In the comments the other day, I suggested that legalization of prostitution would be an argument I’d entertain if I was convinced that a legalization scheme was concocted with the improvement of the lives of prostitutes in mind. Thanks to Nicholas Kristof for stepping in and shining some light on the subject. Romanticizers of prostitution will not be pleased with the facts, so maybe you should just skip over this if your illusions are important to you:
One response would be: Prostitution is inevitable, so we might as well legalize and regulate it. That’s a pragmatic argument that I used to find persuasive. If brothels were legalized and inspected, I believed, then we could uproot child prostitution and reduce AIDS and sexually transmitted infections.
I changed my mind after looking at the experiences of other countries. The Netherlands formally adopted the legalization model in 2000, and there were modest public health benefits for the licensed prostitutes. But legalization nurtured a large sex industry and criminal gangs that trafficked underage girls, and so trafficking, violence and child prostitution flourished rather than dying out.
As a result, the Netherlands is now backtracking on its legalization model by closing some brothels, and other countries, like Bulgaria, are backing away from that approach.
In contrast, Sweden experimented in 1999 with a radically different approach that many now regard as much more successful: it decriminalized the sale of sex but made it a crime to buy sex. In effect, the policy was to arrest customers, but not the prostitutes.
Some Swedish prostitutes have complained that the policy reduced demand and thus lowered prices, while forcing sex work underground. But the evidence is strong that the new approach reduced trafficking in Sweden, and opinion polls show that Swedes regard the experiment as a considerable success. And the bottom line is that if you want to rape a 13-year-old girl imported from Eastern Europe, you’ll have a much easier time in Amsterdam than in Stockholm.
I propose that the problem with prostitution is unique not because sex as a service is unique exactly. I think that the problem with legalization schemes is that prostitution is more, for the majority of the customers, about buying the opportunity to treat a woman like utter trash. In order for prostitution to be legal and yet still viable, the scheme either has to preserve the customer’s right to treat the prostitute like trash (which is why it works in Nevada, though it does the actual prostitutes little good), or an illegal side market of prostitution will flourish next to the legal one. In other words, if you have to be nice to the legal whores, a lot of johns will go to the illegal ones. Which is probably why Amsterdam got more, not less, child prostitution and trafficking when they legalized prostitution.
That’s why arguments about buying hamburgers, etc. are beside the point. I mean, it’s offensive to compare a person to a hamburger, but it’s also a distraction from the real issue. Prostitution is a unique labor market. Most labor markets, the value of the labor can be separated in some sense from the mistreatment of the workers. You hire someone to make widgets, and the struggles are over benefits, safety standards, etc., but at no point do the workers and the bosses struggle over whether or not widgets are to be made. But when degradation and harm are the work itself, struggling over labor standards becomes confusing.
Which is why I tear my hair out at the people who focus on the exceptions, like Kerry Howley arguing that prostitution is about women who love sex so much they want to make it a career. That sort of argument serves only one purpose—to shame people with serious questions about prostitution into not asking those questions for fear we’ll be labeled as prudes. Well, I’m not taking the bait. I love sex, but that doesn’t mean I’m willing to stand shivering in the rain in a tattered miniskirt dispensing blow jobs to assholes for $10 a pop, like the prostitutes in my old neighborhood would do. There’s probably a few high class hookers that fit the “love sex so much I do it for a career” model, and probably even more that are just really good looking women who figure it’s easy cash, even if they don’t have any illusions that it’s a great time having sex with the kind of assholes who pay for it. But even for argument’s sake, there’s a handful of women that have managed to scratch out a living charging guys for having the share and share alike sex that people who actually love sex tend to have—they’re so very much the exception that the fact that their stories drown out the exponentially more common stories of women who want out or women who don’t like the work, but do like the pay, that I’m suspicious of their place in the debate.
I’m all for the Swedish approach, with perhaps some of our wasted resources being used to actually enforce international standards against human trafficking. I think everyone agrees that the only senseless thing in the current War on something or other, which is scattershot, props up the very worst of the black market system, and doesn’t even come close to focusing on the well-being of the people in the sex trade.
After all, focusing on criminalizing this particular exchange while living so close to the strip club capital of the world (c’mon Houston, let it be true!) is a little like producing tons of anti-marijuana commercials that are in proximity to beer and liquor commercials.
Fair enough. I definitely think the last thing we need to do is throw prostitutes in jail. They’re either hurting no one or they’re victims. I can see why a lot of sex worker advocates prefer decriminalization to legalization, since the latter, as the post above indicates, is often about making life easier on men who enjoy exploiting women, and does little to help the workers. Decriminalization at least takes the fear of going to jail out of it, while not putting the state’s stamp of approval on a profession where misogyny is the point of it.
It’s been interesting to read commentary on the Spitzer case arguing that johns are rarely prosecuted, therefore Spitzer shouldn’t be prosecuted. My line of thinking has always been that johns are precisely the ones who should be prosecuted, but aren’t because to go after them threatens male privilege. It’s much easier to prosecute the women because demonizing them upholds male privilege. You see a similar dynamic at work with illegal immigration, where the immigrants themselves are demonized while it’s easy for businesses to hire and exploit them without penalty.
I don’t mind the Swedish approach either, and I look at the drug business the same way (albeit reversed): in most cases users shouldn’t have to deal with criminal charges. Distributers and producers, on the other hand…
Responsibility for the powerless, and benefits for the powerful. That’s the usual way these things work.
It isn’t just that. One other reason is that it’s easier to catch hookers than johns. Hookers, by the nature of the profession, have to advertise. Johns don’t. So if you want to round up the usual suspects for some publicity about doing something about prostitution, the sellers are a hell of a lot easier to find and identify than the customers.
If you’re doing a sting operation, same deal. An undercover cop posing as a hooker has to compete with the real hookers (and, of course, you have to have a cop willing to go undercover as a streetwalker), you pretty much need constant surveillance for the UC’s protection, so on and so forth.
Posing as a john? Run up to a prostitute, get the offer, they jump in the car, you turn the corner, drop them off with the arrest team, repeat.
That’s not to say johns get more sympathy from the authorities, because only an idiot would claim otherwise, but there are legitimate reasons why its easier to arrest hookers.
Sorry, that last sentence should read “…not that johns don’t get more sympathy…”
I’ve corresponded with two women who fit the “liked it so much I decided to make a career of it” model. Neither primarily did PIV sex work. Both quit. One said she found she couldn’t make a living doing only those things she was okay with doing.
When I consider public policy around prostitution, first I think about how many women there are who are not in that narrow top tier with other options; the problem that Herbert pointed out. Then I think that, in that top tier, at least my experience tells me that many will burn out and get out very fast. Then I think about legitimating the male sense of entitlement to rent a body to fuck.
So, I’m a Swedish Model proponent. The women at the top who want that work can work around any ban, and it can only help the women who want to get out that they cannot be criminally charged for the work they did.
Arrgh! Well, I assume people know what I meant to say.
Amanda, I wish you had waited a few hours to post this (though I really like the post). We were so, so close to hitting 400 comments down on the other thread, but I doubt we’ll make it now.
I highly recommend this article:
Prostitution, Trafficking, and Cultural Amnesia:
What We Must Not Know in Order To Keep the
Business of Sexual Exploitation Running Smoothly
by Melissa Farley
It’s very readable, full of stats on the backgrounds of people who enter prostitution, and points to possible solutions like Sweden’s. It tranformed my understanding of these issues!
