Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

Why is prostitution bad?  Can someone make a claim using liberal logic (ie, no appeal to but its wrong!) that the free exchange of money for sex, absent violence or coercion, is wrong?  I don’t think so, unless you’re willing to infantalize women and say that any case of prostitution means that the woman involved in being victimized.  It’s obvious why this line of reasoning is bad, if we can’t assume that adult women are mature enough and have the agency to sell their bodies for sex, are they mature enough to do anything else?

But many liberals who persist in arguing that prostitution ought to be illegal in some form persist in saying that it’s not prostituion per se that they’re worried about, but the violence and coercion that accompanies it.  This argumetn, advanced by Nick Kristof, Bob Herbert and many others, is tendentious BS.  Just look at drugs: have they been made less violence by criminialization?  But we don’t need analogies to show that criminalizing prostitution doesn’t work, we can just look at the facts.  Sudhir Venkatesh and Steven Levitt’s fascinating paper on prostitutes in Chicago found that they were having lots of unprotected sex, which is incredibly unssafe, and being beaten roughly monthly.  The only ways they could find protection was either having sex with police officers, or working for a pimp, who would then beat them too.   Criminalized prostitution often ends up hurting the girls themselves, thus making them exploited by both the law and their pimps, and also breeds disrespect for the law because it is so spottily enforced.  But if criminalizing prostituion is so ineffective, what about legalzing it?

Opponents of legalization often point to how in Nevada, the Netherlands and other places that have liberalized their prostitution laws, there hasn’t really been a decrease in trafficking or in prostitution.  My response to the point that prostitution hasn’t gone down is, who cares?  What legalization does is reduce the violence, coercion and disease spread associated with prostitution.  At that point, why exactly is prostitution bad?  In Nevada, for instance, there hasn’t been a case of HIV with prostitutes since 1988.  Also, a legalized, regulated system makes it easier to enforce laws against underage prostitution because prostitutes are more willing to seek out law enforcement, knowing that they won’t get arrested for their line of work.

A compromise for feminists who see prostitution as necessarily exploitative but don’t think that criminialization works is to just go after johns and pimps, not the actual girls. In Sweden they’ve pursued this policy, and it appears to “work.”  As in there’s less prostitution, but it’s also unclear if it hasn’t driven it underground.  But I don’t agree with less prostitution due to going after johns and pimps as “working.”  Who benefits from this?  Women now have fewer opportunities to make money and men who are just buying sex are classified as predators and are in jail.  Again, who are we to say that buying sex is always bad?

Prostitution isn’t pretty.  I would be sad if anyone I knew was in the business, which is certainly an ugly one.  But the law shouldn’t prohibit people from seeking out marginal employment or employment that people find “ugly.”  There are lots of demeaning professions out there, and criminalizing prostitution just forces women to either be poorer or go into even more demeaning work.  And so much of the rhetoric about prostitution just assumes that these women are childish retards, who have no idea what they’re getting themselves into or the risks involved.  This makes it easy to say that they’re all exploited and that we have to save them.  Nevermind that our attempts to “save” them often just make their conditions worse and their lives harder.

Prostituion should be a totally victimless situation – man wants sex, woman sells it.  Anyone who thinks the harm principle means anything can’t really advocate that the government  prohibit the activity. It’s just that our laws are making that ideal impossible to reach.

NOTE – I didn’t want to weave in all the URLs, so are the articles and posts that I kinda-sorta reference

Here’s Emily Bazelon discussing various legal approaches to prostituion, including the Swedish one

Brad Plumer talks about all this stuff
Venkatest and Levitt’s paper.

My post about their paper.

Kerry Howley on migrant sex workers and Levitt and Venkatesh.

Dylan Matthews.