Sex Trade-A Boon or a Bane

                                                                   

Sex Trade-A Boon or a Bane

A woman’s body has always been an object of desire for men. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that there has emerged a special segregated class of women in the society, who offer their bodies to men for sexual relationships in exchange of some cash and make a living out of it. They are called sex workers or more commonly - ‘prostitutes’. 

Sex trade and prostitution is nothing new in our country. It’s rather an old wine sloshed into the new bottles because this tradition of women offering their bodies for money had existed since the times of the Kings of Ancient India who splurged money on tawaifs or courtesans and spent countless nights living their sexual fantasies in the company of these women. Today we get to hear new terms like ‘sex trafficking’, ‘flesh trade’, ‘call girls’ ‘red light areas’ and so on, but the basic concept remains the same.

The question here is – is it a boon for these women who are often illiterate to be able to make money out of selling their bodies and sometimes even their soul? Or is it a bane, because these women could have probably found more respectable ways to earn money had sex trade never existed? Is it a boon which keeps the lechers restricted to the brothels or a bane which will hamper the progress of women as individual identities?

Sex Trade: Why are women’s bodies on sale but not those of males?

In reality, sex trade usually refers to the trade of women’s bodies for sex and not that of men.  It has become a source of income for many women; most women happily don’t go into this kind of a business. If we delve into their past, this becomes more obvious. When a male visits a sex worker, his main target remains to make the most of the money he has paid to the worker while booking her for the night or say for few hours. He remains insensitive to her feelings and ravages her body and she is contract bound to give him what he wants in the fear of being dropped out of job by the brothel’s owner. 

So this sex trade is undoubtedly a trade of the woman’s body where a woman has to kill her feelings, withstand pain as part of her job and allow the brothel owner to do business with her or rather trade with her body by sending customers to her bed whom she entertains mechanically for money. 

T.S Eliot’s Preludes manages to say it right: “You tossed a blanket from the bed/You lay upon your back and waited/You dozed and watched the night revealing/The thousand sordid images”

Legalizing Sex Trade: Pros & Cons

Sex workers are fighting throughout the country to legalize sex trade and many NGOs are coming forward to uphold their cause. Legalizing of sex trade, however, is a much debatable subject. It has its own pros and cons. 

If sex trade is legalized, sex workers will no longer be considered a minority; legalization will allow them to gain a wider social perspective by means of quantifying themselves but many of them also seek for an intellectual recognition in society far beyond the mere flesh. Many of them come with brains, have an intellectual bent of mind which unfortunately no one sees apart from their body and mere legalization cannot wipe the stigma that society puts on them. 

Legalization of sex trade, however, can restrict the criminalizing of sex trade and can also secure the future of sex workers by pulling some governmental benefits and claims in their favour.

Sex Trade: If legalized, will it be a boon or bane?

Whether Sex trade is a boon or a bane is a very relative question. Some poverty stricken women are earning a living through it. For them, perhaps it’s a boon because they have no other means to make a steady income. Many destitute girls are getting shelters and for them too it is a boon. 

But the grimmer side of it is exposed only when women & girls are kidnapped and forcibly brought into this profession. They are beaten up and forced to entertain customers. Also it becomes a bane when the sex workers while practicing their profession contract some dangerous life-taking sexually transmitted disease like AIDS or get pregnant and go through horror stories of blotched abortions and no one is ready to take their responsibility. In such situations legal backing is indeed needed. 

If sex trade is legalized, these women might have better rights and maybe even a better quality of life. But one darker side of legalization is that once these women become legalized sex workers, they might have to forget their individual identity as woman!