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?
No wonder I’m still single.
Lmao godless The only difference between you & them is you got a stick up your ass
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.
It’s a commentary on humanity and society.
There’s no records or evidence for the first jobs, so it’s mostly humor with a grain of truth. Most likely trading sexual favors for some benefit likely predates most other forms of trade (but it obviously depends on the exact definition of trade, profession, prostitution, etc.)
It’s not just us humans, chimps trade meat for sex: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/chimps-behavior-sex-news-animals
Yale taught monkeys about money, and yup, they traded money for sex. From archive of NYT article:
Further proof that the monkeys truly understood money: the monkey who was paid for sex immediately traded the token in for a grape.
That would make hunting/gathering the oldest profession, so that you have something you can trade for sex.
It depends on whether you’re considering “a profession” to be something that someone does to gain goods/services/“value” from another person, or from nature.
So a farmer isn’t a profession?
If the hunter/gather is trading food for sex, then they are doing to gain services from another person.
Because courtship rituals show up before money and across species usually involve the male providing food to the female to demonstrate the males fitness.
Long before language, money, and lots of other shit had been invented, males have traded resources for sex.
In some species the female stays with the young and is unable to get food for herself, she has to rely on her mate providing food or her and the baby die.
There was an experiment where the researchers introduced “money” to chimps that they could exchange for fruit treats. Some females almost immediately began trading sex for money
Well, yeah.
Food only lasts so long. Money could be stored and used later.
So the exchange became a much better deal. In effect the females were always hungry. Because they could exchange money for fresh food later.
Makes as well could save up money so they didn’t have to get food whenever they were horny.
It really streamlined the process, but long term I’d be interested to see what happened to fitness of the population. Like 4-4 generations down the line, would that population be significantly less fit than a control group?
Although that would likely have to be done in the wild where threats are and not in a safe enclosure.
It really didn’t play out like that. They were not saving anything.
If you take “job” to mean “doing a thing in exchange for another thing”:
Allow me to narrate a brief historical reenactment:
Caveguy:
dragging cavedeer carcus somewhere
Cavegirl:
happens upon the scene
grunting (translation: damn that venison lookin’ tasty af)
Caveguy:
grunting (translation: it’s mine you can’t have it)
Cavegirl:
grunting, but seductively (translation: well, if we smash, can I have some?)
Caveguy:
aroused grunting (translation: hell yeah girl, you can stick around, I’ve been having the worst dry spell)
fin
This is cinema - Martin Scorsese
These Unga bunga bitches always sliding in my DMs trying to get free shit!
I liked the analysis in HIMYM. It can’t possibly be the world’s oldest profession, because in order to exchange something of value for sex, you have to have obtained something of value. Like say this hypothetical first ever prostitute was exchanging blowjobs for berries, then berry gatherer was actually the first profession.
Unless the offer was a blowjob for him to go get the berries.
Arguably, her giving the blowjob meant she got the berries
This guy capitalists.
So, sex is as old as mankind, but we didnt invent favors till 2 AD… so, nope… they couldnt pay favors with sex.
It predates human civilization, and likely even predates homo sapiens. Our great chimp ancestors were likely trading spare food for sexual favors, though whether you can consider it the oldest profession depends on your definitions.
It’s hard for me to believe that hunter / food seeker isn’t the oldest profession… But it’s definitely up there.
What’s the last time you met a gatherer doing it as a profession and not a hobby?
Hunters are a little bit more common, but still, full time food hunters are rare.
Prostitutes on the other hand.
So as a simple saying used in a daily life, I can kinda see why it’s used :)
Yo if you hunt and gather a little more and share it all you can fuck my cave wife
I can’t answer that question, but I want to know why it’s called the oldest profession when sex work is still illegal in most of the world. A profession is usually a legal job. And sex workers should be legal everywhere as a human right.
thievery was probably the worlds second oldest proffesion
Profession doesn’t mean legal. It’s just as opposed to amateur. ie. You make enough money doing it for it to pay your cost of living.
But yeah it definitely should be legal, regulated, and unionized
It has been legal in large parts of the world at some point in history.
The only thing I can think that would be almost as old is agriculture
Nah, prostitution pre-dates agriculture. Hunter-gatherer populations had men trading resources for sex.
That’s what agriculture is almost as old as prostitution!
Around here it is called world’s oldest business.
There were probably professions that long predate history, and any of those are a bit hard to prove. There were ‘shaman’ in pre-history, and good shaman were quite possibly supported by their communities. There may also have been things like dedicated cooks. Trading sex for food however, is clearly hundreds of thousands if not millions of years old, so it’s hard to argue that other professions came before it.
I’m imagining dinosaur hookers, out on the jungle corner in fishnets and halter tops, smoking cigarettes and shaking their tails at passersby.
Edit: look at that second word before anyone gets snarky about dinos and humans not coexisting. We can have fun that ignores reality, and there’s nothing more fun than picking up a t-rex hooker in your Flintstonesmobile, taking her back to your cave and smoking some rock. It’s a gneiss day.
ok. I too am now imagining dinosaur hookers, and it’s not even the weekend yet. RARHH!
You’re focused on the second to first word, I’m focused on that second to last one! Fantastic pun.
The answer is sexism. Before anything else, women were whores.
Not cool actually. It’s clearly not true, but that’s why it’s a saying.
I couldn’t find proofs that prostitution is the oldest
Itt: people finally making the argument I’ve made against the op statement for years.
It’s beautiful when society starts to change and it begins to align with your views. 🥲