It’s from the Yale Journal of Law & Feminism, 2006.
Keith, brothels get busted all the time, and those investigations are resource-intensive as they put an undercover inside a hostile building and require a raid team as well as surveillance. Meanwhile the mere fact that an officer posing as a prostitute needs to compete with prostitutes for clients does not mean that they can’t get plenty of johns. The real issue is that (1) law enforecement and prosecutors are sometimes more sympathetic to the johns and their families than the sex workers — especially cops, who so often abuse and rape sex workers; and (2) even if they were not, juries are more sympathetic to the johns, making the cases more likely to try and tougher to win. So the johns either get easy pleas, or ignored in favor of the slut-shaming worker prosecution.
As with almost all feminist issues in criminal justice, the technical system is secondary to the society as expressed through the system in the attitudes of law enforcement, prosecutors, judges and jurors. Real change is most available by changing the world the system operates in. We as a society have to see johns as the real criminals and sex workers as in a tough situation before the system will work that way.
I highly recommend this article:
Prostitution, Trafficking, and Cultural Amnesia:
What We Must Not Know in Order To Keep the
Business of Sexual Exploitation Running Smoothly
by Melissa Farley
It’s very readable, full of stats on the backgrounds of people who enter prostitution, and points to possible solutions like Sweden’s. It tranformed my understanding of these issues!
It’s from the Yale Journal of Law & Feminism, 2006.
Amanda,
What about a joint legalize, regulate and decriminalize approach? Hypothetically, if we could create a system where legal sex work would occur where there are rules that protect sex workers and provide them with tangible benefits like:
1. The sex workers involved are definitely over 18;
2. The doors are never locked;
3. The sex workers involved are given access to health care, job training and placement assistance, and educational resources;
4. The sex workers cannot be required to perform any service;
5. The sex workers involved can unionize;
6. The police are required to respond to complaints by sex workers; and most importantly
7. If you seek (not provide, but seek) sexual services outside the legal industry we throw your ass in jail for 6 months.
I recognize that we have a doctrinal difference of opinion. But I don’t think that means that no one who supports legalization does so without the improvement of the lives of prostitutes in mind.
Heh, well, if the thread is as much a lost cause as I suspect, it will continue to rage.
Perhaps for every failed law-enforcement initiative that involves commercial transactions:
prostitution
immigration control
the ‘Drug War’
(others)
…the stress should be shifted from one set of ‘perps’, one side of the transaction, to the other for more satisfactory results.
It’s never made (surface) sense to me busting illegal immigrant workers, when the farmer/boss was such an easier target. (Of course, the PTB aren’t actually SERIOUS about stopping that flow, they just want to cow the poor immigrants while the guys w/the money reap the benefits.)
I’m not sure I trust Kristof’s summary of the Netherlands. However, it is wrong to think any regulatory scheme will pick out all the problems that will arise as the result of it. Regulations have to adapt to circumstances. Kristof doesn’t say that the Netherlands is going back to criminalizing prostitution, or even decriminalizing - which one would expect if it were a massive failure. In contrast, he says merely that the Swedes are happy with their program - but I have a hard time believing they don’t have to deal with bad brothels and gangs as well. There’s no magic wand - there’s only constant adjustment. Either way, it would be a better system than the one that is in place in the U.S.
It is a libertarian wet dream to think, oh, let’s have legalization without regulation. That simply doesn’t work - as the financial markets have amply proven, recently.
I do think that if prostitution were legalized, it would have to be under the auspices of some kind of guild system - a sort of prostitutes AMA - for it to work.
And Amanda, don’t you find it rather irritating that the driver of this discussion is the resignation of that dickhead, Spitzer, than, say, the slaughter of seven prostitutes in Houston in November of last year, or the insane persecution of the D.C. Madame? I do.
The more I think about it, the more I think keeping it illegal to buy sex while making it legal to sell shifts the power dynamic in a way that helps compensate for the general misogyny of our culture. If the johns are the ones with something to fear, maybe they have an extra incentive to be respectful.
I also wonder if the reduced demand stems from the shift in that power dynamic. It’s less appealing to those men who want to own and degrade someone. If that segment of the customer base is smaller, that would be a good thing.
“I think that the problem with legalization schemes is that prostitution is more, for the majority of the customers, about buying the opportunity to treat a woman like utter trash.”
can’t draw that argument. Otherwise, since prostitution occurs everywhere, one has to conclude “a lot of women like being threated like trash”. Pretty absurd like?
I tend to think everybody makes rational economic decision. (ie. given all available options, an individiual think prostitution gives the optimal return. This include assuming all sort of risks. That on balance the return is good enough over the rist to continue the activities.)
btw. Kristoff mad some of the most idiotic foreign reportage I’ve ever read (NK, ID, IN, balkan.) That guy should be fired. (he also lied about Iraq war, btw. )
effing eyehole. I do not trust his writing period. (I cannot help but as, what’s his game, who is pulling string, etc)
I was always vaguely in favour of decriminalization of sex work until a long conversation I had with my brother in law. He is a police officer who worked for a while in “vice” and saw much of the way the system worked in action. He tended to work with street prostitutes, most of whom were once “higher-class call girls” (that is, those who work in hotels or homes) but got too old and ended up on the streets. He made a couple of points that really made me reconsider my stance on the issue:
1) And I’ve heard this one recently on blogs as well, those who want to regulate the industry tend to want to do so for the benefits of the johns, not the sex workers. And that’s how legalization and regulation generally play out: giving the johns and the pimps more power. It’s the johns that benefit from prostitution being out in the open, the pimps that benefit from the women having to register so their whereabouts can be tracked, the madams that benefit from sex work being restricted to brothels. Even the health regulations tend to be put in place in order to ensure those icky whores don’t pass on diseases to our fine upstanding male citizens.
2) Just because something has always happened and always will is a stupid reason to decriminalize it. My brother-in-law’s analogy is domestic violence, which has been around forever, will probably always be around, but is still wrong and therefore illegal. He pointed out that we’ve made great strides both in the legal and the social spheres in the last few decades, and decreased the incidence of domestic violence. Now prostitution is less objectively wrong, imo, but I still think the point stands.
I think I like the Swedish model the best. My brother-in-law also disagrees with that model, because he says the only women (and there are very few) he has seen leave the streets to start new lives used being arrested as a catalyst. I think there are better ways to help sex workers than law enforcement, but it requires social workers, not cops, to be the ones to interact with them on a daily basis.
One thing we definitely agreed on is that we have to work to make the usage of prostitution socially unacceptable. A lot of jurisdictions have had success with John schools, where men who have been caught buying can learn about the horrible conditions that lead women into sex work, and about the scars it leaves. Too many men actually delude themselves into thinking that using a prostitute is some kind of altruism. John school has a much lower recidivism rate than the justice system, at a lower cost.
“a lot of women like being threated like trash”. Pretty absurd like?
When you comprehend this truth, Grasshopper, you will begin the path to enlightenment.
Yeah yeah yeah–reminds me of the other co-libertarian, semi-economic rationales offered for, say, drug legalization, with the usual side result being:
1) Government lies when it says the revenue base would be great….
2) in the same breath the revenue base argument and legalization of dope is to help eliminate drug dependency…. Hmm
3) No one deigns to mention that in some segments of Amsterdam you can’t sit down in the park for all the damned needles lying around. Quite literally gone to pot.
