Coercion and Choice
Oldest profession = oldest feminist dilemma in the book, ladies:
"It's my body, so why shouldn't I make money from it if I want to? Why is selling sexual services different from getting paid to do physical labor/give blood/provide donor eggs/give someone a massage?"
vs.
"In the world we live in (in which women earn less than men, have less political power, and are more often victims of sexual violence) prostitution can never be freely chosen. Prostitution is always a product of fear, need and coercion."
I'm sympathetic to both arguments: Hell, why shouldn't an attractive young woman like Ashley Dupre make some cash off idiots like Eliot Spitzer? The world is full of not-very-appealing economic transactions; let's not pretend sex is somehow sacred.
But I also still wince, thinking of 22-year-old Ashley, clueless as they make 'em, with her fantasies of making it big in the music industry and her fears of not being able to pay the rent. There she is, a working-class girl meeting a strange man alone in a fancy hotel room. He wants her to do those "things you might not think were safe."
She's tough and she says, "No way!" And she's also lucky, because it sounds like he didn't push.
But ... what if he had been more insistent? A lot more insistent? She's 22; he's 48. She's 5'5" and weighs 105 pounds; he's a big, tall guy who probably weighs twice that. They're alone. She's a prostitute. She thinks she needs this job—she needs this money. She's worried about paying her rent. How often do the Ashleys of the world end up going along with things they don't think are safe because the alternative could be losing a job or worse, getting beaten, or raped, or even killed? How often do the Ashleys of the world actually get beaten or raped or killed?
I haven't really researched the pro/con arguments for legalizing/decriminalizing prostitution (and I know there is some interesting data from other countries that have done this). But I think my instinct is that we should do, with prostitution, the opposite of what we do with drug crimes. With drugs, we generally have stiffer penalties for selling drugs than for buying drugs. At the moment, that's mostly true for prostitution as well: We give harsher sentences to prostitutes than to their clients. Seems to me that we should eliminate criminal penalties for those who seek to sell their own bodies but increase penalties for those who patronize prostitutes.
Ironically, Spitzer agreed, and he helped do just that in New York. Thanks, Eliot!