Following up on E.D.’s post about Craigslist, I find it interesting that neither Reihan Salam nor Dana Boyd want to grasp the nettle, which is that the fundamental issue underlying the Craigslist dust-up is the prohibition of prostitution.
The way that both dance around the issue is interesting. Salam focuses on how Craigslist is a small company and a boon to consumers, then simply quotes Boyd instead of providing further argument. Boyd concentrates on the “sex-power industry” that keeps women down. Her fundamental thesis is that it’s a waste of law enforcement resources to mess with Craigslist, which was making a bad situation a little better for the indy sex workers.
In other words, Salam, who writes at the National Review, thinks Craigslist deserves special treatment because of its entrepreneurial spirit and the value created by a small business. Boyd, who contributes to Huffington Post, says Craigslist should be treated differently because they are on the side of the oppressed sex worker enslaved by an uncaring industry. It’s different bait for different fish, but both cases just amount to special pleading.
What’s needed here isn’t an exception for the right sort of people — we need to change the laws that govern prostitutes. The legalization of small-scale independent sex work will free up police resources to go after the sex-power industry, and it will get cops off the back of a hard-working small businessman. I imagine that Salam didn’t make that argument because his audience at the National Review can’t stomach the immorality of prostitution, just as Boyd’s audience can’t abide the exploitation of women which they believe is at the heart of sex work.
So many pixels are wasted in the pundit business arguing that good people shouldn’t have to follow the law of the land, when what ought to be argued is that the law of the land needs to change so good people can get on with their lives free of state interference.
WereBear
All in an elegant nutshell.
In fact, we can tell bad law… when it creates problems for good people.
bob h
Indeed, the State should get out of the business of criminalizing prostitution, just as every modern society except perhaps Saudi Arabia has done. I am visiting Buenos Aires, where prostitution seems to be everywhere, yet it is all out of sight, and offers no affront to the public.
The Craigslist campaign is just an opportunity for Ayatollah Blumenthal to score points with prudish CT voters.
DougJ
Laws are for the little people.
Larry Signor
@DougJ: That just about says it all. The rest is bloviating.
bkny
it’s very interesting the many assorted devices being produced for crowd control. smell that freedom — just like burning flesh – via gawker:
NPR visited the Pitchess Detention Center in California to check out the new device, which is produced by Raytheon Missile Systems (nice). Prison guards can use the zapper from the comfort of a secure room and operate it with a joystick without ever having to get near a riot or an unruly prisoner. Mike Booen, a vice president of Raytheon, told NPR that “It penetrates about a 64th of an inch under your skin. That’s about where your pain receptacles are.” And what kind of pain are we talking about here?
Holy smokes!” cried Brian Day, a reporter with the Pasadena Star, as he flinched from the pain and jumped out of the way.
“At first, it’s a warmth,” he says. “Then it becomes an intense burning sensation real quick.”
When I volunteered, the guards hit me first in the arm, and stronger, in the neck. Ten minutes later, I swear I could still feel the pain.
“That’s the mind and that’s the memory,” [Dave Judge from the sheriff’s department] says. “We all tend to imprint a discomfort. So you burn that sensation in your mind, which is a positive thing, because we want individuals to remember that. So if they’re inclined to do [something wrong], they think twice and not do it.”
Uloborus
Policing the morals of our fellow (wo)man is a habit our culture is having a hard time shaking. It’s linked inextricably to conformism, which is habitual and celebrated in our culture. Hilariously, we usually celebrate being conformists who claim to be nonconformists. Where this bites into the ‘morals police’ argument is the subtle, nasty, and passive-aggressive ways conformism enforces itself. Everyone who wants to legalize marijuana *must* be a pothead, and everyone who wants to legalize prostitution *must* be a sophomoric sexual deviant. Thus the opponents’ arguments are not only dismissed, anyone arguing these cases is punished with public ridicule. It’s a culture of 12 year olds. Quite how we got this way and when we’ll grow up I’m not sure, but it’s been like this since at least the 70s.