People mention that Dad has his liquor and mom likes her cigarettes, but we all know the cat was well out of the bag on those issues long ago with little chance of banning them outright,–just making smokers stand outside at the most. The inverse of this is that we all know that had we known THEN what we know now, cigarettes and booze would have been nixed long ago.
It IS kinda a funny this retro reversion to the older feminist thinking on the topic. Some think prostitution is not only the oldest professino but the noblest, and it fosters “economic control” of female’s own bodily resources. Others think it a scam and an exploitation that if legalized would harm little doe-eyed school girls barely old enough to shave their moo-moos. Female empowerment? Or exploitation? Maybe the older madams are not getting royally screwed anymore economically since some of them drive Porsches?
Have yet to see any reference of how prostitution harms the society overall. Though no doubt it does.
One wonders from the Swedish model and similar locales that have high illegitimacy rates and divorce rates 60% over our own and 1/3 of all kids born out of wedlock if promiscuity (probably also admittedly encouraged in no small part by sumptious hand out economic goodies on the backs of others) is that much of a blessing.
Willing to bet Spitzer’s wife would have something to say on this.
OK, but then you’re still doing, at some level, what you decry in advocates for legal prostitution - i.e. tossing out some sex workers’ feelings on the matter as irrelevant in lieu of others’.
You’ve continually spoken here with the unshakable assumption that a person would only ever pay for sex out of a desire to treat a woman (men sell their bodies to men too, y’know) like utter trash. I’ve never paid for sex, and don’t intend to, but I see no reason whatsoever to believe that this is inherent to paying for sex. Those “high class hookers” which you acknowledge exist in some numbers wouldn’t be able to find themselves a living at all if this were the case. And if you acknowledge that they can exist, then that claim that “degradation is the work itself” falls flat.
And thus it doesn’t seem absurd that there could be a model for permitting legal purchase of sex - from providers, probably working independently, but with appropriate oversight from authorities in the name of security and health. People who wanted the exploitative sex you declare the norm would probably seek illegal prostitution outside of that model, and prosecuting people for buying sex in that fashion would make sense.
I want to add something mythago brought up that I hadn’t thought about before, in adding to my suspicions that legalization is often not about improving conditions for sex workers so much as making exploitation easier for johns. Legalization schemes usually involve having prostitutes get licenses under their real names, making it harder for them to get other jobs when they wish to get out. A bit of a back door trap to keep you in the work, but what happens when you get old enough that no one’ll pay you anymore?
BTW, where do some of you live where johns never get prosecuted? There’s been a few busts in my area recently where they nabbed a few dozen men each time via a Craigslist ad.
Dr. Confused: I can think of at least one way legalization would benefit prostitutes over johns: they would no longer have to accept rape and abuse from police officers.
Amanda: Like Ballast (I think), I wonder what evidence you have that “degradation and harm” of prostitutes is so prevalent that it has become the “product” they make and sell.
Is this part of the definition–that a man who pays for sex does this not because he wants sex, but to degrade and harm the sex worker? That is, women who take money for sex have by definition agreed to degradation and self-destruction?
Certainly some men pay for sex to degrade a woman–or at least because paying for sex gives him some control over the act he otherwise would not have. And even if paying prostitutes is like rape in this way, do you think the state should protect women who don’t mind doing this for money by taking away their agency?
Or is this an argument about the structure of society limiting agency for women in a way that makes it impossible for two people to make a prostitution transaction on equal terms?
If so, what about people who pay men for sex. Is this also about degradation and harm? Or does social structure somehow give men more power to exercise their agency by selling sex?
Just asking.
I think that a system similar to what Kristen is proposing above could work if street prostitution was defined as automatically outside the legal system and some sort of professional licensing system for sex workers was set up. In effect, street prostitution would be dealt with under the Swedish model, but it would still be legal to patronize businesses staffed by licensed professional sex workers.
We would also need to make sure that strong worker protections were in place for those businesses. The Nevada system is ridiculous because it restricts the rights of workers way too much. Your employer should never have the right to tell you what to do with your time when you’re “off the clock,” no matter who you work for.
I think I like the Swedish model the best. My brother-in-law also disagrees with that model, because he says the only women (and there are very few) he has seen leave the streets to start new lives used being arrested as a catalyst.
Part of the problem with letting cops arrest hookers is it means the hookers have to have sex with the cops for free to bribe them out of getting arrested. Cops are johns as well, basically. Which seems like a reason to address the issue as a crime for johns, but not prostitutes.
“In other words, if you have to be nice to the legal whores, a lot of johns will go to the illegal ones. Which is probably why Amsterdam got more, not less, child prostitution and trafficking when they legalized prostitution.”
100% correct. In my experience, men seeking prostitutes aren’t “lonely, sad johns” they’re self-obssessed adulteres and/or looking for something . . . shall we say forbidden and risky (to the women, primarily).
If required to go to a prostitute they have to treat well and still pay, they’ll seek out the illegal ones, because if they wanted to treat a woman nicely, they wouldn’t be out searching for a prostitute. Johns know how society views sex workers. They know they can pretty much get away with anything they do to sex workers. *
Decriminalization is the only thing that’s going to help the workers, imo.
*- I left out “high class call girls” because in the last 15+ years, I’ve met exactly four of them and all of them got out of the business after only a year or two. So, I haven’t the background data to make even assumptions about their treatment by johns.
i.e. tossing out some sex workers’ feelings on the matter as irrelevant in lieu of others’.
I’m not tossing out some in favor of others. I’m questioning why the vanishingly small minority of prostitutes should have exponentially larger voices that the vast majority. Answer: because they’re telling a lot of men what they want to hear.
You’ve continually spoken here with the unshakable assumption that a person would only ever pay for sex out of a desire to treat a woman (men sell their bodies to men too, y’know) like utter trash.
Oh, no, I admit that the Sad Unfuckable John does exist. But again, the stereotype that applies to 1% of customers is being utilized as a stand-in for the rest, who are more like Eliot Spitzer, who enjoys fucking and throwing prostitutes in jail. I will never say never. I just question the motives of people who focus on a teeny-tiny percentage of the transactions (sad unfuckable men getting the rare opportunity to have sex, because they paid for it from the hooker with a heart of gold) at the expense of talking about the vast majority of transactions, which are massive assholes who enjoy the feeling of having control over a woman they can treat however they like.
It’s like the anti-choicers who focus on late term abortions, and largely the mythological ones where a woman waltzes in the day before delivery to get an abortion because she changed her mind.
Interestingly, the idea that most prostitution is altruistic only comes up in these discussions. The rest of the time, people seem to accept that the “smack my bitch up” model is the dominant one.
For all those in favor of legalized prostitution: HOW problematical must an industry be before being banned? While the theoretical, utopian vision of prostitution may be superficially attractive, the way it actually plays out is so repugnant and so damaging to so many that I feel it continues to be necessary to outright ban it.
It’s the nuclear power of social structures. Great in theory.
If prostitution goes the decriminalization perhaps sex workers who are being abused by pimps and johns would feel more comfortable with coming forward and reporting the abuse. Then again, so many victims of abuse find it hard to come get the help they need and deserve. This is a difficult issue. I was wondering since this issue parallels the porn industry, since porn is more in the open these days has it been harder or easier to find the people involved in child pornography? Just a thought.
Answer: because they’re telling a lot of men what they want to hear.
And because they are privileged; often educated and often white; in a society that dramatically overrepresents the voice of privileged educated white women over poor women and women of color, and that dramatically overrepresents ceteris paribus the voices of men over women.
