It is naive to wonder what motives drive a woman to prostitution; Lombroso’s theory that assimilated prostitutes with criminals and that saw them both as degenerates is no longer accepted; it is possible, as the statistics show, that in general prostitutes have a slightly below-average mental level and that some are clearly retarded: women with fewer mental faculties readily choose jobs that do not demand of them any specialization; but most are normal and some very intelligent. No hereditary fate, no physiological defect, weighs on them. In reality, as soon as a profession opens in a world where misery and unemployment are rife, there are people to enter it; as long as there are police and prostitution, there will be policemen and prostitutes. Especially because these professions are, on average, more lucrative than many others. It is very hypocritical to be surprised by the supply masculine demand creates; this is a rudimentary and universal economic process. “Of all the causes of prostitution,” wrote Parent-Duchâtelet in his study in 1857, “none is more active than the lack of work and the misery that is the inevitable consequence of inadequate salaries.”

Right-thinking moralists respond sneeringly that the pitiful accounts of prostitutes are just stories for the naive client. It is true that in many cases a prostitute could earn her living in a different way: that the living she has chosen does not seem the worst to her does not prove she has this vice in her blood; rather, it condemns a society where this profession is still one that seems the least repellent to many women. One asks, why did she choose it? The question should be: Why should she not choose it?

— The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir (Page 786)