arguingwithsignposts
See, I’m watching last night’s Daily Show online, so I thought you were referring to Meghan McCain…
JMS
I should preface that I’m pretty much the opposite of a Libertarian, but this is my take on this sort of thing. Laws are just stuff people decide–they aren’t like gravity or germ theory–things that exist no matter how many people may not have believed in them. People only abide by them en masse if they reflect already existing mores and practices. There are a number of things out there (smoking being the most clear-cut) that are manifestly bad for individuals and bad for society and are yet in some form or another legal, or winked at (think speed limits), mostly because too many people are already doing it and don’t see it as evil to effectively outlaw such practices. We learned that lesson from Prohibition. I think the thing not to forget, though, is that the popularity of any given practice does not prove its inherent harmlessness and that the wide-spread or intractable nature of any act is not by itself justification to make something legal–you also have to prove that the activity is relatively benign.
This could apply to anything that is illegal and potentially (or actually) harmful in some ways, but has enough of an underground presence that we would consider making it legal because “lots of people are doing it already anyway”–prostitution, marijuana, immigration, gambling in certain areas, loosening of gun regulations, whatever, you get the idea. I think if you are considering legalizing any of those things, you need to consider whether the thing itself, regardless of how widespread it already is, would be something that would be good for individuals and society if it became even more widespread through legalization than in its underground state. After all, although murder, rape, theft etc. have always happened and don’t look to be going away, most people don’t want to expand legal options for doing those acts, or put forth an argument that “so many murders are happening in X neighborhood, why don’t we just make it legal already?”
So what you are looking is a category where the costs to society are ambiguous–neither clearly negative nor clearly positive, and there is not support to advocate spreading the practice far and wide, but there is enough of an underground presence that simply declaring it illegal won’t stamp it out, I suppose the thing to do is to put it in a state of heavy regulation–joining things like alcohol, tobacco, firearms, and gambling. That way can attempt to mitigate the worst effects of those things being unregulated, while not necessarily encouraging the spread beyond those who were already involved, AND you’d have a new source of tax revenue, let’s not forget. If marijuana and prostitution were taxed like cigarettes from the get go, it’s unlikely they’d undergo some kind of huge expansion upon becoming legal.
JR
And since nobody else ever says it, I will:
There needs to be a “Union Label” for pornography.
Scott P.
Our nation is founded on the principle that there are inalienable rights — as the Declaration says, these include “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Inalienable means they cannot be taken away nor given up voluntarily. You cannot sell yourself into slavery. If you did, then you would become property and your new master could sell you to another person without your consent. That can’t happen, even if you would like it too.
Prostitution is selling one’s body which is also an alienation of liberty, similar to selling one’s organs or body parts. It is different only in degree, not in kind, from slavery, and thus cannot be tolerated in a free nation. You don’t have the liberty to give up your liberty.
WereBear
@Scott P.: One doesn’t SELL in prostitution; one rents.
Agoraphobic Kleptomaniac
@Scott P.: Strange. Here I thought people could sell services without becoming indentured servants or slaves. I must be wrong.
Does this mean because I use a Mover’s body for strength, that is considered slavery as well?
burnspbesq
“Prostitution is selling one’s body which is also an alienation of liberty, similar to selling one’s organs or body parts. It is different only in degree, not in kind, from slavery, and thus cannot be tolerated in a free nation. You don’t have the liberty to give up your liberty.”
Say what, now? Your analogy is invalid. Prostitution is not, in any meaningful sense, a sale of anything. In property-law terms it is a short-term license for a specified purpose.
Prostitution is consensual sex. The fact that one party’s consent is purchased doesn’t change that in any meaningful way.
“Cannot be tolerated in a free society?” I leave it to you to inform the Dutch that they don’t live in a free society.
TooManyJens
@Scott P.: How is selling the service of having sex intrinsically different from selling the service of giving a massage (an actual massage, not a euphemistic one) or being a caregiver for someone who can’t go to the bathroom by themselves? All three kinds of work involve bringing one’s body into intimate physical contact with a client. There is more physical risk involved in sex than the other jobs, but that risk can be mitigated and it’s not as dangerous as lots of other professions we allow people to pursue.
