It's important to notice the complexity of prostitution.
One of the constant difficulties with the debate about prostitution is that it is almost always couched as a debate about prostitution as such: is "prostitution" exploitative or abusive? Should "prostitution" be legalized or decriminalized?
But prostitution/sex work is a widely varied phenomenon. There is street prostitution. There are brothels. There are sex workers who find customers and arrange encounters over the Internet. Some work for other people; some are self-employed. They make widely varied amounts of money and face different levels of compulsion and coercion (from physical coercion to economic necessity to just wanting additional disposable income). Their different circumstances of work also afford them different levels of opportunity to vet potential clients for risk of being cheated or being robbed or being assaulted. And those different circumstances also pose different social costs; it's one thing to live in a community where there is a lot of street prostitution, another where sex work is mostly done invisibility through online arrangements. (You could well live in such a community already.)
This is part of what makes prostitution hard to study. (How could you possibly go about finding a representative sample?) And it is part of what drives the emotional tenor of this debate, because anyone of any ideological standpoint can find people who fit their preferred narrative. There are people who fit the libertarian view: "I have the freedom to sell my body for sex so I can make some more money." There are people who fit the left-wing harm reduction view: people (often part of vulnerable and marginalized social groups) who engage in survival sex and for whom legal obstacles to their work tend to endanger and make things worse. And there are people who fit the left-wing feminist abolitionism view: people for whom prostitution is little more than institutionalized rape and sex slavery.
You might think that this way of framing the issue favors the "legalize and regulate" solution: why not just make it legal and regulate it to eliminate the bad aspects? But the problem is that this proposal may overestimate the ability of the government to effectively regulate prostitution. Prostitution is still intensely socially stigmatized, especially for people who work in it themselves, so legalization by itself doesn't move it "aboveground" such as to make it easy to administer regulations. The regulations legislatures and government bureaucrats draw up don't always have much connection to the actual lives of those people, so they may be ignored and much of the industry left in a legal gray area. Mistrust of government and police doesn't go away with legalization (nor should it, because government and police often behave abusively toward marginalized groups of people). And coercive sex trafficking by all appearances is still profitable enough post-legalization that "legalize and regulate" doesn't stop it. So it is far from obvious that there is a regulatory scheme available to effectively alleviate sexual coercion and other negative aspects of prostitution, and insofar as legalization amounts to a grant of permission for (almost exclusively) men to purchase sex, legalization can make those negative aspects worse by increasing demand.
But abolitionism is problematic too. Obviously abolitionism is appropriate for cases of coercion. But that is not all prostitution. Most obviously, abolitionism hurts anybody who sees sex work as their best option in their circumstances. It reinforces social stigma (which, even under the Swedish model that only criminalizes purchasers, tends to target sex workers too). For those sex workers who have some ability to control the circumstances of their work, it limits their flexibility, by imposing legal risks on customers and on third parties (landlords, banks) that make them more anxious and less cooperative. It licenses abusive behavior by officials and police, who, whatever the official ideology of the law, rarely tend to make the actual well-being of people in prostitution their priority.
The point here is not to say what policy approach you should support. I don't have the answers. And maybe there is no good answer as long as our society is so deeply suffused with patriarchy and sexual shame. One minimalist answer: it is definitely true (and should be a point of consensus) that no one should be criminalizing or shaming the people who work in prostitution. And whatever policy approach you advocate beyond that, be aware of the people whose interests you might be neglecting and whose voices you might be silencing.
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and sexual shame."
Sadly, I tend to think this way as well. 
They are a social design and control system for the rich. And are designed to make shiftless, fatass donut-eaters look like they've earned their pay.
If I wasn't clear, let me repeat:
[CENTER][FONT SIZE=8]BULLSHIT[/FONT][/CENTER]
- We all sell our bodies. Just different parts.......
K&R
With that being said, I really do not have any answers either.
But a damn fine start to a good discussion.
Kick. Rec. 