A nasty story in my town from a few years back: A group of cops were doing a prostitution sting. To keep it interesting, the cops had a competition going as to who could argue the woman down to the lowest price before busting them. It seems they didn’t actually have sex with the women, just humiliated them for their own amusement. I believe the lowest they got was one women who eventually was brow-beat into agreeing to $8 for PIV.
I remember once when bored with my ex-boyfriend, we were reading some forums, and for a laugh, someone posted a website where johns compared notes on various prostitutes. Being naive, I clicked over, having no idea what it would be like. Yeah, it wasn’t funny. Not too many sad, unfuckable johns. Mostly guys one upping each other with stories about who could get the prostitutes to do increasingly degrading things, how funny it is when you’re choking someone with your cock and she’s crying but has to keep going because you’re paying her, and stories about talking street walkers down from $7 for a blow job to $5. I think, prior to that, I really wanted to believe better about men who visited prostitutes. I’m an eternal optimist. But once in awhile, you have to accept that people have this dark side.
I have to admit, I think you’re right, in a sense. I don’t think people hire prostitutes so they can treat someone like trash, but I think once they do, they feel that they have rights to do what they want… which ends up amounting to the same thing.
It’s the same as the old crap about “I bought dinner and paid for the show, now you owe me something in return”, only he don’t actually have to pretend to be a decent human being during dinner and the show.
On the other hand, anti-prostitution laws end up harming the prostitute more than the customer, and I don’t like that.
And I also don’t like it when people can get into trouble for stuff that shouldn’t really be illegal.
Since domestic violence occurs everywhere, one has to conclude a lot of women like domestic violence.
Since rape occurs everywhere, one has to conclude a lot of women like being raped.
Since women earn less than men everywhere, one has to conclude a lot of women like earning less than men.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
“Being naive, I clicked over, having no idea what it would be like. Yeah, it wasn’t funny. ”
That’s only the tip of the iceburg. Help the cops fish a few women out of dumpster and you get to see just how much men truly do hate women.
Some canadian data (the number is old, but it gives some picture. There is also german reports. If you can read german)
http://24.85.225.7/lowman_prostitution/ProLaw/prolawcan.htm
Prostitution Law Reform in Canada
John Lowman, School of Criminology, Simon Fraser University To be published in an anthology celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Institute of Comparative Law in Japan, Chuo University. Edited by T. Shiibashi, forthcoming
This paper is a follow-up to an article on Canadian prostitution law published in the Comparative Law Review (Lowman, 1989a) that described the events leading up to the enactment in December 1985 of a new street prostitution control measure which prohibits communicating in a public place for the purpose of buying or selling sexual services. The paper concluded that the communicating law did not have the salutary effect its designers promised because they misdiagnosed the problems they were trying to solve.
With an additional eight years experience of the communicating law since that paper was written, and with the experience of two other new laws section 212(2), a separate offence for persons procuring or living on the avails of a person under 18 years of age; and section 212(4) which prohibits attempting to purchase or purchasing sex from persons under 18 this paper examines the way various interest groups have influenced prostitution law reform, and how those reforms have played out in law enforcement practice. I suggest that far from resolving the dilemmas facing Canadian legislators in the 1980s, the communicating law has made street prostitution more dangerous, and made the hypocrisy underlying the Canadian approach to regulating prostitution all the more problematic.
since prostitution occurs everywhere, one has to conclude “a lot of women like being threated like trash”. Pretty absurd like?
You know, you could read the link. But even if you don’t want to, here’s the relevant answer to the inquiry:
The irony is that the sad, unfuckable john myth always puts him in the room with a high class call girl. As a rule, these women cost a lot of money, and the guys who can shell it out aren’t likely to be such social misfits that they can’t get laid. Maybe a few really nerdy engineers? Or in some countries where respectable women are kept locked up, we’re seeing a flourishing sex trade that’s as much about sexual satisfaction as sadistic impulses. But on the whole, men who can lay down $3,000 a pop for sex aren’t the kind of guys that are elbowed out of the normal casual sex and dating world.
Here’s a more sceptical look at the than Kristof’s - and by the way, it is easy to see, through Google, that the Swedes have certainly not eliminated gangs dealing in prostitution.
After posting above, I realized that people might not get where I was going.
“a lot of women like being threated like trash”. Pretty absurd like?
Yes, that is absurd. And yet everywhere, a lot of women are being treated like trash. Women are raped, beaten and killed by intimate partners, humiliated and excluded in sexualized work environments … and yet it is absurd to suggest that they all just like being badly mistreated.
It’s almost as if there were some powerful force; some pervasive social structure that subjugates women and forces them into terribly vulnerable positions, that convinces men that it is okay or even necessary to treat them like trash …
Understand that.
Amen, Keith. I’m not a cop, but my department works closely with them at times. I can tell you that if misogyny is as endemic to the ranks of my city’s police force as it is to the fire department (which is where I work), then I wouldn’t expect cops to ever be as harsh with johns as they are with prostitutes.
For a more sceptical look at the Swedish model than Kristof’s, see this article:
http://www.thelocal.se/9621/20080110/.
As for Kristof’s idea that the Netherlands fights a problem with gangs prostituting women that the Swedes have solved, well, just Google Sweden brothel gangs and you will find that - as one expects, given the flood of prostitutes from Eastern Europe in the last fifteen years - that isn’t true.
Which is the problem with Kristof in a nutshell. The guy is a cherrypicker.
Thomas, TSID March 13, 2008 at 12:23 pm
Yes, that is absurd. And yet everywhere,”
you can propose it’s the patriarchy model. I for one more going along the line of basic “money-crime” model.
You can buy anybody and make that person do anything with enough “incentives”. Take out the ‘incentives and provide alternative, a rational actor will chose something else.
making it criminal is one way of doing it (creating expensive barrier of entry) but unfortunately, it only make the transaction and commodity that much more valuable.
Now, let’s say (I know nobody like how I say it, but it’s the easiest way) suppose the environment is changed so that the transaction becomes commodity. (ie. low risk, but very low return since just about anybody can do it. )
Now combined with penalty for johns,
logically, the economy simply is not there anymore. Why becomes prostitutes if there is other easier money?
(of course I feel there is a whole in my view somewhere, but somebody figures it out…
Here are some excerpts from a great (trigger warning) article about Melissa Farley’s work in Nevada:
From a brothel prostitute:
“No one really enjoys getting sold,” says Angie, who Farley interviewed. “It’s like you sign a contract to be raped.”
And, regarding the prevalence of illegal prostitution, despite legal prostitution:
Meanwhile, illegal brothels are on the increase in Nevada, as they are in other parts of the world where brothels are legalised. Nevada’s illegal prostitution industry is already nine times greater than the state’s legal brothels. “Legalising this industry does not result in the closing down of illegal sex establishments,” says Farley, “it merely gives them further permission to exist.”
Here’s the link. Read it all.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/sep/07/usa.gender
PS. don’t make me read Kristoff. I get ugly.
Melissa Farley has questionable methods, some of which this review discusses a bit.
Squashed, how does your stated assumption of rational economic actors explain men who kill their children, their estranged (escaped) wives, and themselves?
Again, it’s almost as if some powerful cultural current is guiding them, unseen …
I’m not sure Melissa Farley is exactly an unbiased social science researcher.
And even if her 89% statistic accurately reflects the state of prostitution in the real world, this may have something to do with prohibition.