There are social differences that stem from the oppression of women, no question. But I don’t think that oppression is lessened by penalizing women who do sex work and removing them from the protection of society.
The Republic of Stupidity
Uh… given the subject matter, wouldn’t that read better if it said…
Non-Existent Patricia
I’ve never really understood the difference between hard-core pornography and prostitution. I can pay 2 people to have sex with each other while I film it, but I can’t pay someone to have sex with me?
RalfW
Interesting question, Republic, viz “small businessWOMAN.”
I have several friends who have been or are independent gay male sex workers. Their work really changed my mind about prostitution and legalization. None of these men strike me as being in the slightest bit exploited. They are clearly selling a service, a service that they enjoy performing, and not “selling their bodies.” They get to go home at the end of a call (or show the client the door), bank the cash, have a cup of tea, and get on with their day.
So the issue then becomes, for me, how to empower women to be able to manage their business similarly, so that they do not become indentured servants or worse, in the aptly termed “sex-power industry.”
My sense of the problem is that these women are exploited by their pimps first, and from there by their johns, and that drugs play a role in many of these women’s lives in ways that they don’t in my sex-worker friends lives.
Of course there are deep issues of power dynamics that are different for women who provide sex services to men v. men for men. That’s the issue that undergirds this most of all.
I believe that men set up social policy to make prostitution illegal/immoral specifically so that this power dynamic is enhanced by prostitution’s illegality. It keeps prices low and supply high: same way that undocumented workers can’t protest their working conditions, wages stay low when there is no option to form trade unions, set standards, and such.
So there are multiple social policy questions. But they cannot begin to be addressed as long as it’s God-awful and immoral to even suggest legalization.
The Republic of Stupidity
@RalfW:
I read someplace in the last year that the US spends about $1.4 TRILLION a year on law enforcement… I wonder how much of that money goes to bust pot users and prosties?
Legalize, regulate, and tax… and free up law enforcement to go after the REAL criminals…
The net shift in cash could save the country in the long run…
MBunge
I believe that whoring is both legal and regulated in Mexico. How’s that worked out as far as “empowering” Mexican sex workers and women in general?
Mike
Uloborus
@MBunge: ’bout the same way as all laws work for empowering people in a deeply corrupt and poverty-stricken country riddled with organized crime – organized crime that largely exists because of the economic pressures of America’s puritanism. Sex workers ain’t exactly the only ones on the end of that boot.
Uloborus
@Scott P.:
Yeah. Sorry, but your argument is TOO slippery slope. ‘Only in degree’ arguments quickly become ridiculous. The difference between having to work for a living and slavery is only one of degree. You’re still being forced to do something you don’t want. Prostitution is not inherently degrading, as sex worker activists, themselves often sex workers, have argued. Prostitution is degrading because of the way we treat them, and because its illegal status makes it a very, very bad job many women are forced to resort to and can’t get out of.
MattR
@burnspbesq:
He can start with Nevada and Rhode Island before making the trip across the pond.
MBunge
“organized crime that largely exists because of the economic pressures of America’s puritanism.”
Yes, because Heaven knows there is no such thing as European sex tourism. No, whenever you go to Mexico or any other place where women and children are being whored out, it’s only Americans you find there.
After all, it’s not like Germany (where whoring is both legal and regulated) announced this year that human trafficking crimes increased 70% there over the last 5 years and that the vast majority of that increase was due to women and girls forced into prostitution.
Oh, wait. Germany did announce that this year.
And it’s not like most of Australia’s sex industry operates underground, even though prostitution is legal there.
Oh, wait. It is like that.
Mike
cmorenc
Prostitution IS currently de facto legal in most US cities, even though de jure it remains formally illegal. Look in the yellow pages under “Escort Services” – nearly every one of these is, in fact, a booking agency for prostitutes where the quoted fee covers: a) the agency’s own service cut; b) transportation for the SW (sex worker) to and from the client’s hotel or residence ; c) modest basic fee for the SW’s presence. The SW’s real compensation is from a negotiated “tip”.
