Why is prostitution illegal?

[Crowbob]

To try to articulate one gross and overly-simplistic rationale: Price fixing. Because prostitution is the cheapest sex there is, it forces the cost downward. Sex has always been a negotiable commodity. You pay one way or the other in the long run. If prostitution were legalized, the stigma would evenutally evaporate, competition would increase and the economic value of sex would diminish.

I believe many womens' obsessions about their looks is directly due to their attempts to make their sex more valuable than someone else's. Legalizing prostitution would be devastating to gyneconomics. One rarely mentioned reason that more and more women are in the workforce is because sex is becoming cheaper and more available.

Feminism and the sexual revolution has pretty much back-fired on women. To counter this we see all kinds of artificial economic pressures such as the fictitious claims of gender wage disparity, affirmative action, unjust divorce law, etc.

Legalizing prostitution would be the nail in the coffin, so to speak.

In my opinion, I don't see women being happier now. They are beginning to work harder and longer are angrier and are dying sooner.

For men the issue would become even more one of why buy when you can rent?

Right about now, before flaming, please re-read the first sentence.

[reachme]

Germany, Italy, Netherlands all have legal, taxed prostitution houses/high rises and they have some of the strongest workers rights laws anywhere.
I don't really know but I expect these are still sad seedy places, yes pun intended.

[Tobra]

Careful there Robert, you just implied that all women are whores.

I know there are downsides to it, but it seems like in some places it works out not too horribly, and in others it is just tragic. That to me says it is just a matter of managing it appropriately. You assure that it is two consenting adults, and the rest is just haggling over price.

[scottmandue]

Originally Posted by Craig T

Where ever prostitution is legal, young women are exploited or even enslaved. If money can be made, heartless people will work the system. Thailand and Vietnam have legal prostitute and have a terrible sex slavery trade.

This to ten thousand!

Easy for us men to sit around trying to be all intellectual and pretend there is a not huge physiological price paid when a women has to sell herself for money.

Or a huge danger to a women to go off alone with a stranger to preform questionable service to/for him.

India also has a terrible sex slavery trade (and other countries).

There is a lot more to this than the mean old guberment or religious community forcing it's morality on you.

For that matter it doesn't take a whole lot of ingenuity to 'pay for services' here in the good old U. S. of A. if you have a mind to.

[oilcan]

Nice job MRM. I think you nailed it.

[Cajundaddy]

Legalize, tax, regulate, educate. Legislating morality has essentially always backfired throughout history. We currently have a thriving sex slave industry right here in every major city in the US that is run by cartels and is simply meeting a demand. See Craigslist personals.

Frank Zappa was right about this. We should stick to making laws we can actually enforce.

[foxpaws]

Originally Posted by MRM

When I was a prosecutor one of the student practice clinics specialized in defending prostitution cases. They had a phenomenal record of success. The professor who headed the program told me that the secret to their success was that they struck from the jury anyone who lived near the neighborhoods affected by prostitution. He said that to anyone who was not directly affected, prostitution is a complete non-issue but to anyone who lives close enough to it to be impacted it is their number one quality of life complaint.

I think that pretty much explains the attitudes toward prostitution. People who aren't close enough to see it don't think it's much of a problem and don't really understand why it's illegal. People who have seen behind the curtain consider it a scourge on humanity.

There are a lot of good reasons. I can go over a short list of some of the big reasons. Prostitution is rarely an arms-length transaction between consenting adults. There is almost always an element of compulsion on the prostitute's part. Healthy women do not repeatedly exchange sex for money with strangers. Almost all prostitutes were abused as children and almost all are either chemically dependent, mentally ill, or both. At some point all prostitution is controlled by some organized criminal gang, right down to the corner street walkers. Prostitution spreads disease and johns will pay extra to not use protection. By the nature of their transaction, whether legal or not, both prostitutes and johns are vulnerable to violence by the other. The secondary effects on neighborhoods are well known and prostitution leads to other crimes and property degradation. That doesn't even get into the whole human trafficking issue.

But as a practical matter, you can't run a massage parlor, outcall business, brothel, or even a streetwalker gang without human trafficking. You just don't have the numbers necessary to keep the business operating. That means that you have to kidnap, buy or drug and coerce enough people to staff your business and keep them from going somewhere else or escaping. Even the most benign looking bath house or massage parlor is staffed by prostitutes who were trafficked. That's how they get they and that's why they stay.