Besides, 87% of Americans would change jobs if they could. This says nothing about the depth of dissatisfaction–20 year old hookers with six years of experience probably hate their jobs more than the Wal-Mart manager–but it suggests we need more than just a percentage to figure out what is really going on.
The review only challenges the Nevada book, stating that is not solid scientific research. I still stand behind the quotes from it I provided. The review does not challenge her other articles.
RSS,
What about the 67% PTSD rate, the fact that the most common cause of death is murder, and the high rates of depression and attempted suicide?
Interesting that 80% of the prostitutes in a legal brothel want out but don’t know how to get out. Not that big a difference from the 89% number under the illegal model that encompasses so many street walkers.
Yes, ballast. Anything to maintain the illusion.
No, but many of her more notable articles were apparently not subject to any peer review process. I’m not an expert on sex work, but as an academic, these things do not reassure me.
Amanda, why are you inserting material related to patently illegal prostitution into this debate (Farley)? No one - *No one* - has ever argued that streetwalking or coercing anyone into prostitution should be legal.
Roger, that article is just as much cherry-picking, only more so.
It seems that she has 25 peer-reviewed articles to her name. If the shorter articles (which I can actually access) on Psychiatric Times are based on those articles, I don’t see the problem.
Oh, how I miss my university days with all the freeee online journals.
Caitlain, because I think that prostitution tends to only exist under structures where the prostitutes can be treated like they’re subhuman, because the thrill for the johns and the pimps is to control the women. Legalizing prostitution doesn’t get rid of illegal prostitution, unless the legal prostitution structure retains the aspects of the illegal prostitution structure that appeal to johns—the ability to be cruel to the prostitutes. If worker safety standards are introduced that make the job more pleasant, the johns will go elsewhere.
But I did also point out that the prostitutes working in the supposed fairyland of legal Nevada brothels have similar “get me the fuck out” percentages as illegal prostitutes.
Bless the woman, she posted her peer-reviewed articles for free online:
http://www.prostitutionresearch.com/c-prostitution-research.html
One BIG problem with the idea of legalizing and “regulating” prostitution is that johns don’t want to participate in a regulated transaction.
The illegal market would continue to thrive for at least two main reasons. The first is the reason Amanda suggests: because many men who use prostitutes want to control, exploit, and abuse another person (male or female), and satisfying that desire would become a lot more expensive in any system that included effective protection for prostitutes. So men motivated in that way would still rely on illegal prostitutes.
Another reason the illegal market would persist is that even those who just wanted sex (there are probably plenty of johns who chiefly have this goal) would prefer an illegal transaction because they were more certain it would be anonymous, so their marriages and careers would be more likely to be affected.
It seems likely that only draconian enforcement aimed at the illegal prostitution trade, making the odds of getting caught buying sex illegally much higher, would make the cost high enough to overcome these benefits, and I don’t think more draconian enforcement is what we want. That’s why a shift like legalizing the selling but not the buying of sexual services seems more practical.
Would it be legal to advertise sexual services for sale?
I suspect that a similar percentage of people who work in a great many jobs would want to get out.
For my honors project for my degree, I’ve spent a lot of time conversing with women who work in the brothels in Nevada (along with a number of stretwalkers and escorts), and the vast majority of them do not feel like they’re being abused, raped, degraded, etc. Sure, several of them would like to find something else to do with their lives at some point, but they are, by and large, not the hell holes that you and many other portray them to be. Anecdotal “evidence” from one or two women who were prostitutes and decry the (brothel) industry hardly make for a compelling expose on what life is like in those places.
Are there problems there? You bet. Most of them could be solved with rational legislation and regulations, however, rather than just doing away with them altogether.
The problems they’ll run into is what to do about getting out when the time comes, Caitlain. If they’re licensed, good luck to them getting another job with that on their records. If they’re not, good luck getting them to convince their pimps that it’s time for another career path. I’m hard-pressed to believe that 89% of people really hate their jobs and urgently want out.
Squashed:
You quoted Amanda saying this:
“I think that the problem with legalization schemes is that prostitution is more, for the majority of the customers, about buying the opportunity to treat a woman like utter trash.”
And you said this in response:
can’t draw that argument. Otherwise, since prostitution occurs everywhere, one has to conclude “a lot of women like being threated like trash”. Pretty absurd like?
Logical disconnect there. Apples and oranges. Why men buy doesn’t have anything to do with why women sell. What men want to buy doesn’t really relate to what women want to sell, and what women want to sell in the context of prostitution only very rarely has anything to do with what they can sell. Just because women will sell it doesn’t mean they like it.
Women making rational economic decisions to become prostitutes (because they have little in the way of options to do something else that will bring in the same cash) does not mean they like it. And it’s simply abuse of rational actor theory (as is so common with any libertarian argument against any “protective” social policy) to assume that if a person really didn’t like what they were doing, or was being damaged by it, she’d simply do something else.
It is entirely consistent with both logic and economic theory to say men are purchasing the ability to treat women like shit, and that’s what they get out of it, and simultaneously to say that women do not enjoy selling that opportunity, yet rationally do it anyway in a market in which they don’t have the economic power or the opportunities to do otherwise for more.
Because it is economically rational for a desperate person to do something does not mean she likes it.
I’ve not made up my mind on decriminalization v. legalization, or what the parameters of a workable legalization/regulation plan would or could be. But the romantising of these imaginary hordes of super happy hookers is just ridiculous.
I’d expect a vice cop to have a bit of selection bias here.
so their marriages and careers would be
moreless likely to be affected.pnkrokhockeymom March 13, 2008 at 1:15 pm
Logical disconnect there. Apples and oranges. Why men buy doesn’t have anything to do with why women sell. ”
but it has everything to do with why somebody keeps selling something. Obviously to the seller there is positive return despite the risk.
Ismone: What about them? Can you show that selling sex for money causes them, rather than the social or institutional structure–legal or illegal–under which the transaction takes place? If not, then the solution is to change the structure, not prohibit the activity.
Amanda: Eighty percent of workers at Wal-Mart want to get out but don’t know how.
Something brought many of these women to enter this business voluntarily–as voluntarily as any of us take any job, at least. They exercised agency. I’m not clear on how having the state take this agency away improves the capacity of women to exercise it in other contexts.
You believe that prostitution is about men cruelly abusing women, and you think the state should take from women their power to permit this to happen in return for money. Should the state also force women to end abusive marriages?
Eh, that’s probably the sign of an impasse. I’ll just note that others have brought up criticism of her work as well. Perhaps normal academic skepticism is just about illusion.
PTSD is caused by traumatic events, and the symptoms are reliving those traumatic events after they are triggered. General population rates of PTSD are 5%, PTSD among prostitutes is 67%.
So it cannot be caused by social disapprobation.
Do your homework, first, before throwing out hypothetical questions that the most basic understanding of PTSD.
And I support decriminalization, certainly not legalization. They make those women register and put up pictures of them. They don’t make the john’s register, get tested, or have their pictures splashed on the internet. Inequality, much?
Amanda Marcotte March 13, 2008 at 12:59 pm
… I think that prostitution tends to only exist under structures where the prostitutes can be treated like they’re subhuman, because the thrill for the johns and the pimps is to control the women. Legalizing prostitution doesn’t get rid of illegal prostitution, unless the legal prostitution structure retains the aspects of the illegal prostitution structure that appeal to johns—the ability to be cruel to the prostitutes.”
the point of decriminalization is not to completely erradicate prostitution, but to not make it illegal. So that there is no reason for underground exploitation. A prostitute doesn’t need the protection of crime organisation. It is reduced to simple transaction.
