Since I only hold that view because I'm a man, how come she holds the same view?

I guess you've heard of self hating jews?

Some women have a similar problem.

I don't want to weigh in on prostitution. Getting paid a 1,000 dollars to have sex with someone hardly seems a crime in either direction. As Glen and others mentioned, there is a distinction between slavery/kidnapping and consensual sex for money. Did he get the shaft from the DOJ. Of course, but for me and a lot of people I don't think that's the point. The bottom line is that he DID commit a crime, perhaps even more than one, when the banking irregularities are sorted out. These charges are not trumped up.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. The Spitzer scandal will have traction with people not for moral reasons but because the average american is hemmed in on all sides by callous laws that they cannot even bend, much less break. If a working class person bounces a check, it can lead to a cascade of fees that will lead to more bounced checks, and can literally make someone's nest egg disappear overnight. This is literally the definition of injustice, transferring the funds from a poor person to a gigantic corporation. Parking tickets, speeding tickets, street cleaning ordinances, and quality of life crimes, car towing, all the dangerous missteps that a person must face in the day to day, with no quarter given. I was once arrested for pissing in an abandoned lot and spent two days in jail before I could find a bailbondsman who would bond me. I'm not kidding. I should have been cited and released, but unfortunately did not have the benefit of counsel.

What I think angers people about these issues is not the morality, its not even the crime, its the legal noose that seems to only tighten around the necks of the poor and working class. There is a different standard for the rich and powerful. And, right or wrong, that's no small thing...

> No "occupation" that demeans and victimizes so many women -- that even the ones who ostensibly "choose" it as a career move can ever be said to profit a woman, no matter how prettily you try to dress it up.

Kindly explain to all of us why this 'reasoning' would not apply equally well to pornography. As has been mentioned several times, why is "paying someone to have sex with you" a crime but "paying two people to have sex with each other" is protected?

Being a man I'm apparently just totally blind, so please, try to convey this female-only truth that seems so very obvious to you to the rest of us. Explain to me how putting adults of both gender in prison for buying or selling sex is 'liberating' them. Truly, the logic escapes me.

How ironic that you should claim that religious structures are the ones trying to dehumanize women and reduce them to their sexual parts, when they generally share the _exact_ same attitudes about prostitution and sexual freedom as you.

Oh, and about your claim that Glenn is being so chauvinistically male about female prostitutes? I hope you appreciate the irony of accusing an openly gay man of wanting to reduce women to sexual playthings. Must be a Y-chromosone thing; us guys all despise women or something?

No one is trying to "foist" their sexual morality "on the whole world." We live in discrete legal-political units called "states." Within the states, people get to enact the laws as they see fit. This is democracy. I don't care what Japan does and in fact I hope they enact laws as they see fit. I am no more arguing that they ought to have our laws than I am arguing that we ought to have theirs. We ought to have our laws.

And when it comes to our laws, it is 50%+1 that matters. You make this broad statement that, "people who enact laws shouldn’t assume that everyone has to believe and live under their morals." While that sounds great, the real problem is that anytime a law in enacted, someone is going to disagree. Should the person who disagrees be exempt from the law because they disagree? That's the point of having laws: to organize society in a specific way that applies TO EVERYONE. I hope you don't mind my emphasis.

The point is, again, that there is no law which allows the people who disagree with it to not live under it. In fact, that is arguably a central aspect of the "Rule of Law." If you care at all that the government sometimes tortures people, or spies on you illegally, or at a more basic level, that it treats people unfairly based on race, gender, or sexual orientation, then you have to accept and care that the laws are not applied differently depending on the person to whom it is being applied. That is the very definition of equal protection. Sorry, but your point of view is irrational.

I haven't been reading the stuff over the past two days. But I am certain that you won't convince me of anything so long as you maintain ill-thought out platitudes about American sexual culture and irrational beliefs about the application of laws.

Until you have had sex with a man you find offensive or vile, but you must go on, you cannot appreciate this fact. You just can't.

I've never in my life had sex with anyone I found "offensive and vile".

What drove you to it?

We - all of us humans - have a strong personal interest in denying, to ourselves, the fact that we are going to die.

One of the best ways - perhaps the best way yet discovered - of denying our own death is to work ourselves up into a state of titillated emotion about the sex lives of other people.

Tennessee Williams grasped this fact, and wrote about it in his play, "A Streetcar Named Desire" - which he wrote, by the way, during the first years of the Cold War. I would bet that the host of this thread, Glenn Greenwald, recognizes this fact. And it appears that many of the commenters on this thread have faced this fact, too.

These years of crisis are forcing a lot of us to start growing up. Once we have grown up, we can't stop being grownups. We can't stop facing life as it really is, and carrying that reality with us to the polls when we vote and carrying it to the Internet political sites that need our help.