work ” and the “abolitionist ” lobbies is often both heated and bitter. This can be disconcerting for those like me who fi nd themselves in sympathy with elements of both “sides ” of the debate and yet also feel it is the wrong debate to be having about prostitution. My own research on prostitution over the past eight years has involved ethnographic and interview work with prostitutes, third-party organizers of prostitution, and clients in both affl uent and poor countries (O’Connell Davidson 1998). In all the countries where I have conducted research, female prostitutes are legally and socially constructed as a separate class of persons, and as such are subjected (t