If prostitution was in practice an arms-length transaction between fully consenting adults with equal power, it would have more arguments in its favor. But it isn't.

Aren't almost all those problems caused by keeping prostitution illegal and unregulated? If legalized and regulated, wouldn't it look more like prohibition/repeal of prohibition. During prohibition organized crime took over the making/distribution/selling of booze - because it was highly profitable, once prohibition was repealed, and the sale of liquor once again became legal and regulated, organized crime pretty much got out of the liquor business, it was no longer as profitable, and it was fairly highly regulated. To this day the sale of 'illegal' booze isn't a very big problem, you can't get it that cheap 'off the books' and the people you have to deal with aren't very 'appealing'.

To say that you couldn't keep the numbers 'up' is a red herring - if it were legal and regulated, and the women got to keep a majority of their profits, and were able to keep it to 'safe sex' practices, there may be more women willing to provide that service. If you add in 'legal, safe, regulated' to the equation, while subtracting out the organized crime and violence factors, you don't know that you wouldn't have the 'numbers necessary' to provide the service in a legal environment.

Prostitution currently, because of its illegal status, isn't a transaction between consenting adults, but that doesn't mean it has to be that way - it is the illegality that creates all the scenarios that you sketched out, not the transaction itself.

[TheMentat]

Originally Posted by MRM

When I was a prosecutor one of the student practice clinics specialized in defending prostitution cases. They had a phenomenal record of success. The professor who headed the program told me that the secret to their success was that they struck from the jury anyone who lived near the neighborhoods affected by prostitution. He said that to anyone who was not directly affected, prostitution is a complete non-issue but to anyone who lives close enough to it to be impacted it is their number one quality of life complaint.

I think that pretty much explains the attitudes toward prostitution. People who aren't close enough to see it don't think it's much of a problem and don't really understand why it's illegal. People who have seen behind the curtain consider it a scourge on humanity.

There are a lot of good reasons. I can go over a short list of some of the big reasons. Prostitution is rarely an arms-length transaction between consenting adults. There is almost always an element of compulsion on the prostitute's part. Healthy women do not repeatedly exchange sex for money with strangers. Almost all prostitutes were abused as children and almost all are either chemically dependent, mentally ill, or both. At some point all prostitution is controlled by some organized criminal gang, right down to the corner street walkers. Prostitution spreads disease and johns will pay extra to not use protection. By the nature of their transaction, whether legal or not, both prostitutes and johns are vulnerable to violence by the other. The secondary effects on neighborhoods are well known and prostitution leads to other crimes and property degradation. That doesn't even get into the whole human trafficking issue.

But as a practical matter, you can't run a massage parlor, outcall business, brothel, or even a streetwalker gang without human trafficking. You just don't have the numbers necessary to keep the business operating. That means that you have to kidnap, buy or drug and coerce enough people to staff your business and keep them from going somewhere else or escaping. Even the most benign looking bath house or massage parlor is staffed by prostitutes who were trafficked. That's how they get they and that's why they stay.

If prostitution was in practice an arms-length transaction between fully consenting adults with equal power, it would have more arguments in its favor. But it isn't.

All great points, however, I can't help but think that a lot of the negative issues you mention are caused but the fact that it is illegal.

- Today, neighbourhoods that are negatively affected by prostitution are mostly affected by the criminal element that surrounds it. If it were legal, and forced to obey municipal zoning bylaws like every other business, wouldn't a lot of that disappear?

- Wouldn't legalizing it shrink profit margins from the business enough to make it less attractive to organized crime? Health codes to limit disease?

- If it were a legit business wouldn't it be much more difficult to operate as a human trafficking operation?

EDIT: looks like fox beat me to it...

[nzporsche944s2]

Originally Posted by Crowbob

To try to articulate one gross and overly-simplistic rationale: Price fixing. Because prostitution is the cheapest sex there is, it forces the cost downward. Sex has always been a negotiable commodity. You pay one way or the other in the long run. If prostitution were legalized, the stigma would evenutally evaporate, competition would increase and the economic value of sex would diminish.