The point to all this: a) reduce homicide b) people doens’t run around the street playing cat and mouse with police and gangster… etc etc… things like that.
that in turn make crime organization unprofitable and bring prostitution into legit public heal and safety policy issue instead of crime problem. You can’t talk about womens dignity while prostitution exist on street level mixing it all with hard crime. (this on top of state database. nasty.)
decriminalization won’t eliminate weird shit. If somebody wants to buy sex slave in black market from the far east. It will still happens.
I don’t disagree with that at all, though if prostitution was legalized, over time, IMO, there’d be less stigma attached to it and it would to some degre because less of an issue.
And where did that “89%” figure come from? Some place other than Farley I hope. Unless I missed it, that’s the only person I’ve seen you cite, and her credibility on this subject is largely nil, at least amongst serious academics. Based on what I’ve seen (which, admittedly, is somewhat limited, but it has been recent), the figure is nowhere near that high for brothel workers or escorts.
I suspect a huge number of nurses would like to find something else to do as well, rather than deal with abusive patients and whatnot. But they do the work because they money is as good as it is and they know that taking another job would lead to a substantial pay decrease.
R. Stanton Scott March 13, 2008 at 1:20 pm
Should the state also force women to end abusive marriages?”
I would say yes. (tho’ we can argue what degree of abuse)
This interview with the prostitute that Spitzer hired is interesting.
It’s worth noting that her going rate of $1,000 an hour puts her deeply into the vanishingly small minority of prostitutes. That’s about 3 times as much as a brothel prostitute in a legal Nevada place would charge (most of that would not go into her pocket, of course), and about 40 times as much as street prostitutes in Chicago make an hour. So what we have here is someone who should be the absolute epitome of the happy hooker who does this work because she just loves sex so much and she’s so good at, right?
Well, doesn’t quite seem to be that way. She’s certainly not hurting, since she can charge so much and doesn’t have to have non-stop sex just for scraps, of course. But according to the profile, she’s really trying to be a musician. She seems to be someone with limited employment opportunities.
And good on her for doing what she has to in order to get by, and it’s hard to fault her for taking on this work when it pays so well and she’s trying to start a small business.
But hardly the happy hooker. And this is the cream of the crop. I find it hard to believe happy hookers are more in abundance if you go down the scale.
i guess i’m just weird. i have this neurotic thing where i’m concerned about my partner 100% doing it because she wants to. if it even seems like her attention wanders a little bit, i’m moved to ask her what’s wrong. so who are these guys who can have sex with somebody transactionally? or coercively? i’ve tried for many years to get inside that mindset, and as you may have guessed, the only way i can access it is by becoming so angry and hateful that i’m able to completely objectify the person i’m fixed on - but the result of that is that i’ve objectified myself as well, and that’s not a place i particularly enjoy being.
There’s a major difference in trying to compare the two and that’s technology: communication technology–well, let’s be honest, the Internet–has made it easier for kiddie porn producers and consumers to find each other, allowing those who have the fetish but previously didn’t have the means to express it to do so. That, however, is a different issue from the acceptance of adult, legal, porn and its somewhat mainstreaming (in that porn stars are recognizable celebrities and recognizable to people who haven’t actually seen porn themselves).
Even if porn weren’t as mainstream and accepted that technological advantage for the still very-much-illegal child porn subculture would still exist
Well, the state provides a lot more assistance to women leaving abusive relationships than they do to prostitutes. Like, sometimes the abusive spouse is prosecuted and the woman is not considered a criminal for “allowing” the abuse to continue in exchange for sustenance.
Why do people have such a hard time accepting that money itself can be a form of coercion? Since we’ve heard all the absurd comparisons of hooking to sandwiches and whatnot, let’s have an extreme example on the other side. Let’s say some eugenically minded group offers all pregnant women below a certain income level $10,000 to have an abortion. The women can say no if they want to. Many undoubtedly will. Some who take the money would have had the abortion anyway, and figure, why not take the money? But can you see, imagine perhaps, that it would be very difficult to sort out whether the women who took the money really wanted to have the abortion, especially if the woman has a very serious need for the money - an aging parent who needs care, other children who need care, signficant debt she needs to get out of, whatever. Can you see how the money actually interferes with the function of free will? Can you see how the motives of the group/person offering the incentive matter? Can you see that in all of these situations that even if the person accepting the money is being a rational actor, their ability to have true, true choice about what they want is greatly impinged upon by the offer of money? Just because money changes hands does not mean the person has not been coerced. What if someone offered you $1 million to have one of your legs amputated? How many of you would be arguing that it’s your right to do with your body what you want and anyone who questions what the hell is wrong with someone that would offer $1 million for your leg must have a horrible opinion of people with disabilities?
In all of the situations, the moral and ethical question falls back on the person offering the money, not the person accepting it. You may consider these examples absurd, but they certainly are not less absurd than comparing working as a prostitute to making sandwiches.
I think its bizarre to argue, as amanda does, that legalizing/decriminalizing and liscencing women as prostitutes constitutes some kind of serious bar to them getting other, regular, jobs when they choose to move on. For one thing when prositution isn’t *illegal* it will cease to have the negative connotations that it does now. For another there is no reason to believe this problem can’t be solved by allowing prostitutes to use “work names” like an actors work name. We are very far from having a total information society in which all your previous jobs must be shown to a prospective employer–or if we are there then not being able to account for the last five years is as big a problem to a prostitute now as it will be when you file your tax returns and show that you paid brothel income (if, indeed, that is revealed by your paperwork.
there are lots of reasons to oppose legalizing or decriminalizing prostitution. I am not opposed to either because I think its to the benefit of the women involved. But fear that legalizing it will make it harder for prostitutes to go on to other trades? Please. People with *criminal records* go on to get hired in some part of the economy. Why would a legal job be ag reater bar to changing jobs/going back to school/starting again than anything else?
aimai
To make it easier, here is a direct link to the study from which the 89% figure was originally taken, although Farley has republished it elsewhere.
http://www.prostitutionresearch.com/pdf/Prostitutionin9Countries.pdf
Be forewarned, it is 8.27 megs.
I do not think there is anything wrong with a peer-reviewed author publishing non-peer-reviewed articles/books, such as the NV book.
If someone can provide a link to a valid (full-text) critique of that study, than I’m your huckleberry.
How does New Zealand compare to Sweden & the Netherlands, in law and in results? Do the latter countries have the equivalent of www.nzpc.org.nz, the New Zealand sex worker organization?
For one thing when prositution isn’t *illegal* it will cease to have the negative connotations that it does now.
Assumes facts not in evidence. Prostitution is legal in six counties of Nevada; how are prostitutes treated by the brothel owners there? Are there any quantitative studies showing that respect for prostitutes increased after legalization anywhere? It sounds like you’re just asserting this as an assumption with no reason to believe it’s true.
Aimai,
I don’t think it is odd. If you have to put it on your tax returns, it is publicly available. If you have your picture on the web, that is humiliating. A lot of legalization schemes have to do with registering, but the johns don’t have to register, as I mentioned upthread.
So I see a problem there as well.
Caitlan and R. Stanton Scott, it’s probably also true that 80% of grad students wish they could quit (I’m a grad student). The difference is that working at Wal-Mart, being a nurse, or being a grad student are all jobs where you have legal rights and legal recourse if you are being abused. They are also jobs where you are selling your labor, time and expertise — rather than selling yourself as an object to be degraded. I understand that not all sex work everywhere is always like this, but I think it’s either naive or disingenuous to deny that most of it is.
