Newest Question About the Oldest Profession
Excuse me but... is it really true that prostitution is the oldest profession?
Who says so? Under what authority?
I'm not saying it isn't an old profession (I *am* saying for the most part it *has* been a *profession*) but oldest? Oldest, even by thousands of years? In form even remotely as it's practiced today?
I'm not saying it's not. It just seems a bit of a stretch it's the *oldest,* even though it's peculiarly suited to assertions of it's... more inevitability than legitimacy. And also very deeply rooted in assumptions about gender roles... that themselves are sometimes of surprisingly modern, even post-industrial origin.
Anyway, maybe someone familiar with the ins and outs of either the
Some also claim farming as the oldest "profession," though farming was initially just done to feed oneself and one's family. It was only after a considerable time that farming became a "profession" where food was grown for trade with others. I suspect women were trading sex long before "farmers" were trading produce.
[I know. Also brewing. Also politics. And soldiering. And by the way I'm not ruling out that there might have been sex of some kind of transactional nature long ago, I'm just interested in some of the assumptions that if it did it had anything like the same character as in industrial or post-industrial societies. Thanks, Bunny. --fl]
I was going to make a similar point, except I was going to say that if the Bible is the presumed source of the notion that prostitution is the "oldest" profession, then it's wrong - in the Bible, the first occupations mentioned are farming (the professions of Cain and Abel).
Since the females of early hunter-gatherer tribes were often involved in gathering (and the males in hunting), I would say that food collection and preparation has to be the oldest profession one way or another.
[Right, or, of course, flint knapping, sites for which go *very* far back and which seem to have been traded... which also implies, of course, trading as well. Thanks,SnowdropExplodes. --fl]
I think spear-making is way older than farming.
If prostitution is the world's oldest anything, I would suspect that it would be "oldest profession not directly related to the survival of the community." But that depends on how you define "profession" - for example, is an artist who does no other "useful" work but is supported by the community a "professional"? Does any profession require a monetary system, or will barter do fine? Et cetera.
I think that whoever coined that phrase was just using it as a metaphor for "it's been around for all of known history". Some people just take things like that way too literally.
[My guess, actually, is that they coined it as a way to try and cannonize gender dynamics as so old as to be unquestionable. (Compare to Newt Gingrich's daffy claims about women shouldn't be soldiers because "military women don't belong in the trenches "because [only] males are biologically driven to go out and hunt giraffes...") Again, prostitution really could be very old, but there's just something *really* suspicious about the decision to say that if there's a first profession that would be it. Thanks, Nightfall. --fl]
And midwifery is older than any of this, or else none of us would be here at all. We had to be born before we could farm, gather or fuck for money or goods.
But I feel like that's such a big duh, it's almost silly to mention.
[Yup. Just for instance. Thanks, Heather. --fl]
I have to agree with Heather. My Midwives were highly offended at the notion of Prostitution being oldest Professional Art, lol.
[I don't think our midwife said anything about it but yeah, I think I remember someone mentioning it in a midwifery book I read, oh, twelve or thirteen years ago now. Thanks, Rosa. --fl]