The unspoken issue at the center of prostitution is causation

[The Magistrate]

157. You Are Simply Wrong, Sir

While this tangential to what is actually under discussion, namely whether a person is acting freely or not, and whether a person's self-report of acting freely should be believed or not, and if not, why not, there might be some small value to engaging your comments.

It seems a certain sexual act troubles you. You seem to imagine there was a pristine time of sexual behavior when this act was un-known, that it is a new thing under the sun. No such time existed; no newly invented sexual act has arisen. As the song says, 'There's no such thing as an original sin.'

A divorce lawyer's practice is by its nature certain to draw a sample of people unhappy with their intimate lives, and disposed to place their spouses in as bad a light as possible. The same sort of sampling problem has affected psychiatric assessment of homosexuality, and a variety of other categories of sexual behavior, since it was only persons conflicted and unhappy over their desires and behaviors who fetched up in a doctor's office. Granted, being conflicted and unhappy over one's sexual desires will be more common if these are objects of social disapproval, even condemnation, than if they meet with social approval, or even simply indifference.

In a society which has deep taboos on sexual behavior, which has long nurtured a religiously inculcated feeling sexual desire is at best dangerous and at worst evil, there will be an element of 'forbidden fruit' attached to any sexual expression, and there will be an extra frisson of transgression attached to any sexual expression. In a society which manages to maintain this inner disapproval even as it exploits sexual desire at every level of commercial enterprise, and displays the signifiers of sexual receptivity and desire openly and widely in this use, there is going to be a lot of tension and confusion.