on persecuting prostitutes involved in the Palfrey case, go here:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/10/AR2008041003486.html

It is society's very attitude towards prostitution that makes it difficult for them to leave sex work and find other employment.

Remember, the demand is irrational while the decision to profit off it is very rational.

I disagree. Women get involved in sex work at young ages -- many are minors -- and for very irrational reasons. You seem to want to dismiss the psychological aspects of prostitution while paying attention only to the economic ones.

A significant percentage of prostitutes and former prostitutes were victims of child sexual abuse. Most come from families with various dysfunctions. Many work as prostitutes in order to feed a drug habit. In many instances, I would say that the choice to frequent a prostitute is much more deliberate and deliberated than the reasons the prostitute ended up in the business in the first place. You seem to be equating Johns to drug addicts who need their fix without supplying a shred of evidence that these two "needs" equate.

Penalizing prostitutes but not the johns is a travesty of criminal justice. Why is it a lesser crime to be the market for selling bodies than the bodies that serve it? Somehow, in the eyes of the law, the victims are the men who pay for a fantasy.

While I don't see how punishing prostitutes changes the dynamic, putting sex and work into a job description is an emotional and psychological oxymoron. The women in this article refer to the emotional consequences of being targeted as criminals, but they don't address the emotional consequences of selling one's body, of selling one's body while knowing it's a criminal act. The sex workers I've known feel a devastating combination of internal, personal and external, political pressure, of anger and sadness.

Our bodies house the spirit and the mind, the fiction that something that happens to one doesn't affect the others is just as damaging as the fiction that prostitutes are happy hookers or that sex work is simply a job without clothes and value judgments. This goes for the men as well as the women. If a guy believes that the girl he's paid for is really a going to medical school, or doing this part time for money to send her kid to private school, he's lying to himself and contributing to the delusion. I'd bet he's lying to his wife as well.

We Americans lie to ourselves about sex. We espouse abstinence because sex is dirty and distracts us from God. We use sex to sell beer and trucks and music. We glamourize motherhood and babies, but not the sex that procreation requires. We divorce sex from life and create this fantasy world of lust without consequence.

No one wants to think of their mother or daughter as selling herself for money. The sorrowful presence of Deborah Jeane Palfrey's mother as witness to her daughter's life and death reminds us that sex isn't just physical. It is an integral part of our being that should neither be criminalized nor reduced to meaninglessness.

You respond:

"You seem to want to dismiss the psychological aspects of prostitution while paying attention only to the economic ones."

Yes. That's exactly what I'm doing, because the women interviewed for this article gave rational accounts of their career decisions.

One went into business for herself in part because she could do what her madam was doing and keep the money. Another left the corporate world to become an escort precisely "for the money". Another, who reported she'd only slept with 8 people prior to her career move, insisted that people stereotype prostitutes as sexually dysfunctional, but often this isn't the case.

Certainly many sex workers are forced into prostitution. On the other hand, many others go into it voluntarily, presumably for the money. Palfrey appears to fit into this latter category.

Of course, you can characterize all sex workers as victims, but at some point isn't everybody? You can find fault with the criminal justice system and advocate for a focus on the rehabilitation of offenders, if that's more palatable, but I would be hesitant to exonerate these rational economic actors.

"Why is it that, of all the things our bodies can do, only sex can get your thrown in jail?"

Oh, there's a lot of things our bodies can do. They can steal, write bad checks, hit people, use illegal drugs, money launder - but to get to what I think was your main point,

because the hired sex is a real negative for society.

To wit:

1. Prostitution (and porn) make men absolute terds. Rather than protecting and defending women and children, they pay them to destroy themselves. It’s the worst of a man. A society with louts for men is a terrible society.

3. Almost uniformly, women prostitute themselves because:

- they are addicts and need to get high

- they were molested as kids and have a psycho sickness to keep punishing themselves

- they are sexual slaves or victims of pimps

If you think it's a valid and exciting lifestyle for women, consider pimping our your wife or daughters. If that doesn't give you pause, you are sick in the head. That reluctance or disgust you (hopefully) feel at the notion? It's an unwillingness to kill a woman you love. Even if a prostitute is not physically killed from her activity, her spirit is killed. Women don't last long in this "career." It destroys them.

4. Prostitution destroys families by encouraging and legitimizing fornication and adultery. This damages society at large and children in particular.

5. There are of course the social costs of the spread of STDs. Oh yes, regulate, and we will fix it. Well, we have 20 STDs and counting (up from 4 or 5 thirty years ago). All that sex ed and so many countries legalizing it or not enforcing existing laws! Also, as Mr. Spitzer has so nicely illustrated, unsafe sex gets a premium.

6. Children result from encounters with whores. Not all birth control works well, even if used. Even tubal ligation has a small failure rate, while condoms, even properly used, have the worst failure rate. These children are either aborted (I know few libertarians care, but I do) or are raised by whore moms. The number of infamous killers and mental cases raised by whores is anecdotally high (sorry, no study to cite, but if you think about some famous mass murderers/rapists I'm sure a few names will come to mind.)

In short prostitution is not a victimless crime and society, as a whole, has made it illegal for that reason.