[MRM]

In all seriousness, making prostitution legal would not alter its fundamental dynamics and would not prevent any of the adverse effects that currently goes with illegal prostitution. Legalization would give the imprimatur of societal approval, which I do not think is a good thing.

But the people who become prostitutes, legal or illegal, are the same people - woman who were abused when young, addicted to drugs, and taken advantage of by older men. The pimps will become "managers" who enjoy legal status and will continue to coerce their stable under the color of law. Organized crime will still traffic runaways, illegal immigrants, and other vulnerable populations. Johns will pay extra to circumvent the safety regulations.

Healthy women do not make their living by exchanging money for sex with high volumes of strangers. Women who have the choice do not choose that lifestyle. That means that there is an element of compulsion in prostitution, whether it's legal or not. The prostitute is not making a free decision to charge extra to not use a condom, or to let him tie her up, or beat her, or make her eat scat - she does it because that's how she makes her living - by charging whatever she can for whatever weird kink the john wants satisfied. The porn industry is legal. But it's still controlled by organized crime. Legal prostitution is like that on steroids.

In Western European countries where prostitution is legal, the girls are not locals. They come from Russia, the Czech Republic, etc. That's not a coincidence. They're trafficked there by organized crime because the relatively wealthy Western European women who are citizens of that country have the luxury of choosing whether to be in that lifestyle or not. The women working as prostitutes don't have the luxury of that choice.

Think about legalizing prostitution to its logical extreme. So all of a sudden it becomes legal. Young single mothers on welfare with no education now have a profession open to them that will support their families in style. Are we as a society going to demand that they become prostitutes since they are now able to support themselves with legal work? There's a fine line between saying that it's acceptable and society encouraging the behavior.