Green’s Dictionary of Slang

(a) (also market) a rendezvous for prostitutes of either sex.

1890		Dead Bird (Sydney) 30 Aug. 2/1: the meat market. In beef there was a great run upon legs, though buyers kicked rather hard at the shins. [...] Some dabblers in calves went a little above tho ankle, but we did not observe anybody knee-deep in them, and mutton is hooked up all over the city.
1896		Farmer Vocabula Amatoria (1966) 43: Boucherie, f. A brothel; ‘a meat-market’.
1950		Goldin et al. DAUL 136/1: Market. The rendezvous of male oral sodomists and pederasts — with robbery and extortion as an indirect objective of youths frequenting these sections.
1964		Lavender Lex. n.p.: meat market:– A gathering place on a street or park where hustlers and prostitutes gather in search for a paying customer. Also the gathering place for amateurs in competition with the professionals. This is usually a fence or a wall where the individuals can pose to best display their qualifications.
1965		A. James America’s Homosexual Underground 30: A dark corner of the beach known as ‘the meat market.’ It is little more than an open air brothel.
1975		J. Roe The Same Old Grind 20: ‘You weren’t a stripper at the Lyric. Nobody at that meat market wears anything to strip out of’.
1989		A. Vachss Hard Candy (1990) 6: The meat market. Whores working naked under clear plastic raincoats.

(b) (US) any situation or place where people are regarded as commodities, such as a recruiting agency or a modelling agency.

1941		A. Lomax Mister Jelly Roll (1952) 118: They gave us a hundred days on the county gang [...] When the inmates on the gang saw us, they hollered ‘New meat in the market!’ They jumped on us and took our money and cigarettes.
2018		M. Mesko Confessions of a Caddie 1349: The caddies usually start to show up at five thirty or six during the week because it’s a ‘first come, first served’ situation and a real meat market.

(c) anywhere that people gather for the primary purpose of finding sexual partners, often used in universities to describe first-year parties.

1957		J. Osborne Entertainer 18: Every tart and pansy boy in the district are in that place [...] It’s just a meat-market .
1964		see sense 1a above.
1970		J.P. Stanley ‘Homosexual Sl.’ in AS XLV:1/2 58: meat market n Street on which homosexuals gather, cruise, and pick up tricks.
1983		Eble Campus Sl. Mar. 4: meat market – place where members of the opposite sex are plentiful and available.
1992		K. Lette Llama Parlour 172: Your best friend is baring all for one of the tackiest meat market magazines in the whole of the Western world.
1998		I. Welsh Filth 145: Aw aye, I say, looking disdainfully around the meat market.
2003		K. Cage Gayle 82/1: meat market n. place where gay men gather to find sex partners – usually bars, and steam baths.
2012		(con. 1980s) I. Welsh Skagboys 144: Everywhere else in Edinburgh is such a meat market.

(d) in fig. use, the world of commercial sexuality.

1967		Oz 6 20/1: Girodias [is] the single most dedicated provider of sexual delicatessen for the Anglo-Saxon mental meat-market.
1974		E. Wilson Show Business Laid Bare 114: ‘It’s really incredible what things they do now in burlesque,’Ann Corio said. [...] ‘It’s like a meat market,’said stripper-turned-author Georgia Sothern.

(a) the female breasts.

1937–84

Partridge DSUE (1984) 730: C.19–20.

(b) the vagina.

1890–1904

Farmer & Henley Sl. and Its Analogues.