Introduction
"He's mad that trusts in the tameness of a wolf, a horse's health, a boy's love, or a whore's oath," said Shakespeare in King Lear; and Samuel Johnson, a couple of centuries later, was even more unequivocal: "The woman's a whore, and there's an end on't," But with all due respect to the artistry of these distinguished gentlemen, the question-like most questions of human morality-is not really that simple. Prostitution, in fact, may even be a necessity for the survival of the human race. Such a view has been presented by James H. Tasker, in an article in Answers magazine in which the author calls for the legalization of pornography. The article is entitled "Why Not Prostitution?" and begins.
"The oldest profession-prostitution-is the cause of the oldest hypocrisy. It makes tense to believe that if man, the male animal, did not want and need prostitution, it would not exist.
"It is man, or men, who pay the freight. It is men, for the greater part, who make the laws, enforce the laws, administer the courts of law. How then, can prostitution be a problem? The answer is simple: men want prostitution, no matter what form it takes or what the play-for-pay gals call themselves, from 'B-Girls' to call girls to whores.
"We hypocrites make criminals of prostitutes, by merely calling prostitution criminal. Yet it is men, and only men, who support this 'criminal activity.' And by shoving the prostitute by law into the underworld, we offer the underworld vice lords control of the girls, then turn around and patronize them, thus pouring millions of dollars into the racketeers pockets."
Mr. Tasker goes on to develop his thesis at greater length and with convincing documentation, but his main point has already been established in these paragraphs. And whether or not we agree with all of his ideas or endorse his proposal for legalizing prostitution, it is difficult indeed to argue with his underlying premise: that if anyone is to blame for the existence of prostitution, it is not women but men.
It is safe to say that very few women choose whoredom as a career in preference to all others they can possibly imagine. Almost any woman, for example, would undoubtedly opt for being a housewife or a movie star, to name two imaginable extremes. But not every career is open to every woman. It's painfully obvious that not every beautiful and talented young girl can realistically hope to attain film stardom. It's just as true, although it may not be quite so obvious, that not every girl can hope to become a satisfied housewife, either. All sorts of combinations of circumstances can combine to prevent a perfectly normal female from ever marrying . . . and to force her to become a prostitute.
But a good illustration can prove this point much more forcefully than any number of words of purportedly objective argument. And the publishers of Dansk Blue Books believe that The Sensual Slave Girl by Wayne Sherman is an excellent argument indeed. For Mr. Sherman is an artist as well as a top-notch researcher, and in his latest novel he has taken facts from the unpublished biographies of several prostitutes and ex-prostitutes and woven them into a story that will stun you with its depth of characterization, subtlety of insight, and sheer power of driving suspense.
We meet the heroine of The Sensual Slave Girl, Myra, at a point in her life when she has two serious strikes against her. The first is that her mother was a prostitute; the second is that her mother is now dead and she is alone in the world. Some readers may feel that the third strike has already been called as the story opens: Myra is largely ignorant of the world as it is and totally unprepared to live alone in it. However, being what she is, Myra is far from out. Her outward beauty cloaks but cannot completely conceal an inner toughness and determination-toughness to survive and determination to make her own life, if not better than her mother's, at least different.
Myra is like her mother in one important way. Her mother always had an "escape hatch" that would eventually free her from her life of degradation. Or, at least, she always said she did Myra can never know for sure. And Myra has her own "escape hatch"-the money she always saves to enable her to find a new path to travel someday. What happens to Myra and to her "escape hatch" is the story. Read it, and you may never think of prostitutes with contempt again. We are certain you will admire Myra, and the probability is that you will find your views on life in general a little bit changed.
The Publishers North Hollywood, Calif. August, 1971