Escort agencies RARELY get much criminal enforcement attention from police, even though what they do is perfectly well-known, and when some reason to crack down on a particular agency or SW does occur, it’s trivially easy for an undercover agent to set up an arrest.
The reason police DO intermittently crack down on street prostitution isn’t mainly because of the sex trade itself, except sometimes they do so to palliate complaints from neighborhood residents (particularly if the nearby area is in the process of “gentrification”). RATHER, it’s because the reason most street-level prostitutes are in the business is to feed a drug habit, and sometimes to feed the drug habit of a no-account boyfriend or pimp. We’re not talking pot or hash, but hard drugs like meth, heroin, etc, and even the drugs would merely be an annoyance to the visuals and ambiance of a neighborhood if it wasn’t for the sociopathic, violent, predatory, threatening types of people typically involved in the hard drug trade.
IMOH decriminalization of BOTH prostitution AND drugs would be the better course. But nonetheless I do understand the practical context of current law enforcement against prostitution – it is to a minor extent due to pressure from prudish morality concerns of some citizens and the need for police to react to this political pressure. But police are hard-boiled practical folks, and it has more to do with the collateral problems they see coming with an open sex trade.
Hustler
Can we get a little more love for the pimps? It’s hard out here for a pimp.
Catsy
@Scott P.:
Pure ignorant bullshit. Prostitution is a service. There is no exchange of ownership, it is contract labor. By your definition physical therapists, acupuncturists, plumbers and thousands of other service industries involving physical labor are slavery.
Gods, that really was one of the stupidest things I’ve read on the internets this week, and that includes a GBCW flame war on Flickr and “news” articles on Sarah Palin’s tweets.
Brachiator
This is doubtful. I pointed out in E.D.’s original post that the Netherlands is trying to clamp down on the sex industry because legalization did not reduce the illegal trade at all. Norway is considering an interesting path, making it illegal to buy sex, but not sell it, trying to respect sex workers but still outlawing prostitution.
There is an interesting fallacy at work here that if you can keep an activity small-scale (farming, marijuana use, prostitution), then everything will be happy snappy. But if the demand for a product or service is high, whether it is legal or illegal, trying to keep it small-scale is utterly irrelevant.
@cmorenc:
Massage parlors are another example of this.
But the larger issue is that prostitution is more than street-level prostitution, and the majority of women in the business are forced into it.
And the drug use is sometimes a form of self-medication. The women do drugs to deaden themselves against the acts that they are forced to perform. But even when it is just to feed a drug habit, legalizing drugs would not reduce the incidence of prostitution.
superking
What the hell does this mean? The problem here is that “small-scale independent sex work” is often the same thing as the “sex-power industry.”
You’re talking in wildly over broad terms because there is no actual good way to legalize prostitution.
Prohibiting prostitution is not the problem and is among the more effective ways to ensure that the “sex-power industry,” whatever that means, is as diminished as possible.
If you could describe an effective prostitution legalization scheme, I would be more inclined to side with you, but you haven’t done that yet.
superking
@Brachiator:
Hey Brach, I’m glad there is at least one other person on this side of this debate. I’m utterly stupified by these simplistic fantasies about the legalization of prostitution, and you’re much more articulate on the point than I am.
Part of the problem is that the pro-legalization people seem to think that legalizing drugs and prostitution are analogous when that really isn’t the case. At a minimum, drug use nominally involves one person, but I think you could argue other differences as well. More importantly, I think it’s worth pointing out that just because an activity is transactional in nature doesn’t mean it should be legalized.
JohnR
@superking:
I think you might want to consider that for a moment. “effective” would be just passing a law saying “prostitution is now legal”. I suspect that you’re looking for a word that means something a little different than “effective”.
Anyway, yeah, I agree that simple fairy-dust “legalize it and we all get ponies” arguments don’t really take into account the truly amazing ability of people to twist and warp anything into a bottomless cesspit of criminal depravity. On the other hand, prohibition has never served to stop anything; it just makes it more profitable for the organizers and more horrible for (in this case) the low-level ‘product’. Legalization isn’t enough – regulation is essential, and even then you’ll still have plenty of filth. Don’t forget that there’s an awful lot of human trafficing that has nothing to do with sex. If there’s money to be made, somebody will figure out how to do it illegally and immorally, no matter how legal the industry itself happens to be.