And as discussed in the previous thread, in fact, we do put limits on what people are allowed to do for money, precisely to limit exploitation. I could offer to work with nuclear waste with no protective gear for lots of money, but it would be illegal for anyone to hire me to do that, no matter how bad I needed the money or whether there was anything else for me to do. More realistically, I could offer to work 60 hours a week at Wal-Mart without asking to be paid overtime, but that’s also illegal. Those labor laws exist for a reason.
So yeah. I think even if you do want to sell yourself as an object for exploitation, there’s a compelling social reason not to let you do so. Just as there’s a compelling social reason not to let you work without benefit of safety measures or overtime pay, no matter how much you want to.
The illegal market would continue to thrive for at least two main reasons. The first is the reason Amanda suggests: because many men who use prostitutes want to control, exploit, and abuse another person (male or female), and satisfying that desire would become a lot more expensive in any system that included effective protection for prostitutes. So men motivated in that way would still rely on illegal prostitutes.
Another reason the illegal market would persist is that even those who just wanted sex (there are probably plenty of johns who chiefly have this goal) would prefer an illegal transaction because they were more certain it would be anonymous, so their marriages and careers would be more likely to be affected.
I cannot speak directly to Amanda’s assertion as regards the johns - I’ve never bothered seeking out a hooker, nor have I seen any research on the topic. I know a couple of people who have touched on the industry (someone who may or may not have worked in a brothel, and a vice cop), but I don’t know anyone who’s admitted to me to have bought sex (although I have my suspicions in a couple of cases).
But I think she is wrong for the significant majority of guys seeking out prostitutes, although the factor is there for some.
But, passing that over, you have a problem with your argument - in a society with a functioning legal market for sex workers, what are the motivations for a sex worker to sell it illegally? The suggestion I’ve seen so far is a desire never to be registered; the problem with that argument is that it is very possible to have a regulated market without registration.
Which leads me to suggest that the only reason a hooker would seek out abusive sex work over conventional sex work, when he or she has the right to refuse to be abused in the course of working and when he or she can engage in conventional sex work, is money. Men pay them extra to accept the abuse - and the hooker has deliberately made the decision to cater to that as opposed to the larger market for more conventional sex.
That doesn’t make it not disquieting and probably harmful - but it does mean that they’re not victims.
The illegal market exists in NV and in other countries. So how does the why matter?
The cost, red tape, or public nature of licensing.
(Well, or de facto slavery, but no one’s seriously suggesting that should be legal.)
(And regarding the “registering them will publicly shame them” argument: laws could demand the confidentiality of that info. Granted, it might leak anyway if authorities don’t cooperate, but pretty much any scheme we’re talking about here, short of unrestricted legalization, involves some degree of faith in law enforcement.)
A cursory examination of the Intro to that document does reveal the 89% figure. HOWEVER, that figure was reflective of their total interview sample, the majority of which were streetwalkers. It is no wonder they got an 89% figure. Hell, my person experience interviewing streetwalkers here in Miami (n=47) came away with all but one saying they wanted to get out. That is hardly reflective of those working voluntarily in licensed brothels.
They also make the statement that 40% of their sample were coerced into prostitution. You can’t include them in a citation here against legalization since they’re not in the work voluntarily to begin with. If someone forced me to work in ANY job I didn’t want to do, I can assure you I’d be “desperate” to get out as well. That speaks nothing about those who choose to do the work voluntarily, however.
Amanda — from time to time you have written about “what I’ve learned from blogging” (& actually maybe this is in your book, which I have not read), but at the end of these threads I just wonder how you deal with confronting hordes of soulless monsters month after month. The arguments here — in the face of every kind of empirical evidence — that johns are awesome, hookers do it for the love, that any stupid-ass explanation that sounds economic is teh smart and teh incontrovertible, god, how do you deal? I realized the other day when I made an argument involving friendship that many of the misogynists that are drawn here are almost equally heartless misanthropes — their hating on women comes first but their hating on men is a very close second. Obviously you’ve got a lot of people talking at you here about another topic, so I am not loooking for a response in this thread, but if you ever did put together a post on “how I deal” it would make incredibly compelling reading.
Also, what chingona said.
How come when YOU say this you are a GODESS and when I say it I’m a BITCH?
To Caitlain,
She reported, in her book (not peer-reviewed, see the link upthread to the guardian review) that 80% of the women she interviewed in legal NV brothels wanted out. Her sample size was 45, which was small, but still.
You don’t think women can be coerced into legal prostitution, or that they can’t be coerced into illegal prostitution or abused when younger, and then transition into legal prostitution?
Thomas, TSID March 13, 2008 at 12:46 pm
Squashed, how does your stated assumption of rational economic actors explain men who kill their children, their estranged (escaped) wives, and themselves? ”
Freak cases happen. But deal with most common cases then work out from there. It’s not elegant. but sure as hell kill less people than pretending that shiny big thinking is enough.
The cost, red tape, or public nature of licensing.
True. I invite you to follow the link I porvided, which seems to cover these - sex workers are not registered, and agencies (which the sex workers pay) seem to handle the majority of the hassles.
I’ll dig up some articles from some credible magazines about the actual experience of sex workers in NZ when I get into work.
The difference is that working at Wal-Mart, being a nurse, or being a grad student are all jobs where you have legal rights and legal recourse if you are being abused.
Not to mention workers comp., unemployment insurance, and disability. But sex workers are entitled to those benefits because we have to punish the men.
aren’t entitled even…oy…
Squashed, you live in a fantasy world. Those of us who listen to the experiences of the women in our lives, and who offer them safe opportunities to tell their stories, know that somewhere around a third or a quarter of women in our lives, sometimes more depending on our social position, have been beaten or sexually assaulted. Those numbers are borne out by researchers like Koss (who is in turn backed up by some US government sources): one in four women who go to US universities experience attempted rapes, one in eight a completed rape, defined under then-current Ohio law. It is tough to say how prevalent sex trafficking is, but in Queens not long ago there was a tour operator that ran a business sending men to East Asia to have sex with children. You can go on pretending that when bad things happen to women it is some kind of “special case,” but that’s as valid as saying that every accident on a commercial fishing vessel is a special case. In fact, if it happens all the time, it’s a systemic phenomenon. Commercial fishing is dangerous, violence against women is systemic. That’s the real world. if you ignore it, you are stubbornly insisting on being a part of the problem.
As a Dutchman I feel the need to respond. Prostitution has never been illegal in the Netherlands. In 1999, we canceled the 1911 law that made brothels illegal. Our hopes were that thus prostitutes would have better access to health care, would get better working conditions (without the usual coercion and downright abuse), would unionize, in other words; make prostitution a viable, safe career option. Not that much different from what Kristen proposes here.
Unfortunately, we weren’t as successful as we hoped. Don’t get me wrong, the prostitutes that work in the now legal brothels are certainly better off than before. However, most johns don’t like to visit these brothels. And that’s where we failed in the Netherlands (and where we fail everywhere).
Legalizing prostitution to make it a safe career option for the prostitutes is just one side of the coin. We also have to, as a society, accept that people visit prostitutes.
Of course they can. I didn’t mean to suggest otherwise (if I even did).
I’m not sure what relevance that has to legalizing or decrminalizing prostitution in general, though. Coercing someone into any line of work is illegal and no one has suggsted decriminalizing that at all.