I believe many womens' obsessions about their looks is directly due to their attempts to make their sex more valuable than someone else's. Legalizing prostitution would be devastating to gyneconomics. One rarely mentioned reason that more and more women are in the workforce is because sex is becoming cheaper and more available.

Feminism and the sexual revolution has pretty much back-fired on women. To counter this we see all kinds of artificial economic pressures such as the fictitious claims of gender wage disparity, affirmative action, unjust divorce law, etc.

Legalizing prostitution would be the nail in the coffin, so to speak.

In my opinion, I don't see women being happier now. They are beginning to work harder and longer are angrier and are dying sooner.

For men the issue would become even more one of why buy when you can rent?

Right about now, before flaming, please re-read the first sentence.

This is golden! Especially the second paragraph! "gyneconomics" is my new favourite word..wait until I share this one with the boys over a beer tonight....

[Racerbvd]

Originally Posted by 70SATMan

Really? None, NADA, no beer? Being serious cause I never realized we still had completely dry areas.

They must be sad places.

Yep..

You Can’t Legally Buy Jack Daniel’s In The Town Where It’s Made
By Jeff Kelly on Friday, December 6, 2013
179196998
“Oh brother, be a brother, fill this tiny cup of mine. And please, sir, make it whiskey: I have no head for wine!” —Nick Cave, “Brother My Cup is Empty”
In A Nutshell

Jack Daniel’s is perhaps the world’s most famous whiskey brand. It’s produced in the tiny town of Lynchburg, Tennessee, a rural town with fewer than 6,000 residents. Of course, one can only hope none of them like to imbibe, because it’s illegal to purchase their most famous product, as Lynchburg is in a “dry” county.

The Whole Bushel


When it comes to whiskey, you would be hard pressed to find a more famous brand anywhere in the world than Jack Daniel’s. Distilled in Lynchburg, Tennessee, for over 140 years, the whiskey brand began to gain fame in the 1950s thanks to it being the choice of such notables as William Faulkner, Winston Churchill, and Frank Sinatra.

Lynchburg is a tiny town in the county of Moore, with a scant population of fewer than 6,000 people in the rural countryside. That doesn’t change the fact that the Jack Daniel’s distillery is one of the most famous in the world and the oldest in the United States, and it gets nearly a quarter of a million tourists walking through its doors yearly.

Of course they probably walk out disappointed, because believe it or not, it’s actually illegal to sell or purchase alcohol of any kind—even the town’s most famous product—because Moore is a dry county. This dates back to Prohibition, which started in Tennessee in 1910 and which Lynchburg decided they’d never bother to vote down, even after Prohibition was repealed in the United States.

In fact, there’s only one place in the entire county where you can legally purchase a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, and that’s in the gift shop of the distillery itself. Even then, it’s only a commemorative bottle. You still can’t purchase a Jack and Coke in any local restaurants, and even if you visit the distillery and get yourself a commemorative bottle, it’s still illegal to even taste the whiskey anywhere within county limits.

Despite all of this, Jack Daniel’s has continued to grow and be featured in numerous movies and television shows throughout the years, and is in fact the top-selling whiskey on Earth. Daniels himself died in 1911 after getting blood poisoning from kicking his safe in frustration.

Considering this was just a year after Prohibition began in Tennessee, our best guess is that, despite what “the man” wants to tell you, he was just plain frustrated that he wasn’t legally allowed to consume his own product anymore. He’d probably be even more frustrated to know that his descendants still have to drive out of the county to be able to legally purchase a bottle with their ancestor’s name on the label.
You Can't Legally Buy Jack Daniel's In The Town Where It's Made - KnowledgeNuts

[shadowjack1]

Originally Posted by GH85Carrera

It is legal in parts of Nevada. Or it was, I presume it still is.

I have never seen a hooker I would want to pay for anything at all except to maybe go somewhere else far away from my sight.

It is illegal only because the lawmakers deem it a horrible thing. Of course most people know it is the oldest profession with the possible exception of a politician.

That is really why it is illegal. Politicians don't want the competition.

Second oldest profession. Sales is first. She convinced him that what she had was worth something or the other way around. But a sale was made first.

[Bill Douglas]

It's not illegal around here.

It was decriminalized about 10 or 20 years ago and no one has noticed anything different. The girls were fairly discrete then and are fairly discrete now.

