Letters to the Editor
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Pimps are illegal businessmen
Anyone who works with their hands and bodies for a living is being 'exploited' by their boss.
Capitalist law says that if you are a steel worker or farm worker, and you wear out your back or hands etc., that is OK.
Capitalist law in the U.S. also says that you cannot hire a woman or man's parts for sexual labor, and your 'boss', the pimp, is illegal.
The only issue here is legality, not physical exploitation. Prostitutes are the same as anyone who works physically. Dancers, waitresses, you name it. So quit joying in the hangin of this woman.
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Decriminalization
The prostitution laws make less sense the more one looks at them. First, as previously mentioned, they make illegal consensual sexual activity between adults, which should not be the concern of the government.
Next, there is the oddity that sex is only illegal if one party is paid for it. If both partners are paid by a third party who records it and sells it all over the world, that's legal. If two people just record themselves having sex and put it on the internet where people pay to see it, that's legal. If people who are married have sex with people not their partner, that's legal. In fact there are lots of internet dating services that make money helping these people find each other. Despite the fact that none of these activities has brought American society to its knees, we continue to make it illegal for one person to pay another for sex, without any evidence that this type of sex is any more dangerous to society than the others.
Then there is the issue, also raised by others here, that the prostitution laws make it open season on a group of women by labeling them as "bad" and "marginal" people. So the police take advantage of them (as seen in the recent Chicago street worker study), crazy guys feel empowered to beat up or kill them, the police fail to protect them as they would other citizens and prosecutors, as in the Palfrey case, feel free to obtain convictions with 55 years of penalties and thus drive a woman who hasn't hurt anyone to kill herself. Drug dealers are treated better.
Melissa Farley's "study" in NV has been thoroughly discredited by many academics. But even if you believe her conclusions, the answer would not be to keep prostitution illegal. If sexual abuse leads to prostitution, arresting the victims is hardly a solution. Moving all the money spent chasing prostitutes to stopping sexual abuse would make more sense. If you think economic conditions force women into prostitution, the solution isn't to arrest them, but to use that money to create more better paying jobs. And the CDC, which estimates that there are hundreds of thousands of prostitutes in the US, has repeatedly found that they are less likely to spread STD than people engaged in casual dating.
Decriminalization of prostitution is the only rational public policy approach.
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her suicide speaks for itself
She chose to kill herself (and make her elderly mother find her!) rather than admit to herself what she'd done. THAT is prostitution: shame, lack of self love.
Most prosititues do it because they need cash fast and you can't really be fired for coming to work strung out on drugs.
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Madams are not Pimps
It sounds like you need to do more research. If madams were pimps, they wouldn't be called madams. Go interview some people who self-identify as one or the other and see if you still stick by your statement.
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Madams are not Pimps
It sounds like you need to do more research. If madams were pimps, they wouldn't be called madams. Go interview some people who self-identify as one or the other and see if you
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lol--Madams are not Pimps
oh right! I forgot! Saw it in a movie: Madames are high class ladies and pimps are black dudes with big fuzzy hats! Ah, words and how we use them to delude ourselves.
An illegal peddler of flesh who takes advantage of desperation smells just as rotting if you call them a madame or a pimp.
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Deborah Jeane Palfrey was murdered
Susannah Breslin should dig deeper and not buy the cover story of Palfrey commtting suicide. Here is a line from Mrs. Breslin's own article: "Britton was a one-time employee of Palfrey's; after Britton was found hanging in her living room, Palfrey pronounced, ironically: 'I guess I'm made of something that Brandy Britton wasn't made of.'" WTF Mrs. Breslin -- wake up and dig deeper! Your article adds insult to the injustice done to Palfrey -- she was murdered by the powerful men that requested prostitutes from her. Wake up!!!
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The other factor
I think the other thing that needs to be addressed is the reason why men are given a pass for patronizing prostitutes, while the prostitutes themselves are treated so badly.
It's pretty obvious, but as someone mentioned previously, cops often let the johns go, "to spare them humiliation," while arresting, vilifying and prosecuting the women. You think that might have something to do with the fact that for millennia the cops and judges have all been men? They relate to the johns, and see the women as "whores" who prey upon men's “weakness.” But nowhere, at no time (not even in the Bible, where it was, I believe, just the woman who was going to be stoned until Jesus told the crowd that HE who is without sin should cast the first stone...) never does anyone stand up and say, "It's men's responsibility to control their own sexual acting-out."
It's ALWAYS the woman's fault for not calling a halt, whether she is physically capable of doing so or not. Christ, I've even heard people say, "She got herself pregnant," which would be a neat trick if true, but is really just more logical sleight-of-hand to exonerate the man.
How likely then are male cops to see anything really wrong in men seeking sex any way they can get it?
It's been my observation that the degree to which straight men feel controlled by their desire for sex is also the degree to which they hold some pretty scary resentment of women. All their lives they've been told, by parents and/or society that the world is theirs for the taking. But then puberty hits and they find there's this one thing they can't control. And women walk around everywhere, by their mere existence practically flaunting the fact that they have vaginas, and guys can't have everything they want. Women can say 'No!" In the case of prostitutes, they can even charge men their hard-earned (except in the case of Eliot Spitzer) money for access to a vagina.
But no one ever tells the guys that it's their responsibility to control their desire for sex. It seems elementary, but one frequently hears guys talking about how irresistible the urge is, that "we just don't understand, etc. etc." To which the answer is: Tough! You're a guy, your life is good, and if you have a burden of existence it's your job to deal with it in a way that doesn't threaten the wellbeing of society. Women have to menstruate and if we want to procreate we have to go through a huge amount of pain. That's our burden of existence and I doubt any man wants to trade.
I think the fact that most cops and judges have been men means that they ascribe exponentially greater evil to the woman who performs this particular service for a fee, seeing this as exploiting men's "weakness," than they do any blame to boys who "will be boys." But the sex industry would cease to exist without customers.