Noli Irritare Leones

The Spitzer scandal has inspired a bunch of the bloggers I follow to start discussing whether prostitution should be legal. So, here, again, is my basic position.

There are three different goods that people propose to promote, when discussing possible policies on prostitution.

1) Sexual freedom/liberty/choice: Women should be free to do what they like with their bodies. Those women who want to, should be free to sell their sexual services. To restrict that right, as long as the choice is voluntary, is wrong.

2) Sexual morality: Prostitution is an intrinsically wrong commodification of sexuality, and should be prohibited on that ground. (And this is true even in those cases where prostitution is, in some reasonable sense, a voluntary act on the part of the prostitute.)

3) Prevention of sexual slavery and trafficking, and mitigation of harm suffered by prostitutes.

Now, obviously goods #1 and #2 are inherently in conflict, while good #3 could, at least theoretically, be reconciled with either good #1 or good #2, depending on what you think the facts on the ground, and your available policy options, may be. And, it also seems clear to me that, when it comes to what the government should allow or prohibit, good #3 trumps either good #1 or good #2. On the one hand, if, hypothetically, the only way you can properly protect women from being trafficked into prostitution is to legalize and regulate, then that’s what you should do, even if legalizing and regulating increases the number of men cheating on their wives with entirely voluntary prostitutes, and even though cheating on your wife is genuinely and gravely wrong. On the other hand, if, say, about 50% of a given set of prostitutes are in the business willingly and about 50% in the business unwillingly, and the only way you can get the unwilling ones out of the business is to adopt some policy – Swedish system of punishing johns and not whores, say – that dries up the business of all the willing prostitutes, then the need of the unwilling ones to get out trumps the desire of the willing ones to stay in business, and, go Swedish system!

Where I’m uncertain on the best policy on prostitution is that there are credible arguments that many different policies suck and fail at achieving goal #3. In which context I’ll link Brad Plumer’s comprehensive prostitution policy rundown (via Matt Yglesias).

Other prostitution stuff:

Crooked Timber, with an eye to history, reviewed the centuries old pamphlet On the Diminished Disgrace of Whores and Their Children in Our Day.

Scott Lemieux says

If poor sex workers are thrown in jail under existing laws, then affluent white johns sure as hell should be too. This goes double for people who have positions that might allow them to work to repeal laws they don’t feel are just.

bean takes Laura Schlesinger to task for suggesting, in the context of the Spitzer case, that wives’ neglect drives their husband to cheat. Because, I guess, everyone is so naturally monogamous as to never even think of sleeping with someone else if he’s getting enough at home. Yep, no one ever actually wants sexual variety.

Every so often, Amanda Marcotte absolutely nails it.

On the other hand, I’m disgusted by some of the intellectual dishonesty employed by people defending prostitution. By that, I mean the invocation of the Sad Unfuckable John. You know the image—in any debate about prostitution, the pro-legalization ones will overplay their hand and argue that prostitution is this positive thing, because it makes sex available to men, who by virtue of being ugly or deeply nerdy or whatever, are basically unable to get sex from volunteers.

Yes! The “Sad Unfuckable John” argument is wrong on just so many levels. One is that no one is entitled to get laid if no one is willing to sleep with them; it follows that “Sad Unfuckable John” is only an argument for prostitution if prostitution isn’t so inherently bad, wrong, exploitive, or coercive as to be unacceptable – in which case, really, why can’t the prostitute be free to sell her services to reasonably fuckable Charlie Sheen or Hugh Grant, as well as Sad Unfuckable John? If there’s nothing wrong with prostitution, then there’s nothing wrong with the fuckable, as well as the unfuckable, availing of its benefits. Otherwise, surely the prostitute’s interest in not being screwed is of more moral weight than Sad Unfuckable John’s interest in finally getting laid.

The second thing wrong with the Sad Unfuckable John argument is the way it gets tied to the “See, the fact that there are prostitutes selling to men and not to women proves that women have sexual power” argument. Because there’s no way men would use prostitutes if they weren’t unfuckable, and no way a blooming market of male prostitutes for women wouldn’t spring up if some women were, in fact, sexually frustrated.

The third thing wrong with the Sad Unfuckable John argument is that, as Amanda Marcotte points out, it’s empirically false – if meant to describe the majority of johns. In a world where multiple movie stars, and rich and powerful men (non-worksafe blog) have been linked to prostitutes, the notion that men only use prostitutes when they can’t possibly get any otherwise should be laughable. And, even if you look at prostitutes’ non-movie star clientele, an awful lot of them are married, have girl friends, or otherwise are quite capable of getting laid for free; they simply choose to pay, for whatever reason.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 12th, 2008 at 7:27 am and is filed under Sexuality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.