Exactly right. I would also point that "well-adjusted" girls and women--the women most likely to get through the experience of selling their bodies with their sanity and health intact--are precisely the people who do NOT become prostitutes. Well-adjusted people have it together enough to stay out of this kind of life. Prostitutes can be defined as screwed up by virtue of the fact that they are risking their lives for $25 an hour.

All of the high-toned discussion here ignores utterly the reality of the lives prostitutes lead. If one of these posters, or one of their wives or daughters, was raped ONCE in their lives they would be sobbing and telling the world how they were traumatized and destroyed, etc. and so forth.

Prostitutes get assaulted--beaten or raped--once a month. They get raped by cops. They often get raped by their pimps, if they have them. A huge majority of the time, studies tell us, they were raped as children. Hell, their whole "profession" is providing sex against their desire and inclination to men they otherwise would never want to sleep with, because the men have the money and they don't. If half-heartedly muttering "no" to your boyfriend when you're drunk and he goes and does it anyway makes a woman a rape victim, isn't she equally a rape victim when she has sex against her will to get money to give a pimp, or even just to survive? In what way is all of prostitution not rape, since everything else these days is?

Please do not tell me this is the same as other employment. It is not. It is traumatizing, every day a woman spends in the business traumatizes her further. That's why we cannot legalize this "trade" and treat it like any other "business".

Either you have enough imagination and empathy to figure that out, or you're an idiot, whatever your I.Q. may be. As another poster says, you either understand that there's more to sex than the physical part of it or you don't. Some people seem to be "stupid" in this area, but the truth I've had to reluctantly accept is that in reality they are deficient morally (I've also had to reluctantly accept that there is such a thing; that all is not, in fact, relative), and want to push their skewed version of morality over on the rest of us, just as the prudes would.

Prostitution is a crime against women. Very few men buy sex because they absolutely cannot get any elsewhere. They buy it because they like paying for it--that means, they enjoy the power imbalance. One sex worker I heard of had a client who insisted on paying by shoving the dollar bills up her a**. Empowering for her? I don't think so. Some men buy it in order to get women to perform degrading acts they would have a hard time getting a free partner to agree to, such as scat activities. No woman should have to go through any of these humiliations, yet prostitutes suffer them regularly (raped once a month, remember). Prostitution is a crime against women, period. By legalizing it, you are saying "We, as a society, find it acceptable that women can be bought and then treated this way".

If you think that, you have the morals of a toad. Sorry, it's the truth.

oh, but the sex industry can be fair for women. No inequality there. Oh, yeah, right.

Anonymous goes on and on and on about his need as a man for alternatives. Here's one for you that does not involve the life of another person: masturbation. I suggest you try it.

You learned all you need to know about prostitutes from the rationalizations of one $10,000 a weekend escort? And you think, as a man, and a person who has spent less time with this woman than one of her clients, that you now understand hookers?

Morals of a toad, like I said. And zero empathy, I may add. It's all about you, you, you and what you want, and when you want NSA sex, hey you oughta be able to BUY somebody to stick it into!

No, you oughtn't. Bathroom is that way, toad. Use your imagination and you'll be just fine.

"they are happy to have creative sex and happy to prove it"...

Neither you nor I have any clue if they are happy or not. They are paid to smile, with a client or on screen. That's all we know for sure about it.

The people I've talked to who have gotten out say they and their colleagues are not happy, although they are paid to smile. In reality they have high rates of drug addiction (almost universal) and suicide to escape the pain. That's the closest I'm going to ever come to knowing. And I'm sure you don't know more.