Is prostitution world’s oldest profession?

[u/aeakinoglu]

I was watching HIMYM and they said this. True?

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[u/itsallfolklore]

As /u/vampirecloud points out in another comment, this assertion is problematic and is typically attributed to the British author, Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936). His writing is often assailed for its shortcomings by twenty-first-century standards, but for the time, his work can be regarded as typical. The relevant quote as presented in an article in Slate (2012) is the opening line: “Lalun is a member of the most ancient profession in the world,” from On the City Wall, a short story published in 1899.

Given this context, Kipling was assuming his readers would understand his meaning without using more direct words to refer to sex workers. This suggests that the phrase may have been floating around in oral tradition, but I cannot find an earlier reference to it, so I/we can't be sure. Kipling may or may not have invented it.

The problem with this assertion rests in a lack of evidence (whatever first transactions occurred in whatever profession, the events date to an undocumented prehistory); in addition, there is the problem with what is meant by "profession." Without exploring and agreeing upon a definition, we are likely to come to the table with different assumptions about meaning.

Any assertion about this or that profession dating to any specific time in prehistory is absurd. We simply don't know and can only make indirect guesses using archaeology or some sort of intellectual parlor game to imagine what occurred first and when it started occurring. Good luck with that exercise. It will lead to nowhere certain!

All this said, we invariably return to this word "profession." What does it mean? Does it mean a trade of service for something, or does it mean the purchase of a service with money? The idea of the exchange of sex for something is grounded in a sexist notion that prehistoric women were waiting at home for the hunter to return with meat, and the hunter, meat in hand, traded his commodity for sex.

This is an absurd imaginary scenario since no one was sitting around waiting for hunters to return: everyone who was able had a task to complete. One could just as easily argue that returning hunters (male or female) were exchanging sexual services for the various things being done at the homebase: the tanning of hides, the fashioning of baskets, the gathering of foodstuffs, etc.

The question then comes around to when did people develop specialized tasks and expertise and when were these traded for commodities or services. Is this what we mean by profession? It seems to me that this is a good definition, but others might not agree.

There is very early archaeological evidence of people trading goods, from group to group. Did the gathering of these commodities and the moving of these commodities to trading locations represent the emergence of a profession? Perhaps. Again, this is a combination of developing a definition for the abstraction of "profession" and engaging in a parlor game of what came first.

If we go back to the purchase of something with money, we find that the earliest records document all sorts of things being purchased, but mostly this involves various commodities. Does this make baking, farming, mining, or any number of other things early professions? Perhaps. Whatever came first cannot be known based on the earliest documentation. The earliest documentation is not the beginning: whatever was first documented almost certainly occurred before that documentation, so we are back to speculating about prehistory with our parlor game.

Even with this parlor game, however, there is no reason to imagine that sex work was the earliest of whatever we can call a profession. This notion gains energy in part because sex is so fundamental to life, and being primal, it is easy to imagine that it is at the beginning. It was, after all, "at the beginning" in some sense, but the idea that it was the first thing purchased with traded items or coin is undocumented and hard to imagine.

Edited for some clunky writing! Writing, by the way, was not the first profession.

[u/aeakinoglu → u/itsallfolklore]

Thanks for the detailed answer. It didn’t make sense to me as well that sex workers were the first, with all the hunters and stuff. *Edited for grammar

[u/itsallfolklore → u/aeakinoglu]

Happy to help! All we can do is imagine the possibilities and hope that our imaginations support one another!