Female Prostitution in Contemporary Spain: Uncertainty of the Obvious

Abstract

During several decades of the post-Francoist development, Spanish society has experienced epochal sociocultural transformations that radically changed its ideological atmosphere and value orientations. Considering the situation with female prostitution in Spain allows us to understand the nature of those changes and their orientation better. It also helps us to compare the current existence of this specific phenomenon with the previous era. I track the evolution of the attitudes of Spanish society and the state toward both prostitution as such and the categories of persons involved in it (prostitutes, their owners and pimps, clients, etc.), all under the conditions of the dominance of so-called “liberal paradigm” in public discourse. Among the peculiar features of the “Spanish case”, the national demographic composition of “sex workers” is noted, as well as the protracted struggle of opinions around the interpretation of prostitution in society, a struggle whose acuteness stands in the way of adopting a law on it and thereby ending its current “illegality” (“neither permission nor prohibition”).