Prostitution

Prostitution is the exchange of sexual services for payment. Although it has been practiced by both sexes, the term generally refers to men seeking the sexual services of women. Throughout American history, therefore, attitudes toward prostitution have reflected and contributed to cultural constructions of masculinity and male sexuality.

In colonial America, little attention was paid to “deviant” sexuality. But in a patriarchal society in which men were expected to produce large families for agricultural labor and legitimate heirs to family property, men who sought the sexual services of prostitutes were perceived as failing to meet the responsibilities of manhood. Because most colonial Euro-Americans assumed that men's sexual aberrations resulted from weakness of the flesh, while women's stemmed from innate spiritual depravity, prostitutes bore the brunt of public sanctions, which included whippings and hard labor.

By the middle of the eighteenth century, “bawdy houses” became more widespread, especially in seaport cities where men engaged in the growing maritime trade. In the misogynistic subcultures that flourished among urban male laborers, prostitution, along with sodomy, interracial sex, and adultery, existed within such homosocial male spaces as taverns and billiard halls. To colonial authorities mistrustful of these subcultures, prostitution signified a declining moral sensibility, and citizen groups and politicians frequently raided brothels.

Throughout the nineteenth century, prostitution flourished wherever men gathered. The market revolution and urbanization eroded the traditional moral constraints imposed by familial control in rural and village settings, and growing numbers of young unmarried men began to congregate in the nation's burgeoning cities. As prostitution moved into the urban marketplace, cities developed “red light” districts in which brothels were concentrated. In many cities, male visitors could purchase “gentlemen's guides” to locate the best brothels in the area.

Prostitution became intertwined with the new class-based definitions of manhood taking form in this new social setting. Although men of all social classes frequented the commercial sexual establishments of the nineteenth-century city, brothels were typically located in the working-class sections of cities, where older laborer subcultures endured and working-class men resisted the bourgeois morality of their employers. Meanwhile, an emerging middle class began associating manhood with self-control, marriage, domesticity, and economic success—and sexual activity for purposes other than reproduction came to be regarded as a wasteful expenditure of bodily fluids and energy. Middle-class social reformers targeted working-class men and— fueled by cultural assumptions that likened working-class sexuality with the behavior of animals—were particularly concerned about what they considered an excessive number of workingmen who solicited prostitutes.

Still, there was a general tolerance for prostitution among the Victorian middle class, which applied a double standard that held middle-class women to strict guidelines for purity while defining men as naturally inclined to moral weakness— and therefore allowing them considerable freedom to indulge their sexual appetites. Since middle-class men defined prostitutes as working women to whom middle-class standards of purity did not apply, prostitution supported middle-class gender constructs by providing an avenue for men's sexual release while protecting the virtue of Victorian women. It also allowed men a sexual license while they conformed to genteel moral standards in their marriages and their public lives. Prostitution was also important for bachelors, for late marriages and prolonged bachelorhood became more common during the nineteenth century, and celibate bachelorhood was considered unnatural and unhealthy.

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