Prostitution History: How Law, Gender, and Power Shaped Sex Work Across Centuries

When we talk about prostitution history, the long-standing, globally visible practice of exchanging sex for money, often under legal, social, or economic pressure. Also known as sex work, it has existed in nearly every civilization—not as a moral failure, but as a survival strategy shaped by poverty, war, and gender inequality. This isn’t a story of deviance. It’s a story of systems: who gets to control bodies, who gets punished, and who gets ignored.

Gender and prostitution, the way female, trans, and nonbinary sex workers have been targeted by law and culture while male clients and pimps often escape scrutiny is central to understanding this history. In ancient Mesopotamia, temple prostitutes were respected religious figures. In Victorian England, women selling sex were locked in asylums while their wealthy clients walked free. The double standard didn’t disappear—it just got quieter. Victorian sex work, the hidden economy of urban women forced into survival sex by lack of wages, education, or legal rights was policed through the Contagious Diseases Acts, which forced women into humiliating medical exams while ignoring the men who paid for them. These laws weren’t about health. They were about control.

Legal history of prostitution, the shifting laws that criminalize, decriminalize, or regulate sex work depending on political mood, not human need reveals a pattern: when women gain power, sex work gets punished. When economies collapse, it gets ignored. In the 1970s, feminist debates split over whether sex work was exploitation or labor—ignoring the voices of the workers themselves. Today, debates still rage, but the data is clear: criminalization increases violence. Decriminalization saves lives. The prostitution history we don’t talk about is the one where sex workers organized, resisted, and demanded rights—not pity.

What you’ll find in the posts below isn’t a dry timeline. It’s the real, messy, human story behind the headlines: how women used sex to survive medieval dowries, how Etruscan tombs celebrated pleasure alongside death, how Victorian doctors pathologized desire while ignoring the women who paid for it, and how modern laws still echo the same biases. These aren’t just historical footnotes—they’re the roots of today’s fights for safety, dignity, and justice.