Personal Sexuality Becoming a Commodity: A Study Based on Female Sex Workers in Matara City Area

Abstract

Women sexuality has become a commodity than earlier times and women have been engaged with prostitution more when compared with men. There are many causal factors for that and those reasons change from time to time and society to society. In this study, the research problem was what are the affecting causes for women to sell their sexuality. The main objective was to find out causal factors involving the female prostitution in Sri Lanka and studying the nature of female prostitution. Studying their childhood experiences was another specific objective to achieve the main objective of this study. The study was conducted qualitatively following methodological approaches in subjectivism and phenomenology. The sample was fifteen female sex workers who live in Matara city area, and they were selected through purposive sampling. Both primary and secondary data were used for the study and primary data were gathered by using in-depth semi-structured interviews. All the interviews were recorded audio visually and were transcribed. Each interview was conducted around 60-80 minutes. As secondary data, the researcher used related books, articles, newspapers etc. All the collected data were analyzed under the thematic analysis method. As findings of the study, it was revealed that many socio, economic, cultural and personal factors have caused women to work as sex workers. All the causes are inter -related, inter -connected and while some reasons are directly linked with childhood experiences of them, relationship factors and majority causes depend on poverty.