Sex, survival and our society's greatest lie about prostitutes

For the past nine months, my mind has been preoccupied with the figure we call a prostitute. This unsettling obsession has led to my latest creative project, a novel in progress titled Forty Days of Solitude. In this novel, I try to explore the life of Kanini, a woman society labels a harlot, but who, in truth, is much more complex than this label suggests.

The construction of Kanini’s character has not been easy. I have reflected deeply on what it means to be called a prostitute, to live on the fringes of a moral order that is flawed and hypocritical.

In everyday conversation, the prostitute is often portrayed as a moral and financial threat to men. She is a vortex that swallows fortunes, destroys families, and derails destinies. A weapon of mass economic destruction?

In Kenyan literature, I believe it is Ngugi wa Thiong’o who has done the most justice to this figure. In Petals of Blood, Wanja is not simply a sex worker. She is a deeply wounded woman.

She is shaped by the brutality of personal tragedy and systemic exploitation. Her decision to sell her body is not a moral collapse, but an act of survival. It is a form of protest against a patriarchal world that uses and discards women with impunity.

I think Wanja is, in many ways, a metaphor for Kenya itself, violated, commodified and yet still capable of compassion and resistance. Her body becomes a site of transaction, but also of power, healing, and rebirth. She protects, rebuilds, and loves. In her, I see not only sin but also salvation.

The Kenyan society thrives on hypocrisy. We hide behind scripture and moral codes, yet glorify exploitation. We quote the Bible by day and prowl neon-lit streets by night. In this theatre of pretense, the prostitute becomes an easy scapegoat. We dump our guilt on her while shielding the real culprits, the men of power who use and discard her, and the society that created her.

In Meja Mwangi’s Going Down River Road, prostitutes are not monsters but human beings, bruised, hungry, resilient. They sell their bodies. Yes. But they also sell their stories of broken homes, betrayal, and of a system that failed to catch them when they fell.

They are not villains but victims. Ngugi and Meja wrote these novels over thirty years ago! You cannot get such an honest depiction of the prostitute in our writings today. Why?

Morally pretentious literature

We are afraid to portray the prostitute with honesty because we have become a morally pretentious society. We write literature for school syllabi, sanitized, soulless, and falsely virtuous. We pretend that intense emotions and messy realities do not exist. We produce what I call morally pretentious literature. This is a literary diet that starves the soul of truth.

Let me seek refuge in my favourite book, the Bible. In one of the most poignant scenes in the Gospels, a woman, widely believed to be a prostitute, anoints Jesus’s feet with costly perfume, weeping and wiping them with her hair.

The disciples are appalled. What a waste, they say. But Jesus is not.

He does not see financial recklessness. He sees devotion in a soul longing for healing, not a weapon of ruin. So is the prostitute a destroyer, or a reflection of our own contradictions?

Let us face it. The prostitute is not merely a seductress of weak men. She is a product of societal failure. In sophisticated, unpretentious literature, she shows more emotional intelligence and humanity than the “upright” men who use her by night and condemn her by day.

That is where I have situated Kanini in Forty Days of Solitude while knowing the dangers of doing this.

Look guys! It is not the prostitute who destroys. It is the hypocrisy of society. It is the failure to build systems that protect the vulnerable.

We have failed to see the human being behind the label.

Let me ask. Are prostitutes the sirens who lure men into ruin? Is this not a label that distracts us from seeing a more dangerous truth? Are we not practicing prostitution of another kind? Prostitution is not just about sex.

It is about power and greed. Our nation is violated by men who symbolize a nation auctioning its soul.

These are the real prostitutes, men in suits who destroy a nation by day and hide behind moral rhetoric.

And what about us, the ordinary people? Are we pure? No. We elect politicians after they have bought us. We sell our votes for branded T-shirts, petty bribes, and tribal promises. We are not deceived, we are bought.

That, too, is prostitution. We have monetized everything, from justice to love, from education to faith. Our entire society runs on transactions. The prostitute is simply more honest about her trade. The rest of us have just mastered the art of pretending.

But all is not lost. No one is beyond redemption.

The destroyer is not the woman on Koinange Street, but the man who signs away billions in public funds. It is not the girl who sells her body for school fees but the system that makes her do so.  Let us stop casting stones and look honestly. We are all part of the same broken marketplace.