Do we really don’t have anything older before it that counts as a paid service/job being registered?
This reminds me an experiment made with capuchin monkeys, where the researchers were using small discs as some sort of currency. They could use it to buy stuff like pieces of cucumber (they eat it, but it’s meh), jell-o (they like it), grapes (they love it)…
One of the things that they reported is that a female exchanged sex for a disc. Then used said disc to buy a grape.
Conclusion: sex for goods is likely a human behaviour that predates humankind itself.
Or maybe it’s not really unique from other animals, we just have fictional currency and choosy morality. Every animal I can think of has the male doing all the courting work. Male spiders dance, birds sing and survive with brighter colors, bugs may lose their heads, giraffes punch females in the bladder to see if they’re even ready for sex, straight female prostitution drastically outweighs straight males, etc. It seems like the one who has to actually develop the offspring has the option to be much choosier. So did the capuchin prostitute herself or is that our morality being imposed on godless creatures who likely see no difference between sex, cleaning, or feeding each other as each is some type of need?
The capuchin engaged in sexual activity for payment, call it what you want but that pretty much the dictionary definition of prostitution. It’s not a moral or god question it’s semantics.
You can pay someone to pretend to be romantic on a date, to give you a massage, or to use their bodies for labor tasks. What exactly makes sex different?
To your point, I think it’s acceptable to call selling your body in a variety of ways prostitution. South Park has an episode from an early season about Kenny, Johnny Knoxville, and Tom Green doing gross stuff for money, in the episode Jesus calls the boys out for helping to make Kenny a prostitute. All that doesn’t change the dictionary definition of prostitution which is what the capuchin was participating in. From the Wikipedia article called “Prostitution”: Prostitution is the business or practice of engaging in sexual activity in exchange for payment. The definition of “sexual activity” varies, and is often defined as an activity requiring physical contact (e.g., sexual intercourse, non-penetrative sex, manual sex, oral sex, etc.) with the customer.
I’ve read an argument (I think I can cite this to David Graeber maybe) that women were one of the original forms of property. Early forms of marriage are essentially master/slave, or a form of prostitution.
