Letters to the Editor
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Pimps
So a pimp is, in essence, just a contracting firm. There are bad ones and there are good ones, and if you get in with a good one, your wages will go up. The good consulting agencies seek out people who are better than good, because they can charge more and they gain a reputation as a broker of the higly qualified.
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In other news, the sky is blue.
Grass, green.
Film at 11.
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Can't be right
One of my friends works in the sex industry and wrote me and told me the opposite.
Women turn to pimps to protect them from police harassment (and the service-me-or-get-arrested part is part of that harassment). Pimps actually depress wages.
At the same time, my friend distinguished between pimps and other go-betweens. I'm not sure whether the study grouped them together.
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Anonymous...
Where does your friend work? Levitt and his colleagues only staked out Chicago; I imagine the business works differently depending on region. (For example, street-level transactions likely decline in areas where there is a brothel.)
As such, I'm sure that both your experiences and the ones Levitt witnessed may be valid for their region.
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Its more complicated.....
There is an ever growing number of thoughtful 'adult service providers' that are running their own businesses. Safe, sane and truly fun 'talent' of all shapes, sizes, colors and ages can do well with a broader more open minded clientèle. Making about $50 an hour average....plus trips, dining out and shopping. Ideas about the 'trade' are changing and helping to remove the taboo structure of prostitution. Maybe not 'sex surrogates' (although really come on, thats legal eh? Hilarious) but surely not just ho's. Imagine the ingenuity of Nancy Botwin but selling sex instead. It is happening. Sadly too the dark side is still growing and only getting darker. People selling people into the sex trade and slavery? Imagine if it was just legal. Then again maybe there will always be a market for oppressed people to abuse sexually for money. There are really so many stories and layers going on in this world that the socio economic impact cant be measured accurately. Hey government guys...imagine the Federal Bureau of the Sex Industry. Quality control investigations would be a bitch huh? LOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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The really better looking women
Generally aren't prostitutes per se..
They usually get jobs as "exotic dancers" where all they have to do is display their wares rather than actually sell them.
Not that a lot of exotic dancers don't turn a trick or two on the side but mostly they make enough dancing where they can be choosy about what tricks they turn.
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Prostitution should be legal.
Prostitution should be legal. Someone once commented that using attractive women in advertising--magazines, billboards, etc. (what to speak of women working in topless bars, stripping, or posing nude!) is a subtle form of prostitution--women using their bodies for income.
Tracy Clark-Flory writes:
<< At $25-$30 per hour, prostitutes make approximately four times what they likely would outside of the sex industry. Of course, that doesn't take into consideration on-the-job risks like contracting an STD (condoms were used in only a quarter of dealings) or being assaulted; researchers estimate that sex workers are assaulted an average of once a month. There's also the threat of being arrested, but according to the Economist, "Prostitutes are more likely to have sex with a police officer than to be arrested by one." >>
Problems such as contracting STDs, being assaulted, pimp violence, being arrested, etc. would cease if prostitution were made safe and legal.
Prostitution was legal in ancient India for the same reason the Prohibition of alcohol failed in the United States. Commenting on Srimad Bhagavatam 1.11.19, A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami writes:
"By tricks of chance, one may be obliged to adopt a profession which is not very adorable in society...even in those days, about five thousand years ago, there were prostitutes in a city like Dwarka...This means that prostitutes are necessary citizens for the proper upkeep of society.
"The government opens wine shops, but this does not mean that the government encourages the drinking of wine. The idea is that there is a class of men who will drink at any cost, and it has been experienced that prohibition in great cities encouraged illicit smuggling of wine.
"Similarly, men who are not satisfied at home require such concessions...It is better that prostitutes be available in the marketplace so that the sanctity of society can be maintained."
Even some conservatives concede that prostitution can be victimless. In a 1995 column entitled "Prostitution as a Privacy Right," Robert Craig Paul, a syndicated columnist for the Washington Times, wrote:
"If a woman's right to control the use of her reproductive organs permits her to enter into a cash transaction with an abortionist, then how can this fundamental right of privacy not apply to other transactions involving her use of her body?
"...abortion has been against the law and restricted with greater intensity for more of our history than prostitution, reflecting social norms that abortion, viewed as infanticide, is more immoral than prostitution...
"In contrast (to abortion), prostitution is entirely an act between consenting parties that does not affect the bodily integrity, identity and destiny of a third party (the unborn)...
"It is legal nonsense that privacy conveys the right to abort, but not the right to ingest drugs or engage in sodomy...
"It will be interesting to watch the court sort out on the basis of Roe v. Wade why it is legal for a woman to contract for abortion but not prostitution."
Again, prostitution should be legal.
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On the other hand
was life really great in ancient India? I doubt it.
The problem with relegating sex to a mere physical function is, it's not a mere physical function. If you aren't aware of that, I don't know what to tell you.
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"Ancient India"?!?
Prostitution is legal, right now, in all non-puritan-founded first world countries.
For all the reasons above.
But from the article, this was chilling:
"condoms were used in only a quarter of dealings"
Are Americans really that stupid?
Sorry, I forgot, W got TWO terms... asked and answered.
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vasumurti
I agree with you that prostitution should be legal--but for completely different reasons. I don't believe that women should be discriminated against by the state and forced into an even more uneven power differential with clients--I think they deserve to live and work above ground where their safety doesn't have to be threatened (or police men serviced) to keep the business going.
On the other hand--your argument about prostitution being a victimless crime and preserving the sanctity of marriage is laughable. If my husband sought a prostitute's service to preserve the sanctity of our marriage, it wouldn't be a victimless crime: I'd kill him. That's correct, and I'm sure a lot of women feel the way I do.
So legalized--yes. For reasons of preserving the institution of marriage: no, no, no, and not until hell freezes over, no.