and religious philosophers have to stretch the texts to come up with some
reason why it’s wrong, although in most cases God never comes out and
explicitly says it is. Again, if God didn’t like prostitutes, why didn’t he/she/it
come out and say so directly? Maybe the writers of the holy works didn’t
mind a little something on the side, like many of America’s TV evangelists…
Muslims think it’s bad because any sex outside of your marriage or with your
concubines or slaves (if you’re lucky and rich enough to have some of either)
is considered sinful, and the guilty are to be flogged 100 times (Koran 24:23). But in Shia Islam there is the option of mot’aa, a temporary marriage,
whereby men actually marry the prostitute and then divorce her after a
couple of days. (You can check out the BBC “Prostitution Behind the Veil”
below for more about this).
The Hebrews were the biggest hypocrites, though. YHWH never says “no
prostitution,” but he does say that priests’ daughters who become
prostitutes are to be burned to death (Leviticus 21:9). Those whom YHWH
doesn’t like get labelled as “prostitutes” (this prejudice was carried on by the
Christians—think of the “whore of Babylon” in Revelations), and YHWH
doesn’t want money from prostitutes (Deuteronomy 23:18), but it seems to
be ok to have them around as long as they are not your own daughters
(Leviticus 19:29). You can have whores, as long as they are not from good
family Hebrews. It’s sort of like calling a girl a slut, but lusting after her all
the same.
Christians have the famous “He that is without sin among you, let him cast
the first stone,” which was about stoning an adulteress (John 8:7), and was
probably not part of the original text anyway as it only occurs in later
versions of John. (I like to think of the scribe somewhere who took it upon
himself to add this tidbit as a humanist stuck in a bad job.) But this
admonition of mercy was lost on Christian communities throughout the ages,
as they tended to follow the far less tolerant and more judgmental (some
would say misogynistic) Hebrew treatment of prostitutes, as dictated in the
Old Testament of the Christian Bible. But despite over 2,000 years of
disapproval, the profession is still going strong.
This is also a case where the rich got away with it all the time. It was called
having a mistress (nope, can’t find an example of any noble being jailed for
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