The simple answer seems to me to be legalize it and regulate it at least as well as we regulate energy resource exploitation. And accept the fact that there’s going to be a fair bit of criminal behavior involved. After all, there’s criminal behavior involved with something as wholesome as yard sales. Just last year, for example, I got cheated at my church’s holiday bazaar. I don’t figure prostitution has a better chance of staying clean.
MBunge
“On the other hand, prohibition has never served to stop anything”
That’s not true, unless you literally mean a complete and total stop. Prohibition, for example, did result in a significant decline in the drinking of alcohol in America. The cost of that decline was just a tiny bit too high, but it was still achieved.
Mike
Catsy
@superking:
Speaking of over broad terms, that’s a rather sweeping statement of absolute knowledge. Support your assertion.
Again, this is argument by assertion. All I’m hearing from you are a lot of statements that need to be prefaced by “I think” or “my opinion is that” in order to be truthful.
See JohnR’s response below.
The biggest problem I have with opponents of legalizing sex work is that most of them–you included–start with the assumption that legalization means telling everyone to go out and sell sex and they’ll get a pony instead of indentured servitude. In reality, pretty much everyone with a functioning brain who’s in favor of legalization recognizes that the industry would need to be regulated at least as much as any other service industry where the unregulated practice would open the door to widespread abuse and risk to consumers and workers. Moreover, most not only recognize this but are in favor of such regulation on its own merits because it would improve working conditions and the quality of the industry. I defy you to find a pro-legalization advocacy group whose position boils down to “legalization and a pony” absent any sort of regulatory regime to mitigate abuse and risk.
IOW, you’re beating the shit out of a straw man here. Congratulations, you’ve asserted that legalizing sex work absent any kind of regulation or licensing regime would not improve the situation. Fission mucking accomplished. Now try addressing the arguments that people are actually making.
superking
@JohnR:
I like the way you put your argument, John.
This is true of every criminal activity. As I argued in a previous thread, prohibition doesn’t stop murder or speeding, but they’re both still illegal. Simply saying that prohibiting prostitution doesn’t prevent it doesn’t gain you any ground.
This is the problem: no one has a good regulation scheme in mind. Again, as argued in a previous thread, regulation means that there are still going to be penalties involved for violating the regulations. It is not going to be the case that prostitutes will simply comply with the regulations. You’re going to need government agencies to follow up and impose penalties for failure to comply. In that way, legalize-and-regulate does nothing more than change the form of the punishment for prostitution.
For what it’s worth, that government oversight will require, at some point, government agents following prostitutes around to make sure they don’t have sex with people. That really is what it will amount to.
This is my favorite part because we’ve just seen two examples of how effective our resource extraction regulation is–the Big Branch Mine and Deepwater Horizon. And remember that MMS got in trouble two years ago because its agents were being bribed by industry officials with sex and drugs. What could a prostitute possibly bribe a government agent with?
superking
@Catsy:
see my response above.
Tim in SF
“What’s needed here isn’t an exception for the right sort of people—we need to change the laws that govern prostitutes. ”
Wow, Mistermix, I think you entirely missed the point.
Craigslist doesn’t deserve special exemption. They don’t deserve special treatment.
And you know what? They don’t need special treatment. The law is on their side.
You need to learn about CDA 230 before you spout more nonsense. Here’s an easy basic overview of the issue.
Brachiator
@JohnR:
But the plain fact is that in places where prostitution is legal and regulated, the impact on the illicit trade is minimal.
In the US, prostitution is legal in some counties in Vegas. And yet, the legal houses are kinda ramshackle, and the workers there are kinda sad, even with increasing numbers of women who are working there because of the bad economy (see, for example, The Family Prostitute).
