Reply #59: I dislike the idea of desperate women (and some men) [View All]

[Lyric]

going to jail just because they were trying to make their rent money any way that they could. At the very least, there should be no legal consequences for prostitutes themselves.

I still haven't decided whether or not I think we should fully legalize it as a service. I can see both sides of the argument--it does contribute to the idea that our bodies are merely objects to be used for someone else's sexual gratification. However, I don't see much of a substantial difference between someone being paid to provide sexual physical manipulation and someone being paid to provide any other type of physical labor. In the end, regardless of what our jobs are, we are ALL selling our bodies, brains, and skills. So long as we live in a capitalist society, what's the intrinsic difference between selling yourself to indulge someone else's greed for sex and selling yourself to indulge someone else's greed for money? We all do THAT and we don't consider it immoral or degrading--at least not enough that we want it to be illegal to labor for an outside party's benefit--a.k.a., having a job.

Sure, it's exploitation--but is it more exploitive than what the corporate greedmasters do to the working class of the planet? Enough so to support the idea of non-sex-labor-for-money as a legitimate means of survival, but sex-labor-for-money as "wrong"? Remove the moralistic "Ewwww, it's SEX!" part from the equation, and I really don't think it is. It's just another way for the Haves to exploit the Have Nots. I am not sure it's fair to say, "Yes, it should be legal for poor factory workers to be exploited as a class, but NOT legal for poor prostitutes...because WE don't approve of THAT sort of work." Note that I am differentiating between mere disapproval, and disapproval on a severe enough level to want something made ILLEGAL. I doubt that ANY of us "approve" of the capitalist exploitation system, but there are damned few of us who think it should be made illegal right at this very minute.

Ideally, I'd like to see ALL exploitation become a relic of the past, but until it does, it doesn't seem fair to pick on prostitutes. In the end, just like us, they're trying to survive in this dog-eat-dog capitalist world. Perhaps empowering prostitutes with legalization (while drastically INCREASING the penalties for "pimping", which is basically just slavery) can at least lead to a reduced level of disease, abuse, and direct exploitation. As for those who argue that "No little girl grows up WANTING to be a whore", my response is that your statement relies heavily upon paternalistic and sexist definitions of "whore" in order to shock, offend, and persuade us. If we remove the paternalistic taboos about sex, if we no longer consider the idea of a woman fully in control of her own sexuality as abhorrent, if we create a set of protections that severely limit the risks of disease and abuse to levels that are about the same as they are in the general population, then why would the idea of our daughters (and sons!) selling sex be so terrible? After all, it's only an awful idea because when we think of the word "prostitute", we think of a woman whose sexuality does not conform to our social norm--we think she's dirty, diseased, sad, desperate, gullible, immoral, possessing no self-respect--but what if being a prostitute DIDN'T mean any of those things? Norms CAN be changed. Whether or not they WILL be is another discussion entirely.

Still haven't made up my mind completely, but I think these are things worth truly THINKING about. All too often this subject just becomes yet another opportunity for people to consider it from a viewpoint that's a mile wide and an inch deep.