In the West women have assumed the right to say yes to whatever sexual arrangment suits them and have gradually adopted the same attitudes towards men as men have historically had towards women. In the not so giddy afterglow of the sexual revolution, there is also a growing tendency to recognize that the right to say yes must also be matched by the right to say no.

But the right to say no is one that women in many parts of the world don't share with their Western counterparts. Poverty, war, and social collpase have pushed increasing numbers of women in the former Soviet block, Asia and Africa into prostitution. The oldest profession is hardly a profession but rather a brutal life of economic, sexual and personal slavery. The streets of Moscow are walked by 80,000 women desperately trying to survive. African girls as young as ten serve as concubines and servants to any of Africa's many mercenary armies. Nigerians girls are sold and transported to Europe to walk cold, wet streets plying their "trade".

And in a strange interpretation of reproductive rights, the United Nations ordered China in June of this year to allow women to sell their bodies as "sex workers". The body that oversees the convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women considers prostitution a "reproductive right" over one's own body. For the literal minded it may indeed be a right but the harsh reality of the life for millions of women in 'the life' exposes prostitution not as right but as one of life's deepest degradations.

In South Africa an estimate that 30% of young girls were coerced into their first sexual experience reflects another side of the harsh social climate of that country which has the highest rape statistics of any on earth.

Before analysis and the predictable torrents of ideological finger-pointing comes the reality. Millions of women today are forced to sell themselves and their children in order to stay alive. And it appears that the numbers are climbing.

The sad truth is that the option to just say no or just say yes are rights that relatively few women possess the world over as we enter the 21st century.