I don’t have much of a beef with Craigslist or consensual prostitution. But the bottom line is that prostitution is much less consensual than people want to acknowledge. It is a brutal business based on supplying a product to the customer.
And there is this: A few years back, doing a paper for an ethics class, I ran across a thing called the World Prostitution FAQ. I didn’t take it to be a statistically reliable sample of the sex industry. But I do pay attention to people freely writing about their experiences. So, there was a lot of practical info (where the red light districts were, protocol, etc). Not much bragging.
But the disturbing thing was how one could easily discern situations where the prostitute was drugged, barely functional, mentally disturbed, or clearly coerced, and yet the poster ignored anything unpleasant, ignored the prostitute’s often squalid condition or circumstances, and went ahead and did the deed, because erections have no conscience. Equally disturbing was how often the poster asserted the clearly preposterous claim that “I think she liked me.” Even when it’s clearly a monetary transaction, it is noteworthy that the men writing here still wanted some social connection.
JohnR
@superking:
Nah. That’s not at all what it will amount to. Not to get personal, but that’s a ridiculous argument, unless I’m being more dense than normal and missing some subtle “LOL” sign. 1. We’re not talking about stopping people from selling sex, and 2. When have regulators for anything ever ‘followed people around’ to check on them? We see safety people once or twice a year at most, and we’re pretty tightly regulated when it comes to safety.
Anyway, my comment about “at least as well as” was meant with just the merest, slightest soupcon of tongue in cheek. Regulation is always inefficient and somewhat ineffective. It’s just not practical to tightly control human behavior en masse – all you can do is to reduce the bad stuff and encourage the good stuff. Look at traffic regulations. There is a difference, though, between regulation and non-regulation, just as there’s a difference between prohibition and unrestricted legality.
What we have right now and what we want to have are different mixtures of bad things and desirable things. Stuff like freedoms, costs, benefits and side-effects (both medical and psychological), money-flow (who gets the geld?) and what gets done with the loot (Golden Rule time – whoever has the gold makes the rules). Policy is about reducing the cost/benefit ratio in some way, while trying not to increase the cost/benefit ratio in some other way. It’s all trial and error, and gets much harder when you throw out tradition and other historical lessons so you have to do it de novo reach time. Toss in all the (shall we say, “unworldly”) belief systems that people have about how other people do or should behave, and it’s no wonder that you’ve got idiots like libertarians and Beckists. Simple one-size-fits-all, Procrustean answers are easier than thinking.
HyperIon
@bob h wrote: I am visiting Buenos Aires, where prostitution seems to be everywhere, yet it is all out of sight, and offers no affront to the public.
How can it be everywhere, yet all out of sight AND no affront to the public?
JohnR
@ Brachiator, yeah – you’ve got a point; perhaps even a good point. But to take isolated points in the US as evidence of anything, when the entire country runs on a different system is a bit dicy. Still, we have what we have, and it may not be possible to achieve anything close to good, let alone ideal. We’re only human, after all. I tend to err on the side of greater allowance rather than greater criminalization, but every rose has its thorns, to coin a phrase.
Oh, and I agree about the status of many (most?) low-level prostitutes. The situation for them is often terrible. I don’t see criminalizing prostitution as terribly helpful to correcting that, though.
L2P
“How is selling the service of having sex intrinsically different from selling the service of giving a massage (an actual massage, not a euphemistic one) or being a caregiver for someone who can’t go to the bathroom by themselves? All three kinds of work involve bringing one’s body into intimate physical contact with a client. There is more physical risk involved in sex than the other jobs, but that risk can be mitigated and it’s not as dangerous as lots of other professions we allow people to pursue.”
This is a good point, but it’s a good point because prostitution is a problem that can’t get resolved at the level of college dorm-room arguments.
Unlike other personal care industries, prostitution, as it is and always has been practiced, generally is linked with crime, kidnapping, drug abuse, violence, and the gradual degradation of the neighborhoods it tends to get associated with. It is possible to have legalized regimes, but very difficult. So difficult that no one really has a good way to make it work without ending up with those problems.
