Some engage with prostitution from an early age and become harnessed into a lifelong addiction to it. Many great writers, composers and playwrights have regularly indulged, patronised, and befriended prostitutes, including Franz Kafka, Guy de Mauppausant, Georges Rouault, Toulouse Lautrec, Dennis Potter, Picasso, Paul Verlaine. The artistic fascination with prostitutes, rather like their religious fascination, is hard to fathom precisely, but tends to exaggerate their power, beauty, social function and intelligence. Like medieval jesters, and circus clowns, and as social deviants, prostitutes are held in awe and have a fearsome power and fascination contingent upon their ability to engage in 'immoral acts' and mix intimately and heedlessly with strangers - types of behaviour that are completely taboo for 'decent people'. Artists especially identify with prostitutes because the inspired, creative mind is so often used and abused by society and its rich patrons in a similarly merciless, exploitative and disposable fashion.
Society condemns alike both the men who use prostitutes and the girls who get into it.
It condemns the men for being sick perverts and as vicious exploiters of women. These condemnations deserve greater study. On Darwinian lines, some might feel tempted to conclude that those who have failed to make children and contribute their genes to the future of humanity, are fundamentally flawed in some fashion. This would be hard to prove and runs counter to any more inclusive or compassionate view of recognising their place alongside the genetically successful in society as a whole. They may pity themselves for the social outcasts and human failures they have become.