"WHISPER, a Minneapolis-based organization of women who have both survived and who are coming out of prostitution, and who are committed to ending prostitution as a form of violence against women, found it difficult to identify job skills gained in prostitution which would advance anyone’s career (Gamache, 1991, p.4). They found that the "skills" of prostitution are: performing sex acts, feigning sexual enjoyment, enduring all kinds of bodily violation, and allowing your body to be used in any imaginable way by another person (Giobbe, 1990, p.4). What young girl would we encourage to develop these "skills?" Yet there are now "courses" to teach would-be "sex workers," as they are called, the sexual techniques of prostitution and everything they need to know to become "skilled" in the trade (7).

What prostituted women must endure in their "employment" is, what in other contexts, would be the accepted definition of sexual harassment and sexual abuse in the workplace -- "employer" behavior that is unwanted and insulting, and unwelcome sexual attention, violence, and conduct that is offensive and threatening. What then happens to women in prostitution whose very "job" -- if we term it "commercial sex work" -- constitutes, what in any other "workplace," would be defined as sexual harassment and abuse (8)? It is the exchange of money in prostitution that serves to transform what is actually sexual harassment, sexual abuse, and sexual violence into a "job" known as "commercial sex work," a "job" performed primarily by racially and economically disadvantaged women in the so-called first and third worlds (9), and by overwhelming numbers of women and children who have been the victims of childhood sexual abuse (10)."

Another term that misrepresents the exploitation of prostitution, and the harm that it does to women, is the term "forced prostitution."(11) What does this term mean? It means we are encouraged to distinguish forced prostitution from free prostitution? The Human Rights Watch Report not only consistently uses "forced prostitution" throughout, but also the term "forced trafficking"(Human Rights Watch/Asia, 1995, p.7). Are we to assume, then, that there is "free trafficking?" Building on the shaky foundation of consensual prostitution, do we now have "consensual trafficking" where some women and children freely choose to be trafficked from one place to another? Few human rights activists and people of conscience would use the term "forced slavery" or "forced apartheid" but so glibly slip into the language of forced prostitution and, now, forced trafficking.

The sex industry makes no distinctions between forced and free prostitution while encouraging others to do so. The industry is linked financially and politically with groups like COYOTE in the United States to promote prostitution as a woman’s personal choice, proclaiming that the worst thing about prostitution is that the women are stigmatized. But the worst thing about prostitution is its violation of and violence against women and children. Although claiming to be a prostitutes rights organization, COYOTE works more for the rights of the customers and the industry, rather than for the rights of women to leave prostitution. The former director of COYOTE, Margo St. James, served as a witness for the defense at the pimping trial of well-known U.S. pornographers, and works to abolish U.S. laws against pimping and soliciting women for the purpose of prostitution (12).

You have a very personal take on this issue that springs from your own experiences, and you think your own conclusions should be acepted by all women, and those who disagree just need to learn that your judgment is superior.

Some of us are just naturally morally superior to the rest of the human race and it is only right and just that our opinions should carry more weight than benighted others.

I'd still like to know about Tina's sexual experiences when she had intercourse with partners who were "vile and disgusting"..

She must have been really desperate for money.

Glenn Greenwald is temporarily insane.

I wrote that to have sex with someone you found objectionable and vile was demeaning.

I was then told to please shut up, because I must be relating a personal experience, and I don't matter, and my experiences don't matter, so just shut up.

Leaving aside the wrongness of that (aren't we supposed to take what "happy" hookers say on faith? what about unhappy hookers?), I was not speaking as a sex worker. I was talking from a viewpoint of compassion and empathy, which most of you people seem to lack utterly.

I think this is really the root of the matter.

Via one of the rare instances in which I disagree with you Glenn, I can now see why so many people find you to be an annoying and petulant jerk. Jeez man, there's a rationale argument to be made that Spitzer f-ed up and needs to resign. I and many other thoughtful rationale people think that Spitzer's hypocrisy is simply too glaring for him to be able to hang around.

