If you check out this link to the Economist, you see what I think is a somewhat misleading figure claiming that street workers make 144% of what a shop worker would earn.

It's pretty simple when you think about it economically. Most women don't usually have many one-night stands. They most usually have sex within relationships where the possibility exists of becoming a wife. (Edit: by this I mean, the man hasn't categorically ruled out marriage and generally acts in such a way that it looks like he favors long-lasting monogamy, even if he's cheating in secret).

When measured in terms of wealth transfer from the man to the woman, prostitution is massively inferior to marriage. By having sex with many men in exchange for a discrete amount of money, amounting to a mere 144% of a shop worker's wages, the prostitute is getting a lower dollar value than the wife, unless she's in the high-end elite.

If we look at the third world, we see situations where prostitution and marriage are not mutually exclusive. However that may have something to do with the fact that Ecuador and Mexico are extremely violent hellholes and prostitutes there are forming marriages out of sheer need to preserve life. It remains to be seen whether prostitutes would marry in countries where law and order prevails.

If you're not a natural beauty whose lifestyle keeps you slim and attractive to the high-end clients, you have to subtract the costs of cosmetics and gym membership from the high-end income. Also, good luck raising a kid while living as a high-class prostitute. You'll spend bank on nannies if you want to maintain your beauty sleep. For this reason, the high-end profession is only going to work for women who desire the childfree life, in most cases. Having a baby is the number one cause of dropping from high to medium end.

A wife (in a first world country) can usually expect just one man to pay all, or a very significant portion, of her rent/mortgage. Though the dwelling is "shared", in reality the dwelling is totally hers, and the man just lives there while she permits him to, even if he pays 100% of the rent or mortgage. If she ever tires of the man, she just needs to call the cops, lie about being attacked, and from then on the man is expelled from the house, but must continue paying for it.

There is also the point of having to provide something in exchange for the resources given by the man. How many stories have you read on redit about a dead bedroom relationship between a man and his prostitute? Now compare that with dead bedroom relationships between a man and wife?

For whatever reason, women often go through long periods where sex with the man they've promised to be with becomes unappetizing. For a prostitute, going through such a period requires her to save enough money to maintain her, or get a job until she's ready to have sex again.

For a wife, she can commence a period of asexuality at any time and without any need for prior preparation. The rest of her life will proceed as normal, and her total de facto ownership of the house continues unaffected.

Can you put a dollar value on that? It would presumably be a large fraction of the purchase price of the house. You have to fuck a lot of rich men before you've saved even a tenth of the price of a house, and a regular woman gets that just by saying "I do".

Prostitution is like working at McDonalds and being a wife is like joining upper management at a big company, comparitively. An extremely high proportion of wives take part-time work to maximize their time with their kids, and you need the guy's income to make that happen. You don't need to plan your finances well, because the law will jail the husband if he doesn't provide the money as and when you require it.

There's also the issue of having to lie to your extended family, or accepting their disapproval, as a result of society at large accepting the system of taboos that benefits the wife while hurting the prostitute. This means the wife enjoys the huge benefits that come from complying with societal taboos while all prostitutes pay the cost of breaking them, if only by the cost of maintaining a secret life. Every client could potentially blackmail you if he wants.

So why do women usually favor using the law to make prostitution difficult or impossible? They dress it up with various stupid religious reasons, citing the Bible, Torah, feminist literature or the Qu'ran as the basis of their reasoning, but I generally think it's best to look beyond religion to the practical requirements that inspired those religious proscriptions in the first instance.

Most women know that they're not going to marry a highly desirable man. They know that, most likely, they will marry the kind of guy who would tend to go to a prostitute from time to time, if all other things were equal.

So for them, they worry that prostitution will seriously impact their hopes of hitting the jackpot of getting married. Most women want to be mothers, and the life of a single mother is so shitty that even a low-grade man is worth tolerating in order to get access to half of everything he has.

Some random musings for discussion: If we change marriage rules to prevent women from getting half of the partner's property, and allow men to disavow children without necessity to pay child support, marriage will probably disappear for 90% of the population. And the population will probably shrink.

Most women would probably prefer the childfree life to one where they can't extract a huge amount of money and labor from men to finance their motherhood.

Even more , future generations would benefit massively. More money-obsessed women would not pass on their genes, and the women who do reproduce would be women motivated by matters other than money. So we would very likely have new generations whose lives don't revolve around extracting wealth from others.