The reason was so they could go to the police if they were being beaten up or robbed. And also to get away from the gangster/pimp thing too I guess.

[jyl]

This makes sense to me.

Originally Posted by MRM

When I was a prosecutor one of the student practice clinics specialized in defending prostitution cases. They had a phenomenal record of success. The professor who headed the program told me that the secret to their success was that they struck from the jury anyone who lived near the neighborhoods affected by prostitution. He said that to anyone who was not directly affected, prostitution is a complete non-issue but to anyone who lives close enough to it to be impacted it is their number one quality of life complaint.

I think that pretty much explains the attitudes toward prostitution. People who aren't close enough to see it don't think it's much of a problem and don't really understand why it's illegal. People who have seen behind the curtain consider it a scourge on humanity.

There are a lot of good reasons. I can go over a short list of some of the big reasons. Prostitution is rarely an arms-length transaction between consenting adults. There is almost always an element of compulsion on the prostitute's part. Healthy women do not repeatedly exchange sex for money with strangers. Almost all prostitutes were abused as children and almost all are either chemically dependent, mentally ill, or both. At some point all prostitution is controlled by some organized criminal gang, right down to the corner street walkers. Prostitution spreads disease and johns will pay extra to not use protection. By the nature of their transaction, whether legal or not, both prostitutes and johns are vulnerable to violence by the other. The secondary effects on neighborhoods are well known and prostitution leads to other crimes and property degradation. That doesn't even get into the whole human trafficking issue.

But as a practical matter, you can't run a massage parlor, outcall business, brothel, or even a streetwalker gang without human trafficking. You just don't have the numbers necessary to keep the business operating. That means that you have to kidnap, buy or drug and coerce enough people to staff your business and keep them from going somewhere else or escaping. Even the most benign looking bath house or massage parlor is staffed by prostitutes who were trafficked. That's how they get they and that's why they stay.

If prostitution was in practice an arms-length transaction between fully consenting adults with equal power, it would have more arguments in its favor. But it isn't.

[widgeon13]

Not to hijack but I always wondered why female nipples are not supposed to be exposed and yet male nipples are just fine.

They both look very, very similar.

Talk about silly.

[MRM]

Because women's nipples are sexy and men's aren't. Ick. I think I need to wash my eyes out just thinking of it.

No, none of my concerns are related to the illegality of prostitution and none of the concerns would be alleviated by making it legal.

Johns will pay extra to ride bareback if the law allows prostitution but requires condoms. Even if prostitutes are protected by trade unions Johns will pay extra to beat prostitutes, pee on them, or do other things that sick human beings do to people they purchased. Legality would not change the fact that almost all women who go into prostitution were abused and started prostitutiin as a minor at the direction of an older male. It doesn't change the fact that to be able to live the lifestyle of having sex with 20 stinking, violent overweight johns a day you have to be high.

Healthy human beings do not engage in sex with strangers for money. Do not challenge my feminist credentials. I belong to the post-feminist critique who fully understand the duality of objectification and reject it. I can sloganeer better than anyone on this board. But that doesn't change the fact that anti-prostitution laws are a human rights protection scheme, not a patriarchal legacy keeping the woman down. Woman should be free to decide who they have sex with when they want it. Prostitution is an anathema to that value.

[techweenie]

^^^ a voice of sanity.

[Rtrorkt]

Quote de Oh Haha

Never have paid for it and hope to never have to pay. I would support legalization, though.

So you have never been on a date?

Had to laugh on that. Dinner a movie $150 later and a good night kiss. At least with a pro she understands the transaction. I'm just sayin

[flyenby]

It is legal in the senate and the congress...

[Tobra]

I am no advocate of the idea of legalizing it, any more than I am an advocate of abortion. I try to be a realist though. I know both those things are going to happen whether I like it or not. I heard about some case being argued about it and it struck me as an interesting topic for discussion. It is one thing to talk about living Hugh Hefner's lifestyle in his glory days, it is something else entirely to go out to dinner with your friend's, their daughter and her boyfriend, Hugh Hefner.

Originally Posted by flyenby

It is legal in the senate and the congress...

That there is funny, because it's true

When I moved to Texas, there were dry counties, and dry parts of counties. Guy had to move his restaurant across the highway to be able to sell liquor, true story.

[Oh Haha]

Don't quote me, spambiatch.
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