e therefore take the notion that a woman who voluntarily becomes a prostitute is degraded in some way. They feel that this degradation relates to the notion of a prostitute being seen as an object, rather than as a person, and seen as a means towards a sexual end, and bought and paid for to that end. Sex, they feel, should not be bought under any circumstances, mainly because it cannot be divorced from the requisite accompanying level of emotional intimacy.People who take this tack are, however, often at a loss to explain why this should be so. Culturally, the idea that love should accompany sex is a prevalent one – although it would be hard to quantify, many people insist that sex accompanied by love is superior to mere sex without love. However, to my mind, that remains a subjective moral judgment; whose validity exists, as Primorantz notes, “only as a personal ideal, not a universally binding moral standard ”. Primorantz goes so far as to state that sex without love may actually be positively good - even if it is not to the extent of sex with love – and hence the sexless love implied by prostitution is not morally objectionable. Examples in defense of sex without love can be conceived of quite easily: Primorantz cites the example of the nurse taking care of a disabled patient’s sexual needs.A final note on this from an observation of a popular US televion series in which the protagonist, a misanthropic, ugly man, is caught with a prostitute. When defending himself in a court of law, he argues that he found it more “inherently honest” to pay for a transaction without any strings attached compared to going through the hypocrisy of picking up a woman in a bar or courting a woman under false pretenses. While it could be said that all three acts are equally morally objectionable, it seems to me that, in some sense, an honestly open transaction exchanging sex for money may be more moral because it ...
