But, when women are stripping and they use the strip joint to arrange dates, does the management take a cut? Yes, IME. Will they beat the crap out of you if you try to arrange dates and cheat them out of their cut? Also yes. In third world countries do people sell their underage children into sex slavery at brothels? Yes. They also sell them into sex slavery into the institution of marriage. Both these things suck, but the first is way worse. Are prostitutes and strippers all formerly sexually abused kids? Uh, only all the ones I’ve ever known. I think of a good friend who would come home from the strip club, do up a bag of heroin, and take a 2 hour long bath, scrubbing in there so hard she came out pink as a sour cherry. That did not look good, psychologically, despite her protestations that she was a ‘strong woman,’ and it was ‘her body,’ and shit like that.

So, probably this is a fine job for some people, and it doesn’t upset them. But a lot of other people do it despite serious qualms. Here what is needed, perhaps, is societal approval of their choice, so that they are not shamed and feel validated in their work, and police who care about the prostitutes and their rights (yeah, dreamin’ here). Honestly, although I am too old for it now, if I had to support myself back in my 20s, to either work on some assembly line or sell my sexy body, I would have gone for the making money on my back. Let’s not talk about my childhood history, OK?

I asked about that 1.5% number for a friend who doubted it. I gave him your response, and he replied, “Please point out to Maggie for me that the study she cites regarding child prostitutes in the US says 16% have dealt with pimps (not just “heard of pimps” as she repeatedly and falsely claims) and nearly all of them reported the pimps were in some way violent. So I’d say her 1.5% figure is closer to the approx. 50% of streetwalkers who have pimps, which mean 7% of prostitutes overall.

Yes, this makes pimps a much less significant force in the overall sex trade than the popular imagination would have it, but pimps are apparently still common in the streetwalking subculture, and so hardly the mythical beast she claims (in fact, that study has many anecdotes of pimps every bit as bad as they were in the Pam Grier movies).”

Thanks for your activism on behalf of women. I’ve always enjoyed that riot grrrl brand of feminism that rejects the de-sexualization of 2nd wave feminism. I love that rather than deny differences between men and women, these girls embrace the differences, and rejoice in the power of their sexuality.

Can you lay out the evidence in more detail?

#10 – Weirdly, no. For most of human history prostitution was viewed as a way to AVOID adultery; as Cato the Younger expressed it, “Blessed be they as virtuous, who when they feel their virile members swollen with lust, visit a brothel rather than grind at some husband’s private mill.” Prostitution laws first started to appear (as #8 pointed out) during the syphilis scare of the 16th century, but they didn’t really catch on and died away again until the late 19th, when they were sold as part of the same “social purity” package which gave us laws against alcohol, drugs, masturbation, homosexuality, etc.

#12 – No. Exploitation is driven by illegality; the greater (and more arbitrary) the illegality, the greater the opportunity for exploitation. Prohibitionists are fond of claiming that exploitation increases under decriminalization, but mounds of data from New Zealand, New South Wales and (to a far lesser extent) Germany prove they are lying.

#30 – I calculated it in my first column on pimps; it’s derived from American, English & French figures but a recent survey of Cambodian sex workers gave a similar figure, 2%. Nutshell version: Pimps are largely unknown outside of streetwalking, and streetwalkers are no more than 15% of all whores. Fewer than 50% of streetwalkers have pimps, and more than half of those who do control the pimp rather than the other way around. So, roughly 20% of all streetwalkers work for a pimp (rather than him working for her), and only about half of those relationships are abusive. 10% of 15% = 1.5%.

Ban prostitution to stop women exploitation.
Ban drugs to stop addicts.
Ban weapons to stop violence.
Ban trans fats to stop people from getting fat.

Well we banned all those things. Are female exploitation, drug addiction, violence, and fat people still around? Yep, as a matter of fact getting arrested, jailed, and generally treated like second class citizens seems to have made them rather worse off than before.

Well the only thing to fix that is more prohibitions!

You can’t control bad behaviors by destroying legal goods and services. You can’t control peoples behavior in a general sense, for that matter. The prohibitionist believes he has a right and a duty to control other people, for their own good of course. It becomes all the more obvious that their only real concern is power over others when the data and common sense illustrate the failure of their policies and yet they go on supporting them. Anyone with the slightest bit of empathy would not jail an addict and call it treatment.

(Yes I realize we have yet to start jailing people for being fat, but please be patient. Bloomberg and his cronies need time to work through the details)

Banning missiles has stopped this from happening, seeing as how the last time someone wanted to crash an airliner used much different means.

Same goes for exploitation and your argument in comment 11. Everyone has the potential do be exploited. To say that we need to address the significant argument of possible exploitation of women and children makes it sound like we don’t already do that now. It’s not like prostitution becomes legal and now rape is suddenly ok or becomes more likely to occur. It was wrong before and would still be wrong if we had legalized sex workers. We do we need to address a crime that has already been addressed?

That’s a good point. I believe the distinction, legally, is that a porn actor or actress is paid for a performance, not for sex. An explicit agreement to perform particular sex acts is never made.The star could dance a jig or do card tricks in front of a camera, and would still be fulfilling the terms of the contract.

I once had an acquaintance who did tech work for porn sites. The further irony to what you describe is that, at least in California, while it’s illegal to pay someone to have sex with you, it’s perfectly legal to pay other people to have sex with each other.

Speak for yourself.

Stealing food when starving may still be theft but most people would look on that situation with sympathy.

Rape, no matter how horny someone is, would not elicit the same response. No one has ever died due to lack of orgasm.

There’s no constitutional difference between a handgun, a 100 round magazine on an assault rifle and a surface to air missile, at least by the modern interpretation of the 2nd amendment. Yet only the last one is banned. Why? to prevent a greater evil – the periodic loss of an airliner full of people.

Don’t confuse “legal” with “moral”. My morality would proscribe all extramarital sex, but that doesn’t mean I think governments should have the power to step in and stop it whether money is involved or not, just as I don’t believe government should use police powers to stop people from using or abusing any substance.

This. Exactly, perfectly THIS.

I like a lot of your stuff, Maggie, but on this one, your argument continues to ignore inconvenient facts.

It goes beyond that — every single person in the the organ transplant process profits. Just not the donor.

This whole discussion comes off like an effort to reduce that magical sunset behind the Golden Gate to 8 bit RGB values that we can compute. Somethings are just mystical and we’ll spend our whole lives, no thousands of years of humanity, understanding and sorting them out. I personally don’t have a problem with different pursuits of understanding in this realm so I’ll leave it to others to explain the wisdom of a ban on prostitution but I will say this: The reason I don’t choose that route is that I need to be laid once about as much as I need one hit of heroin. (at the rates I think a lay goes for, I’d be getting it about quarterly).