You said: 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.

What you need to add here, tina, is that even if Glenn Greenwald has had sex with someone whom he considers "offensive and vile" that he might not be able to have sex in the same manner as a woman would. He lacks a vagina. You keep attempting to argue with people who will not read your links because they have their own foregone conclusion and do not wish to be educated further in the matter. To examine too closely the reasons why prostitution is repugnant to most women would mean to deal with differences both anatomical and psychological between men and women. Feminists who prefer to believe that almost all differences between men and women are cultural do not want to do this. Men who prefer never too look too closely at the way that purchased sex demeans women do not want to do this either. They might have to recall times that their wives or girlfriends may have acquiesced to a compromise sort of sex with them when they in truth found them "offensive and vile."

To the subset of high-priced (generally) call girls (they tend to be several classes above street hooker) that entirely voluntarily do it to pay their way very comfortably through college, for instance?

"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).

Not all of those that are in the broad class of prostitute are coerced or without control. The street-level set are very likely so, but the "high class" set...not so much.

It's a sad thing to watch someone fall so hard. There are many things to be learned here, as Glenn points out.

The biggest lesson and most outrageous thing I learned is that the federal government, with the help of their corporate helpers the banks, track most or all bank transactions. In a sense, we are all suspects now.

If what's going on here isn't the definition of a surveillance society and fascist state, I don't know what is. Welcome to the new Soviet Union.

Sex with someone you don't like. That can be good.

Exactly. Banning prostitution only creates a market for pimps and mobsters who are willing to violate many more laws in order to reap artificially high prostitution profits at the expense of the women who would otherwise receive the entire profit.

-- prunes

Exactly. Banning prostitution only creates a market for pushers and mobsters who are willing to violate many more laws in order to reap artificially high drug profits at the expense of the men and women who would otherwise live their own life. (sorry to butcher your prose so shamelessly)

Hey Glenn.

I dunno if you read all these comments, but consider this:

human nature seldom, if ever, has anything to do with "rational discourse."

Human nature, when you get right down to it, can be summed up by the phrase "what's in it for me?"

Using that criterion, instead of the criterion of "rational discourse" all the gabble about Spitzer can be clarified quickly and easily. Just consider the source, what the source is saying, and, thus, what's in it for them. Period.

I will concede that humans can act in an altruistic, even selfless way, but it's almost always a form of reciprocal altruism, that is, even in an altruistic act, there's something in it for me. Something valuable enough that I engage in the altruism in the first place.

Far more often, though, humans are simply striving to dominate...whether it's a set of cubicles in an office, a few city blocks in south Los Angeles, or entire countries.

Humans want to dominate. That's what we do. We want control, and the benefits that come with control. That is the essence of politics. So, everyone writing and speaking all this gabble about Spitzer has an ax to grind. Everyone. And, thus, while I'm all in favor of rational discourse--I really am--I cannot see where such discourse gets people what they think they want, whatever it may be. Deceit and irrationality are far more potent tools for a human to use to get what they want, and your column here proves it pretty handily, in the sense that everything you cite displays almost nothing BUT irrationality and deceit.

For what it's worth.

For example, should crackheads be allowed to be prostitutes to pay for their drugs?

Umm.. If crack were legal, it would be inexpensive enough that users wouldn't need to go into illegal businesses to afford it.

Prohibition *always* drives up the price of the item prohibited.

For instance, cannabis is basically a weed which grows almost anywhere it is not actively eradicated.

And yet cannabis is the #1 cash crop in the US of A..

Cause...Effect..

It's really quite simple.

with your comparisons and your insights, but little do you and the other heretics know that your continued wrongness is the face of Tina’s axiomatic rightness merely labels you as a patron and therefore oppressor of coerced prostitutes and a denier of what your own heart knows to be true. Cease your futile resistance! Tina is privilege to the truth, all who oppose her are wrong and are merely trying to cloak they’re dark, prostitute using, shame.

resignation announcements from our professional client philanders across the aisle?

Or, should Spitzer have simply asked Jesus to forgive him to keep his job?

The Governer of NY is hardly the only hypocrite.

"I am really astonished -- though I know I shouldn't be -- by how much people enjoy expressing moral outrage over the sexual lives of other people."

I hear you. One very unsurprising underlying pathology among large segments of faux Puritan America is its fascination with sex--sex, being a biologic imperative regardless of orientation, this should be no more surprising to people than becoming thirsty and needing water. But the prurient or salacious quality of the interest and the moral outrage that seems to follow I attribute to misogynistic religious doctrine, male sexual inadequacy or dysfunction, and a misscaled moral barometer that ranks sex as more problematic than the wholesale killing of human beings and the destruction of our biologic lifesblood--the planet. This is learned not innate.

I came to the immutable conclusion a long time ago that 40% (and that may underestimate the actual number) of the American population is not only factually misinformed, they are afflicted by mental illness of one variety or another and have a limited capacity for empathy that stops at the family/tribal level due to acculturation via American mythologies like "bootstrapping/equal opportunity/equality/theocracy of prosperity". People are taught to cognitively disconnect from reality at a young age. These same people rarely become high functioning critical thinking adults but rather remain trapped in a moral and functional state of adolescence.

We've also become a physically and mentally ill society because of the way many are forced to live their lives has them all out of whack. From the way we produce and consume food, to the poisonous materials in the homes we live, to the "medicines" we take, to how our economcy must necessarily structure our work lives and tasks. We've entered a period of neo-feudalism but instead of agrarian based it is technology based.

We are at root elegant biomechanical electrochemical machines illsuited by process of evolution for this particular lifestyle and it's making us sick in myriad ways. Hypersexualiztion is symptomatic of a fundamental imbalance. We don't eat, sleep, exercise, socialize, engage in sexual relationships, or work in ways consistent with biologic imperitives. Just my .02 pop psychology pseudoscience analysis which when combined with $1.73 might buy somone a bus ticket.