Gut reaction, yes or no?
Given who is likely to be my readership here I suspect most of you went through something like;
'Heck yeah, then I could bang those chicks and get away with it!' (at which point I have a mental image of 'Glen Quagmire' from Family Guy saying 'giggity giggity'...
You're then probably going to have 'moral second thoughts' at some later point in time when you 'think about it'.
So, think about this;
In my city earlier this year the police broke up some 17 brothels - all of which were using women trafficked in from Asian countries and held against their will. Some of these brothels are found in 'the usual places' like massage parlors, the back end of a strip club or bar, etc. But some of them have been found in residential homes sitting in those 'nice quiet family neighborhoods' where the locals just don't ever pay any mind to all the people coming in and out all day long...
I myself have lived in places where women were forced into sexual bondage to pay off the debts of themselves or their male family members. In other places women might be kidnapped right off the street and then quietly shoved away to some other country. This is rarely the thing you see on a TV special with some middle class white woman from a first world nation. It is almost always a victim from the third world, trafficked to some other place in the third world or into the major first world cities such as Tokyo, San Francisco, New York, Jeruselum, etc...
So should it be legal now? The answer there I guess revolves around whether or not creating a 'legal market' would wipe out the 'illegal market'.
But we can go further, one of the major issues with prostitutes is that they have nowhere they can go for help. With an illegal lifestyle, if you experience medical problems or become a victim of crime you have no recourse to protection. These health and security of the men and women who work in the sex trade is unprotected. This makes then a nexus for problems like AIDS, and we know of the major factors spreading AIDS around the world is people who carry it between sites of illegal prostitution.
By contrast in places with legal prostitution, such as the Netherlands and parts of Nevada, the workers get regular health checks and there is security there to force the clients into agreeing to use protection, as well as preventing predators from killing or otherwise maiming these workers. I'll leave that comment on the note that two of the people I know with involvment in the sex trade have lost people to such violence - one of them doused in flames and burned alive while others were forced to watch in order to teach those others an obediance lesson, the other 'purchased' from her handlers for the express purpose of 'sex with razor blades'. You can claim those are just 'friends of friends' stories, and that might be right - I can't prove them, but they do fit a pattern that does exist in crime reports.
So that might support the idea that legalizing it would at least 'turn on the lights' and let us make sure both the workers and the 'johns' are safe and not spreading disease. This is the real world I'm writing about after all, not the world of NiS - we don't have magic cures for many of these diseases. Even if you think the lives of sex workers and johns should be worth nothing, they both then spread it on to innocent third parties. Many women in Asian and African countries have aquired AIDS after their husbands went on business trips, and I suspect the same is true in the USA after seeing American men and how they behaved when travelling to sites of 'sexual slavery and tourism'. Sometimes these women victims do not discover it until after they have passed it on to their children.
Next there is the idea that it is a victimless crime. What business does the state have criminalizing something with no victims? This is countered by the notion that the families of johns become victims. But in chapter 4 of Alandra I wrote in a reply to that:
"And do you think there are negative consequences?" Ms. Magante said.
"I'll let the class make up their own minds on that. On the surface, sure; she should be able to use her body as she wants. It's long been said that prostitution is a victimless activity."
A girl I didn't know raised her hand and said "But what about the families? Of the guys I mean. What about his wife?"
"If you think the government cares about the family, why is adultery legal?" Mrs. Jacobs said.
I'll return to that in a moment...
A final more radical idea, because you know an erotica writer has to have a radical theory in her bag of tricks somewhere, comes in the notion of 'economic control'. I put this idea out there in my Alandra NiS story, though I don't think anyone noticed me doing it. The idea here is that sex has economic value. We all know this even though we try to deny it. Outlawing prostitution puts the economic control of a woman's body in the hands of men. She is either denied the ability to make profit on her property, or she is pimped out and denied the ability to keep the profits of the use of that property. this of course also extends to male prostitutes.
In Alandra, chapter 3, I put it like this:
The second half of the reading talked about prostitution, both male and female. Mrs. Jacobs put in notes about several states overturning prostitution laws in the last few years – many of those also put strict health rules, but that was breaking down with all the STD and AIDS vaccines. Some of them even regulated pimping and brothels – allowing companies that sold sex. Pa would say it was just a way men could ensure a hold on the money. He said prostitution was the original form of female empowerment – giving girl's economic control over their sexuality. Pa said it'd been illegal for so long not because anyone was hurt by it, but because men wanted control over sex. But that was Pa – but I imagine Ms. Lippmann and Ms. Magante would agree with him.
I didn't see myself ever selling a fuck, so I'd never really given it much thought. Way I saw it, with all this Program shit the cost of a fuck was gonna go down pretty fast. Maybe that's why they were legalizing it – now that it really wasn't worth all that much. Or whatever.
. . .
Mrs. Jacobs ended it by saying the Supreme Court was looking at a woman in a state where prostitution was illegal saying she had a fundamental right to freely employ her own body. It was something about freedom of religion, privacy, and contract. Mrs. Jacobs wanted us to think about that, if we thought she'd win. If she did, prostitution would be legal in the whole country.
This final radical idea simply put, is that who has a right to control and gain wealth of a person's body? That person or someone else? Should not a person be able to use their body as they like? Outlawing it 'locks it down'. It gives the power to control sex and sexuality to men or to the state, who each control access to sex. A woman, or even a man, is not allowed to trade access for their own gain - they must either grant it freely (previously illegal under fornication and adultry laws), or grant it and consent to a loss of freedom in exchange for 'security' (marriage) and legal recognition of 'kinship' (not sure how to describe the benefit spouses get in things like ability to visit in a hospital, etc).
And I said I would return to chapter 4 again, so look at this longer quote from chapter 4:
She filled us in on that woman who was suing her state for the right to use her body as she wanted. How it got to the Supreme Court on appeal, and how we'd know the result by summer, if not sooner. The woman had claimed her right as an extension of privacy, property, and something called 'liberty of contract' that Mrs. Jacobs said used to be a big thing after the Civil War, but was mostly not used anymore.
"It makes a lot of sense when you put it that way." Kevin said.
"Yeah..." A girl in the back said.
"But," she started, and I noticed Magante sit up "People often ignore the larger consequences of the choices that support their side." Mrs. Jacobs looked at Ms. Magante.
"And do you think there are negative consequences?" Ms. Magante said.
"I'll let the class make up their own minds on that. On the surface, sure; she should be able to use her body as she wants. It's long been said that prostitution is a victimless activity."
A girl I didn't know raised her hand and said "But what about the families? Of the guys I mean. What about his wife?"
"If you think the government cares about the family, why is adultery legal?" Mrs. Jacobs said.
"Uh... Hmm..." the girl said. She didn't have an answer for that, nor did I actually, I don't think I'd ever thought of that.
"No, prostitution has traditionally been illegal because it represents economic power in something women have that men don't, something they want. Men have been trying to control pussy since the day they realized they didn't have one. It's power over them." Mrs. Jacobs said. Ms. Magante smiled at that, and it left me thinking, but I could see Kevin frown. "You might say adultery gives men power over the sexual relationship, as a converse."
"What about wives who cheat?" I asked.
"That still gives a man sex without making an investment." She said. Maybe if I thought about it I could answer that, but I didn't have any ideas just then.
Prostitution puts sex in the 'supply and demand' model. If a person believes in 'the free market', that should be a desirable goal.
So there's your 'radical theory'. Pack that in with the ones over safety, victimless crime, ending slavery, etc...
