ABSTRACT
Liberal feminists have always seen prostitution as degrading to women and conclude that it should receive no encouragement even though it should be decriminalized. The usual liberal recommendation on prostitution, then, is that it should be treated as an ordinary business transaction, the sale of a service; in this case, of a sexual service. Because the prostitute engages in it out of economic motivation, liberals view prostitution as quite different from a sexual act committed by physical force or under threat of force; they view prostitution as quite different, for instance, from rape. In order to establish that prostitution is simply an ordinary business contract, they need a clear theory of what kinds of contracts are legitimate. The Marxist approach to prostitution is considerably wider-ranging than the liberal approach, both because it attempts to understand prostitution in its social context and because it construes prostitution much more broadly.
