The claim that increases in prostitution is due to “women’s increasing economic power and buiser executive schedules” is incorrect and is an attempt to sanitize the real reasons prostitution is on the rise. Throughout all of history, when economic conditions worsen, prostitution increases. I could provide examples thoroughly that would take up several pages, but let’s zero in on one most relevant to socialists history.

Michael Parenti notes in Dirty Truths that when communism was overthrown and market reforms aimed at capitalist restoration were introduced, “Russia’s health system was crumbling; the education system was deteriorating; cholera, diphtheria, and tuberculosis were spreading, as was poverty, hunger and homelessness; and crime, corruption, and prostitution were flourishing.” He goes on to state that “whatever economic democracy the communists had managed to put together — including the guaranteed right to a job, medical care, and education, and subsidized food, housing, and utilities — was being scuttled.” When material conditions worsened, prostitution increased because people are more desperate to survive. And when real existing socialism was overthrown, trafficking and prostitution increased once again, reasserting the right of the ruling class to women’s bodies.

Anuradha Ghandy, a Maoist revolutionary feminist from India, noted in her 2001 International’s Women’s Day speech that, “the cosmetic industry, tourism and bourgeois media have degraded the women’s body as never before, without any respect for their individuality,” and that “this, coupled with mass poverty, has led to entire populations turning to prostitution as witnessed in East Europe, East Asia, Nepal, etc.”

You state that “the violence we all experience stems from the criminalization of not just the trade, but of LGBTQ folks, non-citizens, poor people, people of color, and other marginalized communities.” Yet from understanding the historical and material origins of prostitution, we see that violence is part and parcel of what is definitively a vestige of slavery, patriarchy, feudalism, and class war. Prostitution has never existed without violence, slavery, patriarchy, and class oppression.

(emphasis not mine)

By claiming that prostitution has existed in “virtually every society” you intentionally mislead people into an idealist understanding of history that is both ahistorical and attempts to present prostitution as natural. As Marie Mies notes in Women The Last Colony, “no aggressor can maintain permanent control over those he has conquered and subordinated unless the subordinated are made to accept this state of affairs as nature-imposed or, what amounts to the same, as God-given.”

The first historical mention of prostitution was around 2400 BC, in Ancient Sumeria, a society whose mode of production was that of slavery and patriarchal property relations. The origin of prostituting women and children is linked directly to the regulation of women’s sexuality, the practice of enslaving women, military conquest, and child debt slavery. Although mythical tales are told about “sacred prostitutes,” that assertion has been disproven by historians such as Gerda Lerner. As Lerner notes in The Origin of Prostitution in Ancient Mesopotamia, “slavery became an established institution, slave owners rented out their female slaves as prostitutes, and some masters set up commercial brothels staffed by slaves.” Similar to today, the ruling class of the time not only used women for sexual pleasure but also displayed captive women as a sign of their wealth and power. Indeed, it was men’s appropriation of women’s sexual and reproductive capacities which laid the foundation for private property, class society, and the state to develop.

Never before in history was prostitution as widespread as it is now under global capitalism. Engels notes in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific that as industry developed on the capitalist basis of production, poverty and misery of the working classes became widespread. He stated that “oppression by force was replaced by corruption; the sword, as the first social lever, by gold.” In previous modes of production, the force of the sword is what disciplined the masses into submission to the desires of the ruling class. Under capitalism, however, the sword has largely been replaced by money. “The right of the first night,” or the legal right in feudal Europe which allowed lords to sleep with women of the subordinated classes, “was transferred from the feudal lords to the bourgeois manufacturers.” And with that transition, Engels noted, “prostitution increased to an extent never heard of.”