Just the land use issues with prostitution make it virtually impossible to legalize in the US. Where’s the legal red light district going to be, exactly? Next to Disneyworld? Out of the prostitute’s home? In any hotel? You think anybody with a kid is going to be cool with that?
Non-Existent Patricia
@L2P: Why not start with the land use restrictions already in place for businesses like strip clubs and massage parlors?
Non-Existent Patricia
@Brachiator: Do you think the conditions in the legal houses in Vegas have anything to do with the virtual monopoly on legal prostitution these places hold? Say, I want (for lack of a better word, I don’t think many people grow up wanting to be prostitutes) to be a prostitute but I want to do it legally because I assume (perhaps wrongly) that the conditions will be better. I have very limited choices in workplace environment and there is no incentive for the owners of the environment to improve the conditions. I don’t know that this would change if prostitution were legal everywhere, but it could be one explanation for the conditions in legal houses. Another explanation could be that, as a profession, it tends to attract the desparate and the desparate are less likely to argue for improvement in conditions.
Nutella
@Brachiator:
What is noteworthy is that the men writing there pretended to want/have some social connection while very carefully structuring the transaction so that there was no social connection.
Johns are sleazy scum and even sleazier when they pretend they’re not.
Brachiator
@JohnR:
No, it’s that I get tired of repeating myself, and a little frustrated that people want to approach prostitution as a philosophical issue, instead of looking at the reality. In my replies to E.D.’s original post, I posted some links related to prostitution worldwide. I use the US as an example, but not as my primary basis of comparison. You can go back to the original post and review these comments.
I noted that the illicit trade flourishes even where prostitution is legal, and that trafficking and cruelty toward women increased in some of these countries despite efforts to heavily regulate the industry. I noted that countries which previously had liberal laws relating to prostitution are rethinking them, most notably Sweden, Norway and the Netherlands, because regulation did not reduce the problems associated with the illicit trade. Again, here are some of the dismal statistics, which also indicate how the sex trade is a global business.
And in trying to be fair, I noted that New Zealand seemed to have a successful sex worker trade with fewer problems and more worker control, but even the authorities there noted that New Zealand’s relative isolation made it harder for large organized criminal elements to get a strong foothold, so that country may be a special case, and other countries might not be able to follow their example.
I understand what you say here, but it has little to do with the reality of prostitution. Another poster noted that drug use and prostitution are not the same. People who use drugs are doing their own thing and primarily harm themselves if they over-indulge or become addicted.
There is consensual prostitution, but the largest and worst part of the industry is based on pimps, madams and panders coercing or forcing women (and children) into sex work. This is the case not only with street-level hooking, but also brothels and some supposed high end trade as well.
Street level prostitution is just more visible. This has nothing to do with the problems prostitutes face.
There is also this, which relates to the human side of prostitution. Some years ago, I did some tax returns for a South Korean woman. From various clues, I figured out that she had been, maybe still was a sex worker. But I treated her with courtesy and respect, and she sent some of her friends to my office as well. I noticed something about my original client and one of her friends. They were very pretty women, but if you looked closely, past the makeup, you could see that at some point the bones in their cheeks and chin had been broken and repaired.
Every now and then, I still think about these ladies and wonder whether this damage had been done by a pimp or a customer.
Superking
John,
Your response just again makes my point that no one has ever laid out an effective legalization scheme. I hope you’ll realize that By saying “legalization” I wasn’t suggesting that it should simply be without regulation. Legalization requires some form of oversight because ther are plenty of negative consequences that can flow from prostitution as you and catsy point out.
In order to have an effective regulatory scheme, your going to have to identify those consequences and explain how you will prevent them through a combination of penalties and the intervention of government agents. What you’re saying is that your industry sees a rergulator once or twice a year. Do you think that will be effective for stopping the spread of STIs? In the case of prostitution, a once or twice a year checkup would effectively create an unregulated industry.
If you want to actually stop the spread of STIs, you have to have a mechanism for ensuring that infected prostitutes won’t further spread their infections. How will you do that without following them around in some way or other to monitor their behavior?
