A few, but only if they are exceptionally goodlooking, and only if they sell themselves to gay men. Women almost never will pay for sex.

That is essentially the gist of what we are talking about and applies to a lot more than just prostitution. And, by God, it makes sense. If you aren’t hurting anyone, why should what you’re doing be illegal, and why does it benefit society to make that thing illegal?

Chances are pretty good that you’ll find a net detrminet to society in a lot of cases – for example, the criminalization of prostitution has made a lot of girls who are being coerced, etc, afraid to go to the authorities for help. I fail to see how this benefits society. Another example – how many good, productive individuals who could be working and producing and making something of themselves have essentially become drains on society because they are in prison for smoking some weed?

The same is not true of working-class women. Such women rarely have the opportunity of a privileged marriage or of professional training. They might “choose” prostitution faute de mieux, but that’s coercion even if we call it a choice.

That’s not a useful definition of “coercion” – I am “coerced” to do any work at all because I have to eat.

The one thing I have to laugh about all of this that seldom gets brought up (and I especially thought of it after Maggie’s post about women and emotions on her blog) – look at how much men will SPEND on sex!

How many men can make a living of any kind, much less a really GOOD living, offering sex for sale? That woman CAN sell sex to men for such high prices tells a lot of things about the natural “coercion” applied to men.

No, that doesn’t usefully fit the definition of “coercion” either – that was kind of the point.

But that analogy about men on the raft and women in the ocean? Yeah, it leaves out the tremendous sexual driven-ness in the vast majority of men. Who’s taking advantage of whom in the prostitute/john scenario?

Everyone must stand up for everyone else’s Right to do as they please so long as they are not trespassing upon another’s Right to do as they please, and their Right to agreeably interact with one another. Or you will be divided and enslaved—even if you believe yourself free.

Your contention that some women are forced into prostitution by circumstances not under their control is just another attempt to portray all prostitution as coerced.

You misunderstand me, Dave. I’m a fang-and-claw feminist; I don’t object to prostitution, I object to coercion. I object just as much to a woman being coerced into becoming a physics professor or orchestra conductor as a prostitute. I object to contrived filtering, especially the class-based kind that permeates our culture.

My point is that all too often there is no “person using the force”. The force is inbuilt to the system: the filtering process itself is the force, and those of us who profit by the system are the ones using it. But the fact that it’s diffuse and invisible doesn’t make it okay.

Women from privileged backgrounds rarely get coerced into prostitution. They often get coerced into dynastic marriages, or professional careers, but if they go into prostitution, it’s rarely because they’d no real alternatives.

The same is not true of working-class women. Such women rarely have the opportunity of a privileged marriage or of professional training. They might “choose” prostitution faute de mieux, but that’s coercion even if we call it a choice.

10% sounds huge to my (admittedly very uninformed) ears, so I’d be very interested in seeing where the figure comes from.

But, the person committing the crime in that case is not the hooker and it’s not the customer. It’s the person using the force. Their is no virtue in making criminals out of everyone who sells or buys sex in order to save (or rescue) those who are forced into it.

Your contention that some women are forced into prostitution by circumstances not under their control is just another attempt to portray all prostitution as coerced. It’s a bogus argument for a number of reasons. As I already said, it’s idiocy to criminalize someone for engaging in an act that you contend they are being forced into. Secondly, for women who have so few options that they turn to prostitution, what good are you doing by removing that option from them as well? Finally, who gets to decide whether they are being coerced and need to be saved? Shouldn’t that be the choice of the woman involved?

Of course, as it is now, we will never know how many women are really coerced because, by criminalizing it, we give women a huge incentive to claim they were forced into it even if they weren’t, so as to get more lenient treatment (“Give us the name of your pimp and we’ll let you go”).

There are virtually no arguments for criminalizing prostitution that don’t collapse on even the most superficial examination. This tells me that the real motives for outlawing prostitution have nothing to do with the reasons we keep hearing.

How do you factor in the reality that certain people have less control over their own lives than other people have? And that “force” need not be brute force?

As I noted in my previous post, it wasn’t all that long ago that opportunities for women were heavily restricted by law and custom, and a whole array of societal forces were brought to bear on women to ensure that we conformed.

For many women, the highest-paying work available was prostitution. The other paying jobs that women could get -teaching, nursing, retail clerking, light factory work, etc- paid very poorly, often not even enough to live on. Of course, the lower ranks of the prostitution trade –populated by the older women, the less-attractive, the less-skilled– also paid poorly, so the choice was not an easy one even for those women who didn’t feel terrorised by the thought of losing social acceptance.

Yet the other major option, marriage, imposed its own restrictions: a married woman became a cross between property and a non-adult. A married woman couldn’t refuse her husband sex, and if he took her by force, she couldn’t charge him with rape: it was her duty to give in to him whenever he wanted her to.

There was a lot of coercive force involved in that setup, but none of it was personal or actionable, or even very visible. It was “just the way things are”. And women were the ones who paid the price. Much the same coercion goes on today, just a little more diffuse and obfuscated.

I see no contradiction between that short and sweet statement of principle and the equally short,sweet and valid statement that anyone who forces another person to provide any services for money, including sexual services, has committed a grave crime and deserves to suffer the full weight of the law. Nor do I see any contradiction between the statement that consenting adults should face no impediments to their purchase or sale of sexual services, if they decide to do that, and the statement that anyone who has sex with people under the age of consent for money has committed a serious offence.

In fact, it seems obvious to me that trying to outlaw sex work provides the best way to discourage sex workers from reporting coercion or other crimes of violence against them. Likewise, criminalizing the purchase of sexual services discourages people who might notice or know something about a crime against a sex worker from coming forward. So repealing laws against the purchase and sale of sexual services by consenting adults not only does not contradict the goal of protecting sex workers from crimes of violence, it actually serves that goal.

So far, I suspect most of us agree, but that leads to a question: why spend time of efforts to attack concern about human trafficking as a so-called “moral panic”. If anyone uses a legitimate concern about crimes of violence as an excuse to try to criminalize the nonviolent sale or purchase of sexual services, surely it should suffice to point out that criminalizing sex work has not made the workers any safer. Arguing that estimates of violent crimes involving sex work may contain exaggerations has no relevance: any crime of violence against anyone, anywhere, calls for exposure and justice.

Excellent post Maggie.

#28 – You asked for a pirate whore; voila!

This sums it up well enough that it deserved to be repeated.

Nothing useful to add, just a funny bit of particularly trivial trivia.

During that same period, the opportunities for women to have a life of our own choosing were few. All except marriage and prostitution required the appearance of chastity. Marriages required children, and the only acceptable marital sex was straight missionary position for procreation only. Men were presumed to have animal “needs” that no decent woman would consider trying to cater for. Women were expected to have no needs at all other than a responsible husband and a lot of children.

Which is how brothels and prostitutes came into it: priest-driven societal lunacy.

I’m old enough to remember, as a then-married woman with three kids, going into a pharmacy in the US to buy contraception and being told, with a hostile sneer, that they didn’t sell “anything like that”. Lunacy.

It’s become class-based now; not so much in an economic sense, but in a “what kind of person has to pay for sex?” sense. The enthusiastic college football players paying a visit to the Chicken Ranch in “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas” have been replaced by the stutterring, socially awkward Pruitt Taylor Vince paying for a handjob in “Monster.” I obviously rely too heavily on movies for historical information, but it seems that at one time, engaging the services of a prostitute was something many respectable men were expected to do once in a while (or at least once in their lives). Now, like smoking, it’s become more associated with stigmatized groups, and people are far more comfortable coming down hard on it.