It is a man’s world, and it will remain that way till eternity.
Though in a society women are given the freedom to make their own choices and take their own decisions, it comes with a few tacit terms and conditions. They can choose their dress, their education, their career, their partner, and whether they want to bear children or not. But there is one choice they will never be given — whether they want to make some quick money through prostitution.
Society has always been patriarchal, and it will remain so — because that is the only divine order that keeps the existing societal structure intact. Remove that structure completely and human society will descend into chaos.
What women really are has been predominantly defined for mankind through religion, culture, literature and, more recently, movies.
A womaniser ends up being a villain in a movie, while a philanderess — a woman who chases men simply to fulfil her sexual desires — usually ends up in an adult movie. Why is that?
Why cannot a society comprising men, women and children simply be told that women can be sexual predators too?
Why cannot society openly acknowledge that women can cheat, lie and manipulate?
Why cannot we tell the world that women are fully capable of using their sexuality as a commodity to obtain money, position and power?
Well, because it doesn’t sound good to the masculine ego.
More importantly, society may completely lose its carefully constructed image of a gender that has been placed on a pedestal and protected by most man-made civilisations.
Society always wants us to believe that prostitution is a racket that exists only because weaker women are forced into it. They are vulnerable, we are told, and therefore they give in.
Oh, come on.
Then here comes the paradox: how can women suddenly become “vulnerable” when, at every other stage of civilisation, we consider them intelligent enough to cast votes that decide who governs an entire country?
Can we really entrust the future of a country to people whom we consider too vulnerable to make decisions about their own bodies?
No, women have simply never been allowed to express their own sexuality entirely on their own terms.
Take the books of the woman author Nancy Friday. She explored the sexual fantasies women actually had — and many of those fantasies involved being forced into sex by attractive men. Of course, they were fantasies. But how many men would have guessed that about women if women themselves had not opened up about it?
And that is precisely the point.
Society will understand women better only when women start expressing themselves honestly, rather than accepting the mould that men created for them.
And what if, one day, women openly say that they would rather choose prostitution to make money than spend years studying, building a career or getting married?
Then what?
The entire concept of family, marriage and the traditional distribution of power between men and women could be shaken to its foundation.
And perhaps that, more than anything else, is why men don’t want to legalise prostitution.