You’re exactly right that it’s not practical to tightly control human behavior. The point you’re missing is that regulation of legal prostitution is actually less practical than simply outlawing it. Prohibition is a form of regulation. And it happens to be easy to enforce, even if it does not actually prevent the activity.
I think we both agree that we can’t expect full compliance under either prohibition or legalization, but I simply can’t comprehend why you think regulation is the simpler system.
mrmike
@L2P: Just the land use issues with prostitution make it virtually impossible to legalize in the US. Where’s the legal red light district going to be, exactly? Next to Disneyworld? Out of the prostitute’s home? In any hotel? You think anybody with a kid is going to be cool with that?
Seems to work in England for the most part.
[eta: Not that they don’t have their own issues with trafficking and organized crime in the business, I was merely saying that many escorts in England have punters visit in residential areas or hotels and there doesn’t seem to be a huge outcry about it. My knowledge is arguably all second hand from newspapers and the like, so take it with a grain of sand.]
JohnR
@Nutella:
Hey!
@superking:
That’s probably because I don’t. It’s not. I don’t even know whether it’s more practical. “Simpler” systems are often not, or have greater drawbacks than the “more complicated” systems they’re supposed to be preferable to. Yes, regulation would be a problem – hell’s bells, regulating anything is a problem. I’m saying that, considering the problems associated with outright prohibition (which may, as was suggested earlier, reduce the obvious problem, but at the cost of increasing the power and wealth of the criminal sponsors among other social ills), regulating a legal business, even poorly and sporadically, may be better than not regulating a huge “underground” business. (My high-school essays always came back with lots of red ink “Run-on Sentence!” marks on them. I still don’t know what she meant.) There’s not a great deal of evidence to help us with this either way, although Brachiator suggests that the bulk of the evidence is against it. He may be right; it may be impossible to treat prostitution in the same way we treat sub shops. It might be an intractable problem. The situation as it presently exists, however, is very, very bad, as Brachiator himself points out. How long has prohibition been tried and is this is the best we can get?
Personally, I feel the same way about allowing women to vote – on the one hand, the world has certainly gone downhill since we let women vote (_obvious_ cause/effect, there, right?), but on the other hand well, actually they still get out in the streets all the time protesting stuff, so I guess that argument doesn’t fly. I’m sure somebody can come up with a positive for that…
superking
@JohnR:
That’s fine. I think you’ve hit the point here:
The problem, as I see it, with the pro-legalization crowd is that they tend to assume that prostitution is analogous to drug use/dealing and really drug use/dealing is like alcohol. Alcohol is effectively regulated, therefore drugs can be effectively regulated. Prostitution is like drugs, and it’s transactional, so there’s going to be a “market” and it can be regulated.
I don’t find anything convincing in that argument. Effective regulation of prostitution is as much a fantasy as believing that legalization with no regulations will solve the problem.
I’d be happy to have a discussion about how to mitigate the consequences of prostitution for women engaged in it. Brachiator in one of his posts above mentions a move in Norway to legalize selling sex but not buying it. That seems like an interesting solution, but we could do other things as well. We could, for example, lessen the jail time or create systems where women convicted are placed into a more beneficial system. What I mean is, we could set up a system to help prostitutes find another way to survive and use the arrest/conviction as a point of intervention. Sort of like drug rehab. We could also allow prostitution to be more readily expunged from criminal records so that former prostitutes don’t have to disclose it to potential employers when they want to find another way to make money.
There are a ton of things we can do to protect women and lessen the negative impact in their lives that don’t have to happen in the context of a legalization/prohibition debate. I’m for helping people who need help and I’m for making sure that people who make mistakes can fix their lives.
But I still just think its silly to believe that we’ll achieve those things by legalizing prostitution and treating it as any other market. I see that you’re not being absolutist in your position, and I don’t mean to keep bashing the point.
goatchowder
One thing at a time. First, let’s finish legalizing marijuana (as California seems about to do). Once everyone sees that legalizing it doesn’t destroy the republic, we can get to work on legalizing prostitution too.
Really, if it’s a choice what you do with your own body, why can you not have the choice of renting it?