A few days ago, one of my female Nigerian friends who holds a first degree in Philosophy, a second in Law and a masters in Law cornered me with a question in the wake of the Moesha CNN faux pas.
The question was: who is a prostitute and would you term what Moesha and many other women do today as prostitution?
Knowing the background of my friend, I knew she was not looking for a dictionary definition of a prostitute, else she would have checked that herself. She was looking to entangle what on the face of it would seem like an easy question with probably philosophical strings in relation to the zeitgeist of our time.
I remained calm for a few seconds to carefully structure my response and said: “a prostitute is any person who trades sex for financial gains or advantage—whether the intended gain is express or implied.”
I thought I had nailed it but she was not satisfied and therefore jumped in: “so if I meet a man at the bar and I think he’s cute and would want to sleep with him, and immediately before taking of my panties in his house, I realized he’s rich therefore asked that he pays me for the sex which he also so much wants, does that make me a prostitute?”