He prosecuted prostitution rings, and then got caught in the midst of one. Therefore he needs to step down. Yes or no? THAT'S the discussion that needs to take place. But you yourself have destroyed the possibility for rationale discourse here as much anyone else with your merciless sarcasm, dismissive tone, and--most importantly--insistence that this be about the relative moral pros and cons of prostitution. That's NOT what this issue is about.

One's personal feelings about whether prostitution should be legal or not, whether it's good or bad, comments about "the oldest profession" and so on are irrelevant. Again, Spitzer prosecuted prostitution rings and now he's caught in the midst of one. If he was caught buying pot in a drug sting, there'd be just as big of a flap, and the same arguments would still be there REGARDLESS of one's opinions about the legalization of marijuana.

You're avoiding the basic problem by taking a snarky, mocking tone because some people might actually think what Spitzer did was wrong. Come on Glenn, you want to be a bully? Then get your own radio show.

A young woman with two children works as a nurse's aide in a nursing home. She earns $10 per hour cleaning up human poo, pee, vomit, saliva, doing hard physical work for long hours in a noisy unpleasant atmosphere. Fine.

One day she calls in sick from her job. She still gets paid in her absence. She makes a phone call and a man comes to her house and has sex with her. Fine.

She quits her job, thus saving on gasoline and childcare fees, and receives a phone call and a man comes over and has sex with her. She has to clean up some semen with a washcloth, brush her teeth, launder the sheets and towels, and her day is done.

He gives her some money, more money than she could have earned in two days at the nursing home.

Now she has done something evil, she has contributed to the degradation of women all over the world because of her selfishness.

This seems to be the view of the moralists who can see the significance of an act which is not apparent to those individuals actually engaged in the act.

Yet if she becomes pregnant and she destroys the fetus, she is within her rights and those same moralists will very likely claim she has a right to choose, even when others sincerely believe she is committing a terrrible crime by ending a life.

It seems to me that every human act has layers of meaning like the layers of an onion, and we will argue for ever about whose interpretation is the ultimate layer.

In the early 1930's George Orwell went to the town of Wigan in the industrial north of England to examine working conditions during the recession of that decade. He wrote a very famous and influential (and controversial) passage as follows, describing what he saw from a train.

At the back of one of the houses a young woman was kneeling on the stones, poking a stick up the leaden waste-pipe which ran from the sink inside and which I suppose was blocked. I had time to see everything about her--her sacking apron,her clumsy clogs, her arms reddened by the cold. She looked up as the train passed, and I was almost near enough to catch her eye. She had a round pale face, the usual exhausted face of the slum girl who is twenty-five and looks forty, thanks to miscarriages and drudgery; and it wore, for the second in which I saw it, the most desolate, hopeless expression I have ever-seen. It struck me then that we are mistaken when we say that' It isn't the same for them as it would be for us,' and that people bred in the slums can imagine nothing but the slums. For what I saw in her face was not the ignorant suffering of an animal. She knew well enough what was happening to her--understood as well as I did how dreadful a destiny it was to be kneeling there in the bitter cold, on the slimy stones of a slum backyard, poking a stick up a foul drain-pipe. [The Road to Wigan Pier]

Writer Paul Theroux visited the same scene fifty years later, and as best he could he located the houses seen from the train, and spoke to a woman of about seventy five, who could easily have been the same woman, as she had lived there all her life. Her memories of the thirties were that things were not so bad, the community was very tight, and she used to have a lot of fun.[The Kingdom By The Sea]

Who was right? Were they both right? Maybe the situation experienced by the people of Wigan in the thirties was awful, but if they didn't know it, then did it count?

It seems to me that it is similar with prostitution. If a man and a woman enter into an agreement together and both are happy with it, does society have a right to criminalize them because society is aware of greater evils that the lusty couple aren't aware of?

Maybe yes, maybe no. I have paid for sex in the past (though never in the US, which may be different) and found it to be an overwhelmingly positive and life affirming experience. I know many people have different experiences and views. Now I am way too old to be bothered with that stuff any more, so I really don't have a dog in the fight, but isn't it a bit like abortion?

Better to have it legal and regulated than going on in secret where no one has any legal protections at all.