As I stated earlier, Farley’s work been discredited on this subject in academia. The reasons have already been cited. Not that her opinions and assertions aren’t totally without validity, just that you have to take them with a grain of salt and examine the real world situation as it exists, and not as she portrays it on her web sites and in her “research findings.
My biggest problem with prostitution being illegal is that I cannot see how we can make something that is perfectly legal to do for free a crime if done for money. But legal or otherwise, it’s a sad, sad industry.
Nor do I particularly see how prostitution could be legalized, but with a requirement for registration; no one is required to register before having sex for free.
Thomas, TSID March 13, 2008 at 2:18 pm
Commercial fishing is dangerous, violence against women is systemic. That’s the real world. if you ignore it, you are stubbornly insisting on being a part of the problem.”
… therefore make it illegal and sings la la la like nothing happens is the best course of action. I am sure the situation will change sometimes if everybody just sings louder.
whatever.
In Nevada, all prostitutes (the legal ones, at least) have to register with the County Sheriff’s office. They have a background check performed, and if they have no serious criminal record and their health checks come back clean, they get a license to work.
In fact, Squashed, I am a Swedish model proponent.
And maybe if you try to change the world, and I try to change the world, and many other people try to change the world, it will actually change. Or we can just say, “hey, it sucks for some people. Guess that’s too bad, but that’s not my problem.” You would apparently rather say that every woman that gets killed, beaten or raped is its own individual case, and not part of any societal pattern at all.
But as you say, “whatever.”
Not true. It has another purpose, which is to blame prostitutes for anything negative that happens to them. It’s their own fault for CHOOSING to be whores, and there’s an undertone of “and they probably get off on it anyway”.
Amanda, you can then put one cherrypicked article against the other. However, still, even if you say that the article gives a dark side to Sweden’s decriminalization, it does negate Kristof’s point that Sweden doesn’t face the same problems as the Netherlands, since it clearly does. Gangs. Problems with condoms. Prostitutes without any bargaining power. Underaged prostitutes.
The larger point, I think, is whether you decriminalize or legalize, you aren’t going to address the big problems - working conditions for prostitutes, and the violence they are subjected to - by a simple change in the legal status of prostitutes, but you are simply clearing the ground to address that problem. This is why I think (utopianly - it is easy to forget in these discussions that nothing is going to happen in the U.S., that the same alliance of church and state is going to crush any attempt to change prostitution laws, and that patriarchy, expressed through the cops, the johns, etc., will continue to encourage treating prostitutes like shit ) that prostitution should be monopolized by a guild, like the American Medical Association or the American Bar Association. I think that is a regulatory structure that mitigates the brothel problem (which is, I should say, a problem also faced by migrant agricultural workers and by meatpackers - which attract vulnerable populations, like immigrants, and provide on site housing, and similarly treat workers like prisoners).
I think Aimai is right that decriminalizing/legalizing will lead to the loss of the stigma, but I think that will take a long time We have the present prostitution regime because the Nineteenth century, far from being the Victorian values time of Gingrich’s twisted nostalgia, was the veritable age of prostitution - it exploded as women immigrated from the country into the city. I’ve read incredible estimates of the number of child prostitutes in London. Stefan Zweig, in his memoirs of Vienna, mentions that when he was a kid, he always passed by prostitutes when he bought candy at the candy store in his middle class neighborhood - and they would often follow him home, trying to sell their services. When patriarchy is unchallenged, there are a lot more prostitutes - which tells us a lot about the industry.
Caitlain,
Show me where her peer-reviewed work has been discredited, and I’ll bite.
You disregarded the stats. from the article I cited b/c you stated that 40% of the women had been coerced into prostitution. If women can be coerced into legal prostitution, as you acknowledge, the harms still exist. That was my point.
Isn’t that a problem of a patriarchal system being in place rather than specifically a problem of legalization?
If we imagine that we could put any system we could devise into place, ignoring the challenges of enacting any sort of feminist-driven reform of sexwork laws in a patriarchal society, is there no possible approach in which sex work could be legalized while placing the overall power in the hands of sex workers rather than johns?
The decriminalization approach seems like it would solve some problems but not necessarily others. It removes the direct threat of extortion-rape from the police but doesn’t actually compel them to help prostitutes in actual situations, nor does it necessarily help protect sex workers from assault, rape, or threatening violence by johns — I guess I’m skeptical that the police force wouldn’t just switch to various technicalities for harassing and refusing to help prostitutes, the same way that cops regularly use their power to threaten and attack women who haven’t committed any crime.
I would also be very interested to hear how you think this issue intersects with male prostitution.
Ismone: I would say my twenty year military career left me with a “basic understanding” of PTSD. But perhaps I did not make myself clear: do you mean to say that having sex in return for money is the “traumatic event” that gives these women PTSD?
Or is it other events–abuse by johns or pimps or cops? If so, the problem is not the sale of sex, but the construction of institutional and social rules that make these traumatic events possible without giving the victims some recourse, such as support from authorities and treatment.
If the latter, then changing the institutional context might mitigate the negative consequences of making this choice. For example, legalization might make unionization possible and provide a layer of protection for workers.
And indeed, the same study you cite asserts that “prolonged and repeated trauma usually precedes entry into prostitution,” but supports the claim only by pointing out that “55-90% of prostitutes report a childhood sexual abuse history” (page 35 of Prostitution, Trafficking, and Traumatic Stress). If Farley’s subjects had PTSD before they even became prostitutes, then legalizing prostitution would not increase the incidence of PTSD among prostitutes–and might in fact decrease it, by creating an institutional structure that keeps abused kids out of the business and creates incentives for victims to get treatment.
BTW, you can find a review of this book in Volume 6, Issue 3 (2005) of the Journal of Trauma and Dissociation. I can’t find a full-text link, so I guess I don’t get a huckleberry, but your library should have it.
Chingona: the money offered to the poor women may change the calculation they make as they exercise their free will by introducing a new incentive. But it does not interfere with their power to make a choice by taking away their agency.
R@d@r: This baffles me, as well.
If you thought that social disapproval could cause PTSD, you certainly weren’t applying your understanding of the condition to the question at hand.
It seems, from the research, that a combination of physical abuse (at the hands of clients and pimps and in early childhood) + sexual abuse + sex with a large number of partners causes it. It seems to be most connected to number of clients, if I recall the paper correctly. But violence of course is a factor.
I agree that the book has problems, but it isn’t presented as peer-reviewed. See upthread where I acknowledge this. I want to know if anyone can question the peer-reviewed research. So, yes, you are right, you are not my huckleberry.
I am in favor of decriminalizing, and think it will help with police abuse (although I think prostitutes are still considered not credible by most juries), but I do not know how much good it will do with pimp/john abuse.
What is your take on how decriminalizing will protect prostitutes from violent pimps and johns?
In terms of anticipating some loss of stigma, I’m sorry, but that cannot be posited without contextualizing the stigma of prostitution within the very real, effective, and in many cases dangerous stigma that still exists against women who just have sex, with or without consent, without any money entering into the picture at all.
If I have consensual sex, I’m stigmatized if I want it. If I give it away (well, there it is, right? I gave it away; we all know what that says about me). If it’s taken from me, I’m stigmatized too, because, well, it’s probably my fault because I really wanted to just give it away, or I wouldn’t have been in the position to have it taken from me, anyway. If I then add money to the equation, then the stigma is all the more.
There’s a hierarchy of disapproval, right: (1